(major content crossposted to 1in3campaign.org)
Hello all - This is my first diary and while I've been a lurker with a username for the better part of a year I've been a lurker without one for much longer than that - I finally registered shortly after the switch to 4, I think it was. I was inspired by the diary written here in support of the 1 in 3 campaign, and as someone who had a safe and early abortion without harassment at age 19 it horrifies me that young women today in our 'free' country are being systematically denied the most fundamental agency, that over their own bodies, bit by bit. Despite the mountains of evidence that women will not be denied this agency even at the risk to their own lives, and that criminalizing abortion doesn't reduce them but only increases morbidity and mortality, we continue to advocate for policies that increase suffering.
I have never spoken out publicly in any form on the topic of abortion (despite the title of the poem, there was no published 'letter) but this morning felt compelled to share with the 1 in 3 campaign the moment when this issue came to a head for me five years ago now. Rather than repost all the boilerplate that I posted there, I will simply post a poem I wrote in late 2006 when, as I said, a confluence of events caused the issue to reach critical mass for me:
(Note: the reference to 'gluten in the spaghetti' is obscure and personal - I've long held a completely unsupported conception of space and time as being like a plate of spaghetti, all looping and with portions sticking to each other, rather than simply linear and directional.)
An Open Letter to Feminist Women's Health Center
Gluten in the spaghetti brought me
to the place I came half my life ago
I read the poems hosted there
But did not find my story
Among the songs and prose of joy and mourning
Where were the words that said:
I own this act?
I saw the hedging, the apologies, in the lyrical waxing about more 'acceptable' reproductive topics
And I became angry
Where were those words, without which all others are wan excuses:
I own this act
I did not own the act that brought me there
half my life and more ago
Careless and sloppy about what I knew to be important
He was inebriated
I did not know what love was
When, six weeks later
Penny's bulghur sent me running for the bathroom
And I'd spent a week crying
And I could not complete a circuit
And the other person involved could be charitably described as 'annoyed'
I had a blood test done
And I made my decision
Proud is the wrong word
But I certainly was not ashamed
Sometimes the calculus is simple
'Choice' is such a pale word
to describe an act of life or death
But life and death is in the eye of the beholder
And at that moment it was her(?) life or mine
That was no hyperbole
The calculus was simple
So I got on a bus
(And bounced a check)
On the way back
I had ice cream
Not to celebrate
But furiously reclaiming my body
I was fitted with a cervical cap
and vowed 'never again'
When 'never again' was three years later
I opted for a more permanent solution
I never regretted that decision
It allowed me to own my own life
And if there was a price, it was a bargain
Twenty-four years later, while at work, something told me to look up information on misoprostol
and Google's magic algorithm brought me back to Los Angeles
I should have known it was the gluten doing its work
I got home from work last night
and there was a message for me
my best friend, my only cohort, with three grown children, and two grandchildren
Denied a tubal ligation twice
Pregnant at 44
Put off and delayed by Planned Parenthood
Had tried to reach me two weeks earlier while I was on the road
Had dropped no clue as to what she was going through
But had made her decision
She owned her act in the most intimate way imaginable
When she could not get help in an affordable, timely manner
She ordered the meds herself, committed a Federal crime
And did it at home
She was not proud
But she was certainly not ashamed
The calculus was not simple
But it was hers
She put her process in a glass jar and examined it to be sure
And mourned, and owned her act
And moved on.
At last we talked last night, for four hours
connecting our experiences, never discussed, over miles and decades
And made our peace with them
And realized we were angry
Why are we ashamed to say those words, unambiguously?
I own this act
There is no room for shame, for excuses.
Not for this
To fail to own our actions, and their rationale, fully
Allows others to define them for us
And to define life and death, our life and death
In the eye of the beholder.
We do not have to be proud
But we cannot afford to be ashamed.
The calculus is simple.
-Deborah A. Dixon (c)
5 December 2006
A week after writing this, an honors student of mine, also 19, came to see me with great trepidation about an unplanned pregnancy (and that she was going to have to travel some distance from our small border town in order to get the procedure done and she was afraid she was going to miss her final. I reassured her that we would work it out and to do what she needed to do. She visited me afterwards, pale and wan but otherwise well, and I was able, for the first time, to share my experience with a non-intimate other (via this poem) with her. As I said, a strange confluence of events (which has not repeated itself), and gluten in the spaghetti indeed.
People like Rick Santorum are egregious examples of the contempt for the agency of women, but no less dangerous are those that would chip away at the rights of women to control bodies through restriction of access, notification laws, or engage in shaming, thus keeping women from seeking out the help they need until none of the choices left to them are healthy ones. In the face of such forces silence truly is the voice of complicity and the stakes are too high for me to stay silent any longer.
Sincerely,
Deborah A. Dixon
"Morigel"
