Barack Obama is calling for a new conversation on abortion. Women of the Roe v. Wade generation have already started talking.
In Search of New Words: A Report From the Front
Peg Johnston dropped out of the abortion war in 1998. She didn't give up her convictions, or her job. As the director of an abortion clinic at a time when her colleagues around the country were facing firebombs and sniper attacks, she wasn't about to bail out. She stayed on the job, making her way to the office past "Baby Killer" signs every day, working the phones to raise money for her clinic, Southern Tier Women's Services, in upstate New York, and counseling women to make sure they really wanted to end their pregnancies. What Johnston abandoned was the idea of a war.
Talking about the abortion debate as that kind of conflict, she realized, was paralyzing her thinking, locking her into a defensive mind-set, and leaving her, finally, disconnected from the people on whose behalf she had been fighting. To most Americans, Johnston thought, the battle over abortion had begun to look distant, unintelligible, with extremists on both sides growing more and more entrenched. "It's like the uninformed American perception of the Rwanda conflict," she wrote in an essay published in Our Choices, Our Lives: Unapologetic Writings About Abortion, urging others in the pro-choice camp to reexamine the debate. Many Americans "don't see any difference between the Hutus and the Tutsis. It's a remote conflict between sworn enemies, whose positions we cannot begin to fathom."
So Johnston tried to stop thinking and acting like a general defending a hilltop. She even stopped yelling back at the protesters. And then something unexpected happened. Paying less attention to her adversaries, she found herself listening -- really listening -- to her patients.
A Blurred Front Line
The grandniece of suffragette Elisabeth Freeman, Johnston grew up among political activists; the abortion war for a while had seemed a righteous fight, boosting her adrenaline. Over the years, when protesters had conducted sit-ins and blockades and locked themselves inside the clinic, she recalls, "I would go out there and scream at them. Then I would come back in and listen to a woman talk. Frequently the words were almost the same. The protesters would be saying, 'You're murdering your baby,' and the women inside would be saying, 'I feel like I'm killing my baby.' I used to think, 'Well, they're just echoing what they are hearing.' There was a time when I would correct them if they used those words.
"The word killing was hard. It was so difficult to see women that guilty or distressed," continues Johnston, who has run the clinic since 1981. "But eventually we got into conversations about the difference between murder and killing. Now our reaction is more: 'Well, does it feel like killing to you?' And 'How are you going to make peace with that?'"
You wouldn't know it from the rising clamor in the abortion debate -- the fight over the abortion ban now on the ballot in South Dakota or the furor greeting each new Supreme Court vacancy -- but away from the headlines, many people in the pro-choice movement have, like Johnston, been engaged in a lively and sometimes gut-wrenching reassessment of rhetoric, assumptions, and messages having to do with abortion. What is going on when a pro-choice woman posts her "baby's" ultrasound picture on the refrigerator door? When a pro-life woman has an abortion? When people tell pollsters, over and over, that they think abortion is "morally unacceptable" but also that it shouldn't be illegal? Are we straining at a pro-choice/pro-life straitjacket? If so, how do we work our way out?
Questions such as these are being asked in closed-door meetings of pro-choice leaders; they are sometimes broached, gingerly, by politicians, as when Hillary Clinton last year said abortion could sometimes be a "tragic choice." They are talked about most often and openly among people on the front lines, who are less interested in political messages and more focused on the needs of the women who are at the center of this quandary.
Could it be that the abortion debate is, at last, coming of age?
