September 26, 2021

"Last week her book, Larger than an Orange, a reference to advice she received from the [abortion] clinic ('Go to the hospital if you pass something larger than an orange'), went on sale in her own name...."

"Burns discovered that her 'right to choose' was neither freeing nor empowering.... The procedure itself was brief but traumatic. The book describes the humiliation she faced approaching a clinic: 'It was like I had to beg.'...  Burns admits that this process left her angry and hurt, and the experience appears to have drained her of any wish to become an advocate either for or against any aspect of abortion. 'It would be great if [the book] did change how women are treated, I have to say that,' she said. 'But I struggle to have anything to say except an expression of pure anger and hatred. It’s difficult to want to engage to improve these process when you’ve been treated in the way I have.' While finding a UK publisher was not a problem, the American market has proved tougher to crack. She said: 'We haven’t got a US publisher yet. That might change, I’m not sure. It’s about an abortion in the UK so the legislation and procedure and context is different. But the culture and the ‘debate’ about abortion is so different in America that I’m not sure we’ll ever find a US publisher.'"
 
From "Lucy Burns breaks taboo on abortion with a book of ‘pure anger and hatred’/The author found terminating an unwanted pregnancy to be both a physically and mentally traumatic experience" (London Times).

Here's an excerpt from the book (at Granta). Excerpt from the excerpt:
No sex for four weeks. No exercise for four weeks. No swimming for four weeks. No – I wouldn’t ride a bike. No lifting heavy objects. No grapefruit. No grapefruit juice. No aspirin. No alcohol. Do not take this pregnancy test until four weeks after your last appointment. No mefenamic acid. No St John’s wort. No alcohol. Would you like the abortion to appear on your medical records? Why not? Do not use public transport after the procedure. You must not use tampons. You must call a taxi. Do not insert anything into the vagina. No bathing. No recreational drugs. No smoking. Avoid tea and coffee. Avoid tight or fitted clothing. You must not walk home from the clinic after the second appointment. You should have someone waiting for you at home. No sexual activity. When you get home, you will feel the need to push. When this happens: go to the toilet, sit down on the toilet, and bear down. When you’re finished, don’t look in the toilet bowl. Just flush.

33 comments:

Dan in Philly said...

In all fairness it was less traumatic to her than her child.

Leland said...

What is normal things hospitals say on discharge. Now I’ll take common stuff for $1000, Alex.

Temujin said...

Well...abortion should be mentally taxing, shouldn't it? I cannot speak to the physical aspect of it. But for any rational person- no matter your stance on the topic- actually going through it has to be mentally taxing. And if it's not, you probably should not be passing on your genes to another generation anyway.

Her story sounds like a report, not only about abortion, but about the NHS, which is famously, one of the world's largest bureaucracies. In this respect, it does not mirror the US. As for finding a publisher, I'm sure there are many who would love to publish that book here in the US. Good thing she's not a Conservative. God forbid she would be writing about the Trans movement ala Abigail Shrier.

Scot said...

I'm confused. Don't look in the toilet, but "Go to the hospital if you pass something larger than an orange". (Also, I thought British English omits "the" before "hospital".) Are women so sensitive they can tell the difference between an orange & a grapefruit without looking?

From this excerpt, it appears she is most angered by the post-op restrictions. Mentions "no sex" twice. Quelle horreur.

wendybar said...

Congratulations!! You are the mother of a dead baby that YOU decided that their life didn't matter.

Flat Tire said...

"But I struggle to have anything to say except an expression of pure anger and hatred"
"When you’re finished, don’t look in the toilet bowl. Just flush"

Those two lines will haunt me for a long time. I feel ill.

Owen said...

Paging Dr. Gosnell.

Lucien said...

Nothing signals an individual’s ability to take a measured, insightful look at something like an expression of pure hatred and anger. Really makes me want to buy and read the thing.

daskol said...

This is a like book version of those billboards that give you the view if you do look he toilet.

Achilles said...

I have always found killing a living human to be a traumatic experience.

For some people it isn't.

You should watch those people...

Gahrie said...

No woman must be made to feel bad about, or responsible for, anything, ever.

Sebastian said...

"Lucy Burns breaks taboo on abortion"

Not really. The real taboo is on describing what actually happens to the baby, the living being torn out, broken up, discarded. Did she describe that?

Saint Croix said...

Reminds me of that article in New York.

Abortion is awful. If we had honest journalists who just reported the truth of abortion, nobody would like it.

ColoComment said...

In this era of ubiquitous artificial birth control, why are there so many abortions "of convenience" (as opposed to confounding medical issues, or a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest (i.e., involuntary intercourse)?
There is a type of birth control to suit any "birthing person," from pill, to implant, to intra-uterine device, to the ultimate control: abstinence.
And as I understand the business, Planned Parenthood offers advice and control methods to all at reasonable prices (if you can afford a cell phone, you can afford birth control, I suspect.)
Re: abortion as birth control:
Are these [presumably] women stupid, ignorant, negligent, lazy, or what? Has abortion become the birth control method of choice because (a) it's legally available, (b) the stigma of extra-martial pregnancy has been removed so the erstwhile related shame is not an issue; and/or (c) post-pregnancy control is "easier" than acknowledging and/or anticipating that one will have sex?
Or, has convenience-abortion become a status signal whereby a woman can advertise her sexual availability without responsibility for the results?
Anyone?

wildswan said...

She's right that when you go for an abortion you are treated coldly and it hurts and humiliates. But she refuses to ask herself - who would work at a place like that? She wants the people treating her to be sympathetic - of course she does. But if they were sympathetic it would let loose floods of emotion. Crying, sobbing clients might deter other clients. It's about money on the provider side and so women are treated in a way that suppresses their emotions - humiliated deliberately, chilled. Submit, pay and go. That's the reality. And suppose you are a liberal and despise prolifers (who are constantly warning about this reality which they are well aware of) and you think you are advanced. Then you can't do the normal things that people do when an action proves very upsetting. You can't ask questions: was this right? is this the reality for everyone? You're in the position of an aspiring actress who has encountered a great producer, Harvey Weinstein. You're distraught but your culture tells you to act as if nothing happened. Same with the actual experience of abortion. Omerta. Don't talk like a prolifer. Next you be saying "they get it" and then you'll be joining them. They're dirt and scum and no one liberal will talk to you again. So shut up. Sisterhood is powerful and you keep talking and you'll find that out. (You can burn with rage all you want as long as you never use your mind on its cause.)

Aggie said...

I haven't read the book obviously, but..... it does seem, on the face of it, that she really wants it to be someone else's fault.

Tom T. said...

@Scot: Anything larger than an orange clogs the toilet.

hombre said...

Slaughtering an unborn child ought to be easy and pleasant? Really?

Sixty-one million dead and rising. And we thought the Nazis were the epitome of evil.

Yancey Ward said...

I find myself feeling like Wildswan in wondering exactly what kind of person works in an abortion clinic and continues to work in one.

Václav Patrik Šulik said...

the mother
BY Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

MalaiseLongue said...

The title of the US edition should be Just Flush.

Wilbur said...

Wildswan said:
"She's right that when you go for an abortion you are treated coldly and it hurts and humiliates. But she refuses to ask herself - who would work at a place like that? She wants the people treating her to be sympathetic - of course she does. But if they were sympathetic it would let loose floods of emotion. Crying, sobbing clients might deter other clients. It's about money on the provider side and so women are treated in a way that suppresses their emotions - humiliated deliberately, chilled. Submit, pay and go. That's the reality."

I found this most insightful.

Narr said...

I've only known a small handful of women who I'm sure got abortions. None of them seemed particularly happy about the experience.

One of my wife's best friends from (RC, girls) high school went off to RC college out of town and pretty quickly got knocked up. She got an abortion and moved on, eventually marrying someone else and having one daughter. I think the abortion haunts her to this day.

For a few years, our next-door neighbor was a Planned Parenthood branch manager. Neither she nor her husband (they were childless) were very likable and none of the neighbors were sad to see them go.


Louise B said...

In the early 1980's, my sister's college roommate got to school and went wild, becoming pregnant. She was going to have an abortion, but my sister convinced her not to. (We're a pro-life family.) The roommate listened, had the baby, gave her up for adoption and moved on with her life. A few years ago, the baby contacted the roommate, who told my sister how grateful she is that her baby wasn't killed. It's one of the finest acts my sister ever did.

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

What taboo is she breaking? "Thou shalt not speaketh ill of abortion or the NHS!"?

Big Mike said...

I can’t read more than a little piece of the article because of the paywall. Pity. I would have liked to know more details.l such as how far along she was in her pregnancy before terminating it.

Somewhere along the line the meme seems to have taken hold that abortion is a nothing procedure, somewhere well below pulling a wisdom tooth in terms of discomfort. Perhaps early enough in the pregnancy, it is. (Not that I’m endorsing the Texas heartbeat law, because I don’t.) But abortion is an outpatient surgical procedure, it carries medical risks with it, and it should not come as a surprise to a woman undergoing an outpatient procedure that there is lengthy list of “don’ts” included in the post-op period.

I believe that abortion should be legal, and I appear to differ from feminists in my concern that it be safe. Nowhere do I say that it should be easy and comfortable, physically or psychologically.

cubanbob said...

Absent rape, why do women who are sexually active not use birth control? I can't think it's because of the cost. Birth control is cheaper than a lot of things women spend money on that are farless consequential. Maybe I'm old school but what guy who is willing to pay for dinner and a movie to get laid wouldn't pay for the woman's birth control?

Blair said...

If you can't look in the damned bowl afterwards, and confront the reality of what you just did, then don't do it. That seems a pretty reasonable rule of thumb to me for these situations.

Big Mike said...

Maybe I'm old school but what guy who is willing to pay for dinner and a movie to get laid wouldn't pay for the woman's birth control?

@cubanbob, I’m a septuagenarian, so I’m very old school, but I have to wonder what ever became of the “morning after” pill?

As far as unprotected sex is concerned, unwanted pregnancy is just one of the risks. Lucy Burns risked chlamydia or gonorrhea, both of which can cause sterility. If she’s full of hate and anger now, how will she feel if it turns out that her aborted pregnancy was the last she can ever have?

A while ago Althouse blogged about the derogatory term applied to people who wait until they’re in a committed relationship before having sex. I dunno. Seems to me that it beats the risk of unwanted pregnancies and/or STDs.

Narr said...

My wife used birth control for about 12 years, before we got married and for some years afterward.

Some sexually active girls we knew refused to take the pill because it meant that they were admitting to themselves that they would give in to temptation.

Some good friends of ours spent about 10 years living and teaching in a small, poor, rural county in middle TN. On one visit in the 90s, they told us about the students who got pregnant, and were clear that if one of their best and most promising students got pregnant and sought an abortion, they would help her regardless of her parents' wishes.

I thought then and now that that is a stunningly arrogant attitude to take, and my wife agrees.

FWIW they are churchgoing believers and my wife and I are not.

Original Mike said...

"If you didn't want to go to Minneapolis, why did you get on the train?"

MalaiseLongue said...

@cubanbob: "Absent rape, why do women who are sexually active not use birth control?"

You left incest and stealthing off your "absent . . . " list. That said, it's not uncommon for any method of birth control to fail.

Gahrie said...

That said, it's not uncommon for any method of birth control to fail.

Any? In my experience, abstinence works fine.