To My Readers —
I apologize for my absence over the last couple months. I have made some changes in my life - and this took time.
But given the turmoil of these times, particularly in the closing down of Choice - here is a re-posting of “Breaking Bad” - an earlier essay of mine on rape and abortion.
Thank you for reading and passing it along.
My senior year of high school, long ago in St. Paul, Minnesota, I told my father I had my heart set on going East for college. He blocked a tentative gesture toward independence on my part, when I brought up possible scholarship opportunities. Though a lifelong Republican undercut by my mother’s Democrat loyalty, he agreed with his spouse on the absolute necessity of college for their six children, but balked at my scholarship idea, refusing to have government “prying into” his taxes – or his wealth. He had “converted” to Catholicism from his Scandinavian Lutheran background for my mother, who, I knew, hoped that I would choose a Catholic college.
So — what was my next move, as a seventeen-year-old would-be writer, non-stop reader, straight A student, product of an excellent “convent school” type education? With impeccable wrong-way radar, I managed to find the worst college I could possibly have chosen for myself: a Jesuit learnery called Creighton in Omaha, Nebraska. (I now share alumnae status with the unhinged wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, “Ginni” Thomas, who apparently flourished there.)
My unfounded hope in applying to the Jesuit college was that perhaps this institution would equal or better the excellent education I had received from the nuns at our convent-style high school. The Black Robes, I thought. The Great Equivocators.
My passionate ambition to learn nearly died when I ended up in Omaha with the Jesuits. There was no attempt to hide a gruesome misogyny, a commonplace crushing sexism informing every aspect of student life. In Theology class, the silver-haired Jesuit prof remarked, slyly, to the “men” in the class -- that the “ladies’ should keep their legs crossed. When women’s legs were crossed, he smirked, “The gates of hell stayed closed.” I grew deeply depressed, my grades suffered. The school had only recently become co-ed. I was a homecoming queen candidate --probably I stood out because the ratio of men to women was so lopsided. I had a steady social life but broke dates and acquired a reputation for being “fast”.
Without campaigning, I was elected editor of the literary magazine, Shadows. I put together, with staff, an issue of which I was mutedly proud, though I knew few on campus read the journal. I was wrong. One of the poems I’d selected, a witty musing by a young poet on her breasts, created a firestorm, a major scandal on campus. Unbelievably, all copies of the magazine were confiscated, and I was called into the president’s office. The president, a potato-like Man of God in a black frock, attempted to interrogate me about the poem. I asked him why all copies of the magazine had been seized and he said I’d published a “bad word”.
“So you’re saying that breast is a bad word?” I tried hard to hold on. I noticed that The Potato was starting to sweat in his great leather chair – I guessed that he had not read the poem in question, but perhaps had always been made nervous, in fact grossed out, by any reference to female anatomy.
I explained, as if to a child, that this innocent anatomical term in question showed up universally, historically - in various discourses and publications, medical to literary. (I thought of the irrepressible poems of Catullus that my best friend in high school and I had once translated, stretched out in front of a fire, with our Latin books propped up in front of us. With a dictionary, a “pony” and our excitement, those jagged insouciant poems came to life in English before us.)
“Shakespeare used the word breast” I noted. (Was it possible this person had managed to live in a world without “bosoms”, “busts”, “bubbies”, “teats”, “tits”, “dugs”, “jugs” -- or was he confusing these more casual allusions with the “too, too solid” fleshly reference of plain old mammary glands?) The president looked inspired, then uncertain. “But he only referred to “breasts” in plays,” he said.
Not long after this alarming conversation, I had a date with an attractive cocky classmate, whom I did not trust. I had intended to drop the date. He had a very loud laugh and drove a hot car with a Florida plate and a Confederate flag in the rear window. On the afternoon of our date, I realized it was too late for a “headache”. He picked me up, we had a quick bite, after which I told him I’d like to go home, my “headache” showing up out of nowhere. He said he had to stop at his apartment, he’d forgotten something. When we got there, he began kissing me. I pulled away, but he began to force himself on me.
We struggled, I pushed away, then felt the hair on the back of my neck rise. There is someone else in the room. I shouted in alarm. A closet door opened and a lurker, sheepish, sidled out. My date had planned to let this guy “watch”.
The creep slipped out the door. I turned to the door myself, but I didn’t make it. I was raped.
It was the end of the semester. The Vietnam War was raging.
I had been teaching a freshman composition course. Bobby Kennedy had been shot. I left Omaha the day after the semester ended. I traveled to San Francisco and stayed with acquaintances from high school. Not long after, I discovered I was pregnant. I had no money and no life plans. I was a runaway. Twenty-one, all alone, in trouble. And now all the Catholic hell-fires blazed in my dreams, intensifying my terror and guilt. Murderer. Murderer.
I’d somehow found a job as a technical writer at a major insurance company, but kept to myself at work though everyone was friendly.
I now had morning sickness. Time was not on my side.
I told no one about my situation. I could not let my parents know, they would have disowned me. But I visited a health care/social services center and a very kind social worker there took pity on me when I asked her for help. I was so terrified about breaking the law that criminalized women seeking abortions (Roe v. Wade would not pass for a couple years) that I gave the social worker a pseudonym, panicked about using my real name. She understood my panic. I told her I knew that my only hope was a “back alley” procedure, probably in Mexico, but she let me know that a legal abortion might be available at a major hospital if I could convince a psychiatrist that I was mentally unstable, unfit to give birth - or suicidal.
She helped me register for an appointment to talk to a psychiatrist at San Francisco General Hospital. It took time to get on the schedule. Meanwhile, the clock kept ticking. Weeks passed and finally I was assigned a slot for a “pre-interview”.
I met at the hospital with an older woman who may have been a therapist. I never knew, because she did not introduce herself, but directed me to her office with a distracted wave.
I tried to tell her my story, but I stumbled over words, my voice shaking. I was mentally unstable, I said, truthfully. I was filled with guilt about the possibility of an abortion. But I had no other choice. I had no resources. I could not afford a child. I did not want a child. And I had been raped. No one would have believed me at the Catholic college, and even if they had – they would have hushed it up, blamed me, forced me to bear this brute’s child. I had nowhere to turn. And the thought of a back alley abortion… I couldn’t go on. I sat in front of her, frozen, unable to utter another word.
The woman stared at me for what seemed like a long time. Then suddenly she began laughing. “Sorry” she said. “You’re a nice smart little girl who got herself into a pickle, aren’t you? You’re in a pickle, kiddo, but I can’t help you.” I heard her merry laughter lengthening as I left her office.
More time passed. Despite the disastrous “pre-interview”, I was allowed one more meeting with the authorities, I was given the name of a male psychiatrist at the hospital. In the waiting room, I sat next to a young (my age or younger) Black woman. We began to talk, sharing our stories. She too had been assaulted, but by a family member –the attacks ongoing for a couple years. Her tormentor was an uncle, who entered her bedroom late at night, drunk, whispering, fondling her, then lying on top of her. When she told her mother, her mother slapped her face. Now she was pregnant. As with me, weeks and weeks had gone by while she waited for a chance to plead for help before someone with the power to deny or, miraculously, provide that help. Neither one of us was hopeful.
Suddenly there were tears, silent tears – we both stared straight ahead as the tears fell, soundlessly. One of us took the other’s hand.
Jeanette (I’ll call her Jeanette) was summoned first by a secretary, who poked her head round the door, shooting us a lowering “look”. We were used to that look by now.
I wiped my tears on my sleeve. I suddenly realized, sitting there, that Jeanette and I, and all other women in our desperate state, wrongly thought of this system of formal appeal as “help.” It was not help. It was a wrongful law’s mockery of mercy – a “loophole” provision that exacted a performance from both the “wrong-doer” and her judges.
From the wrongdoer: a show of abjectness, a “voluntary” act of self-criminalization, of self-abasement akin to that of a political hostage. “How low would she go, admitting her crime? What distance would she crawl, begging?
And from the all-powerful “decider”, a performance of objective professional evaluation offering theater both psychological and legal on the program featuring the freak show: “how” mad, “how” desperate, “how” impoverished, “how” sick at heart, “how” remorseful, did these base supplicants seem? And what would be “enough” for a supreme judge, allowed ultimate power over a woman’s womb, to deny or allow her a reprieve based on sexist scorn and a barely-masked sense of voyeurism?
I had been judged by a fatuous dolt of an old Jesuit for publishing a poem using the word “breast”. For this crime, all efforts of my mind and talent were censored – and “disappeared”.
Now my body and my right to my body were being erased – because my body had a uterus, because it had breasts -- because I was a woman: the original “sin”.
I recall having all these thoughts. I have total recall. If this seems unlikely, just remember: I was a nice smart little girl who got herself into a pickle.
This was my state of mind when I was summoned. I remember wondering if there was another exit, because I hadn’t seen Jeanette leave.
The psychiatrist sat behind a large desk, his hands folded on a stack of papers. I don’t remember his face. I remember anger, like a high unwavering whistle in the air, a dog whistle audible only to me because I was a dog. There was a family photo on his desk: a wife, faceless, and three faceless kids. A faceless dog.
The shrink smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. He scratched his head reflectively.
“You know,” he said “It’s unusual to see a nice girl like you. What we usually get in here is trash.”
I repeated “trash”, as if I hadn’t heard the word before.
“Trash” he repeated. “You know, like that one who was just in here before you. There was a long pause.
“Trash – like, shall I say, that Black slut who was just in here.” (For “Black”, he used another word, we all know what it was.)
I don’t remember exactly what poured out of my mouth. It was violent and it rose up fast and suddenly plastered faces on the faceless. From the time I was a child I knew that race hate was indefensible because it had one face of cruel stupidity – it’s illogically an insult to the intelligence of anyone conscious, in fear and ignorance. O such a nice girl in a pickle, but also someone with her eyes open – smarter than a half-wit college president, smarter than this sleazy fake empath – each with a face both misogynist and racist – I knew more at nine about this face than these so-called authorities.
I remember how he startled away from my rage, dropping fast his phony shrink impartiality: “I should have known better than to expect something reasonable from you. You sleep around and then claim rape? Don’t even know his name?”
So far was I from caring what happened next – I’d blown up any chance I’d had for fair “adjudication” – imagine my surprise when the unthinkable occurred. Imagine my surprise to learn later, after exiting another way, following Jeanette’s lead, that I had been granted a “safe” hospital abortion – because of my “aggression, hostility, threatening and violent behavior – therefore: insanity. I managed to find out that Jeanette’s appeal had been “approved” as well.
What followed was both predictable and the opposite. Predictable were the orderlies mopping floors outside the curtained examination rooms calling out “Murderers!” Not predictable was the abatoir of a labor-like abortion – the result of my long forced bureaucratic wait. How I covered myself with blood as I crawled on the steel table, so that I would never forget any part of it – though I was given a drug to make me “forget”.
After my youthful history among the Jesuits – the ultimate irony occurred. The college invited me, years after my literary magazine debacle and my awkward disgrace – to come to campus to accept their “highest” alumni award – in recognition of my post-college success. Because my parents learned of this honor and arranged to attend the ceremony, I relented, stopped saying “no” and showed up with Mom and Dad. The new “guard” of black robes applauded my speech, (in which I hailed my education there as equipping me for “any crisis of the 12th century”) but a couple older priests, whom I remembered, could call up no trace of me in their records. No record of the Shadows censoring and seizure, my having been called on the carpet of the dimwit president and our “breast” debate, no record of my teaching freshmen, then disappearing. It was as if I was a ghost returning to haunt – except I was a ”who’s who” without identity.
Yet this was oddly liberating in a way. I had always wanted to attend another school – perhaps in a wishful summoning of an alternative universe my bad memories would naturally be erased – and I’d travel back through time to begin again. And the Jesuits would go on searching for a young woman they’ll never find - because she never actually existed for them. I was never real to them in the past and I wasn’t real now. But my doppelganger is walking down a street somewhere – a nice smart girl - and her story is the one I just related. The one where I am indeed real - as real as any woman – and like all women who attempt to speak up, I have survived so far.
Before Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973 – stories like mine and Jeanette’s were not unusual. Because we were pregnant, whatever the circumstance – we were considered criminals for seeking an abortion. A woman, whether impregnated by rape or by chance when birth control failed, or simply having made the decision not to have a child for whatever reason, including to control (or save) her own life and right to decide reproduction - became a criminal if she exercised choice. In 2022, after fifty years of legal abortion, we have now turned to that Dark Age once again. And now there are no “psychological” reviews – though the irony of mine stands out not for the existence of this default, but the irony of the racism and sexism that became a standard for judging women who sought to control their own bodies.
Debemus repugnare.
Gut wrenching, Carol. And as relevant now as ever. Strange, regressive times. Ed