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| Slovak Mother. Photo by Igor Grossmann |
Or, Life Unworthy of Life
She was old. Women Lina's age were
becoming grandmothers.
She was malnourished. During the
hungriest days, she learned to get by on black coffee and cigarettes. That was better
than picking through discarded food in a garbage dump, something she had tried
in childhood, shortly after her family had arrived in America.
She had already been pregnant eight
times. Three of those pregnancies ended badly. She never wanted to feel that
pain again. She never again wanted to pray those desperate prayers to St.
Joseph, patron of the home, the family, of expectant mothers and of their
unborn children.
Her own mother had lost her firstborn,
Lina's sister, in the influenza pandemic of 1918. The next child, a boy, was
stricken by a raging fever, in a tiny peasant village far from the best
healthcare. Her mother had prayed to St. Joseph, and the baby boy survived. Yes,
he was suddenly deaf, but he was alive. Lina didn't want, again, to carry a
baby that could not live nine full months within her and survive to delivery.
Lina had spent decades taking care of
kids. Lina's mother and father reunited in America after ten years apart. They
immediately created a new, American-born batch of younger siblings for Lina.
Lina would be her siblings' babysitter, while her mother sewed dresses for
luckier women and her father mined coal. Then, emphysema made it impossible for
her father to enter the primitive mines any more, the mines without breathing
devices or protections against explosions and collapse. "Who's going to
feed the big cow?" her mother asked her. She, Lina, was the cow, and she
needed to earn her keep. She was shipped off to Manhattan to serve as a live-in
nanny for a rich family. Lina became the family breadwinner. No American school
for Lina, though she had been a straight-A student in her natal country.
Now the survival of her own five kids
rested on her shoulders. Her husband Antek had been a combat officer. Before
that, his life as the son of an immigrant family had been a Dickensian gauntlet.
Antek's own coal miner father died an early and unspeakably tragic death. Antek
tried to use his little boy strength to save his father's life, by carrying his
father to safety, but it was too late. Carrying that emotional burden on his
shoulders, this little boy, like millions of others during the Depression, rode
the rails seeking work. He was a "dumb Polak," an unschooled child
who spoke English with a foreign accent. He couldn't make enough to feed his
widowed mother and siblings. Antek finally lied about his age. The army
recruiters could not have been fooled; military photos capture a boy's naïve
smile under an army cap; a boy's underfed body adrift in a man's uniform. But Antek
finally grew into manhood in that uniform. When he returned to America after over
a decade away, he found comfort only in drink.
Antek, lacking any inheritance or collateral,
lacking any history of official employment outside of the army and "killing
Japs," lacking even a grade-school graduation certificate, turned to the
wrong men for loans. Lina was in the scrubby backyard of a tiny Cape-Cod-style
house. Lina and Antek had taken out a mortgage and bought the house for $5,000,
half the median home price in their state that year. The kids were playing on a
swing set Antek had erected. Lina's man was good with his hands, and Lina and Antek
wanted the kids to have everything that they themselves never had. Suddenly
Lina realized that her sons were staring at someone standing behind her.
The men told Lina that they were going
to kill her children. If Antek still didn't pay back the loan, they'd
eventually kill him, but the kids would go first. That wasn't the men's only
visit. Another time, Lina barricaded her children in a bedroom and placed her heavy,
wooden, Lane-brand bridal hope-chest against the door.
So, yes, someone needed to "feed
the cow." Lina was that someone. She had no record of formal schooling,
except for crumbling report cards from the Old Country attesting to her as the
best student in the class. Though she was highly intelligent, multilingual, and
hard-working, the door to white-collar jobs were closed to her. She cleaned.
She worked in factories. Her five kids were depending on her. She could, for
now, get by on black coffee and cigarettes, as she had so many times before,
until enough food for everyone was again available.
And now this. She was pregnant. As if
that were not enough, one of her bodily organs had just gone haywire. She suddenly
needed emergency surgery.
The doctor was straightforward. There
could be no delay. Without surgery, she would die. The complicating factor was
the five-month fetus inside of her, and of course her age. She, or the fetus,
or both, might die.
The doctor could eliminate some of the
risk. All she had to do was say "Yes." Actually, she didn't even have
to say "Yes." She just needed not to say "No." Given the
extraordinary circumstances, there would be no further questions asked. What's
more, there would be no blame. It was life-or-death. This doctor wanted to save
her life, rather than focus on a non-viable fetus who would never survive if Lina
died first. Everyone would understand. Even God.
Lina said "No." She was
Catholic, and though she did not want this pregnancy or this child, she
couldn't do it, because the Catholic Church told her it was wrong.
When I was growing up, I heard all these
stories many times. I heard them from my mother and my older siblings. These
stories are one of the many reasons, though I'm a devoted movie fan, I have
never seen, and never want to see, any Godfather movie. The Mafia
– those loan sharks, casually threatening to murder children on a swing set –
are scum, not entertainment. I had to hear the stories because I wasn't around
when they were happening. Except, I was. I was the fetus.
My mother was the first to tell me the
abortion-option story. My mother telling me this is one of my most vivid
memories of childhood. Our house was tiny – eight people, multiple animals, one
bathroom – and yet every tragedy the Greeks ever imagined seemed to have been
acted out within those tear-drenched walls. I was standing in one room, near
the one telephone, a hefty, mysterious black monolith fixed into the wall. A
source of momentous portents from doctors and cops, a jangling Stonehenge.
Across a narrow, wood-floored hallway, my mother was in my parents' bedroom, a
room not much larger than a closet in my current apartment.
I think I remember this so clearly because
what my mother said shocked me greatly, and made me very sad. I had no idea
that anyone could, or would want to, extract a baby before its time. What was
utterly clear was that I was different from my siblings, and maybe different from
all other people. My mother not only didn't want me. She had wanted to end me. She
didn't, because of that one word: "Catholic."
The June 24, 2022, announcement of the
Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson decision overruling Roe v. Wade prompted much
discussion of abortion on social media. One genre of comments were testimonials
from abortion survivors. Claire Culwell's mother was 13 years old. She had a
successful abortion – of Claire's twin. The abortionist did not realize that he
had left behind a living fetus. Gianna Jessen survived a saline abortion. She was,
she said, "burned alive, inside and out, in the womb for eighteen
hours." The abortionist signed her birth certificate. "There's a religion of rights and it's
all about me," Jessen says. But a true ethic, she points out, does not
focus exclusively on the needs and desires of the more powerful person in an
interaction. "Everyday I bear the mark of my biological mother's
decision." As a result of surviving a saline abortion, Jessen has cerebral
palsy. "I don't want women who have had abortions to hear condemnation,
but the redemption of Jesus," she is able to say.
There's a lesser degree of abortion
survivor. There are people whose mothers were advised to abort, or who came
close to abortion, but never went through with it. I suspect that there are
many of us.
The abortion survivors whose stories I
watched or read looked really good. A few are attractive enough to be
celebrities. They lead productive lives. The viewer is invited to conclude that
abortion terminates the lives of people that the viewer himself would like to
have as a friend. The viewer is to conclude that this abortion survivor
contributes positively to the world, and that a successful abortion of this
person would clearly make the world a lesser place.
I cannot provide that testimony. I'm not
an attractive or a successful person. Further, my life has been difficult and
has entailed significant pain. I haven't made any noteworthy contributions to
the world about which I can brag. Should my mother have not said "No"
to her surgeon, and should he have ended me?
Being suddenly surrounded by a swirl of
pro-abortion social media posts was, for me, very much like being back in high
school. In high school, a ruthless, Darwinian line separates the winners from
the losers. I was never one of the winners. I was "fat,"
"retarded," and "weird." The abortion discussion was just
like that. The "cool kids" were once again bringing down the
guillotine between those deserving of life and those nobody would miss if they
were pushed off a cliff, into "a chasm at the foot of Mount Taygetus,"
where Plutarch said the ancient Spartans threw their undesired offspring.
Marge Piercy is a Marxist, feminist
poet. Her pro-abortion poem "Right to Left" – as opposed to "Right to
Life" – was shared frequently on social media. The poem is smug; it
presumes to speak for all women. It is not, as the best poetry is, an intimate
excursion into one person's experience, written with unflinching honesty that
protects no one's BS. Good poetry does not protect the poet; good poetry does
not protect the reader. Good poetry shocks through the simple act of telling
the truth. Good poetry takes the reader on an excursion that, through the
microcosm, the personal and the intimate, brings the macrocosm, the world
beyond the self, closer to the reader.
Piercy's poem is a thudding dictatorial
hammer telling the reader what one must feel if one is correct. If you don't
feel as Piercy and her fangirls feel, you are wrong and bad; you are the enemy.
Without even getting to the substance, but just focusing on the bullying style,
I hate this poem. That Piercy's poem, and those sharing it, make me the enemy
because I do not submit to the poem is a Stalinist power grab.
Good poetry is not about us v. them.
Good poetry is about us, period. About human beings. Piercy overtly creates an
"us," the cool kids, menaced by "them," those unworthy of
life. "They are inflicting their religion on us," she announced.
Beyond the style, the substance of this
poem is laughable, repugnant, and also terrifying. Piercy, a Marxist,
analogizes sexual intimacy to capitalist exploitation of the earth. Piercy announces
that her body is not a pear tree, and one may not "enter" her body
without her permission. Piercy assumes a lot. I do not want to
"enter" her body. Piercy enjoys the protection of the Judeo-Christian
tradition's emphasis on protection of women and she also enjoys the simple
protection of police. She does not live in Afghanistan or many other spots on
the globe where a girl has virtually no rights at all. She does not acknowledge
this.
Piercy's poem presumes that her poetry
is what protects her from sexual assault. This is self-flattering, delusional,
nonsense. And it is worse. Once the Woke get what they want, the destruction of
Western Civilization, and they are surrounded with metaphorical and literal
rubble, they will learn that their smugness and their poetry was never what
protected them. Some feminist artists, like Pippa Bacca,
have learned this lesson already.
Again, good poetry protects no one's BS,
not even the poet's. After June 24th, Piercy posted a new poem. In this new
poem, Piercy reports that she performed an abortion on
herself when she was 18 years old and "pregnant from a man i no longer
trusted or loved" (sic). The normal reader, not the pro-abortion zealot,
drunk on hate of "Christofascists" and numb to any normal human
reaction, but rather a normal reader, immediately focuses on this line. Why was
18-year-old Marge Piercy having loveless sex with a man she didn't trust? What
would that backstory tell us about human nature, about teenage girls, about
what steps we can take the lower the number of abortions? A real poet would
write that poem. But she'd have to strip herself of the political zealotry and
Christrophobic hatred that protects Piercy from any honest confrontation with
herself. Worthy poets, and worthy ethicists, own mirrors.
"Right to Left" implies that
people like me, people who were not wanted, who grow up without love, become
Nazis. We, abortion survivors, will set off nuclear bombs. This is high school
all over again. The "cool kids," the "wanted" people are
telling us, the "unwanted," the abortion survivors, that we are the
real threat to humanity. This hateful bit of doggerel has been shared widely by
Team Choice, by people who think of themselves as feminist, as kind, as
compassionate. Here are Piercy's key lines:
"Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will
come
due …
a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns."
On her Facebook page, Piercy posts a lot
about cats. Cats. The creatures that, unlike me, have a right to exist. On July
12, Iranian women risked
prison and torture by
removing their hijabs. Piercy posted no support of these women. She posted a
lot about her cats.
A Facebook page calling itself "One
Million Vaginas" posted a meme from Lauren McKenzie. McKenzie's meme
said that abortion lowers the crime rate. "Unwanted kids" – me – go
on to commit crimes. Eugenicist and Planned Parenthood pioneer Margaret Sanger
would approve. In 2008, The Guttmacher
Institute wrote that
"The abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white
women." One meme, that I will not link here, states simply, "How does
a black woman fight crime? She has an abortion." The message of all of
these memes, whether from racist fringe groups or from "One Million
Vaginas," is the same. It's better, and certainly more convenient, to
abort "unwanted children," and indeed black children, than to work,
as a society, on making the world a better place for children. Life, like high
school, is a Darwinian exercise, and the cool kids have the right to eliminate
the losers preemptively.
The conviction that I should not exist
is not limited to prize-winning poets or a million vaginas. Facebook friend Sandy wrote, "Abortion is good for the
ecosystem and the society. Unwanted children are the future psychopaths, mass
murderers, and school shooters."
One Saturday after the SCOTUS decision
came down, I was hiking in a beautiful woodland setting. Tom, a fellow hiker, pointed
out that my mother didn't want me, and that I was an abused kid. He said that
thanks to the abuse, I am "f---ed up." He said that aborting future
unwanted babies will stop "misery" and prevent others from being
"f---ed up." Tom said that "We need to abandon this idea of the
sanctity of human life. What is discarded in an abortion is no more significant
than this," Tom scratched his arm, "than the cells lost when you
scratch yourself. Just because those cells are human doesn't make them human
life."
Human life does not begin, Tom insisted,
until consciousness. One study shows that "babies display
glimmers of consciousness and memory as early as 5 months old." Of course,
researchers picked up only "glimmers" of consciousness, so perhaps
even five-month-old babies are not yet life worthy of life, and can be killed
with impunity. Tom is a vegetarian; he thinks that meat consumption is immoral.
Given what social media was coughing up
after the Dobbs decision, I wondered if I had a right to be alive. As with many
abused children, a conviction of personal worthlessness is the wallpaper of my
life, so Team Choice's insistence that some lives are unworthy of life inspired
me to reflect on whether or not I should be here.
I thought of a moment from 2011. It was
my last day in Krakow and I was rushing over mostly empty dawn sidewalks to get
to a train or a bus or something that would take me to the airport. A woman was
approaching me; we were the only two persons on the sidewalk. She was oblivious
to me; her eyes were focused on her purse, which she held in both hands.
Something fell from her purse. Littering? I could not tell. She passed; I
looked down. In spite of the heavy backpack on my back, I squatted and lifted
the dropped item. "Prosze pani," I called out. "Excuse
me, Ma'am." She just continued rushing forward. I had to turn around and
chase her. "Prosze pani," said, louder, more urgently.
She never looked up at my face. She
focused on the paper I thrust toward her. She grabbed it. "Oh!" she exclaimed,
in Polish. "How could I have dropped this?" Apparently it was
something very important. She moved on.
Did this good deed earn my place on the
planet? The same planet the cool kids like Marge Piercy enjoy?
I can't deny what Tom said. If you abort
all unwanted children, those children will never suffer through the nightmare
of abuse. Luckier people will never have to endure association with people "f---ed
up" by child abuse. Tom wants to eliminate human suffering by eliminating
people who suffer. I can't assess Tom's mathematics. I don't own the scale. On
one side of the scale rests the pain I suffered as an abused child, and the
pain I caused others who have had to interact with flawed me. On the other
side, I was aborted; I was never here. I never gave that woman her lost piece
of paper. What's the equation that solves that? I'd be lying if I said I knew.
But there's more to consider. What happens
to the wider society when we start attempting to perform that equation? In
chapter four of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, Cain allows envy to eat
at him and push him to murder his own brother, Abel. God tries to talk Cain out
of this, humanity's first murder. "If you do not do what is right, sin is
crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over
it."
Sin crouches "at your door."
Doorways are powerful places in traditional cultures. They are liminal; indeed
the very word "liminal" comes from the same root as
"lintel." Doorways are the vulnerable borderland between the interior
and the exterior world. Doorways represent what we close out, and what we let
in. When we decide that some human lives are not worthy of life, what, exactly,
are we letting in to our interior world? God doesn't use the term
"slippery slope," but it is certainly implied. If I, a "f---ed
up," unwanted child, have no right to life, by what basis do many others
have a right to life? You know who finds it easy to answer questions like that?
People like Himmler.
My birth was not the only time Catholic
teaching on the sanctity of human life affected my family. Five members of my
natal family died slowly of disease. A sixth was killed quickly, which, comparatively,
seems almost a blessing. Antek, my father, died of Alzheimer's. He was never in
an institution. My mother took care of him. Toward the end, when he was no
longer moving, she woke up every two hours – the medically advisable period of
time – to turn him in bed so that he never developed a bed sore. He died
peacefully, in his own home, in his own bed.
My mother died of cancer as I was
holding her hand. We were alone in the house together, and she was in the room
where her husband died. I played a cassette of fujara music from Slovakia, and said, in English and in Slovak,
"I forgive you. I know that you forgive me. I love you. I know that you
love me. You can go now, and everyone will be fine."
My mother was, if nothing else, a very
strong woman, and death had a hard time of it when it came for her. My mother's
body had been through so much, but she just kept not dying. It was hard to
watch someone hollowed out from multiple surgeries live day after day, long
after she had been able to eat her last meal, and receiving large amounts of
morphine, but just not dying.
Witnessing her final battle changed me;
had I not witnessed it, I'd be a different person. So much for the idea that
suffering is pointless. I did not believe then, and I do not believe now, that
my mother loved me. I said those words because a friend who had done hospice
work said that that is what the dying want to hear. I traveled to her bedside
determined not to say those words. I said those words to stand between my
mother and the pain I was witnessing. I could feel her pulse against her wrist
as if it were a captive bird, beating against its cage, and finally breaking
free.
My brother's consciously chosen
suffering changed the people around him. Mike was dying of cancer. His wife was
expecting their child. He wanted to stay alive long enough to see his daughter.
He dragged his body through hell; at the end, he was a skull suspended over a
pile of sticks. Welcoming his daughter to this world was one of the last things
he did. At his funeral, his fellow seminarians, choking back tears, told stories
of how Mike's willing carrying of his own cross, right up to the moment of his
death, was a testimony of Christian faith such as they had never seen.
Brittany Maynard was much in the news
and on social media sites in 2015. Maynard was a beautiful 29-year-old California
girl. She was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a form of brain tumor that is almost
always terminal within a year or so of diagnosis. Maynard ended her own life.
She was identified as a "Death with Dignity" advocate. Her final
internet post read, "I have chosen to pass away with dignity in the face
of my terminal illness, this terrible brain cancer that has taken so much from
me ... but would have taken so much more." My social media was flooded
with praise for Maynard. Heroic Maynard, posts said, had spared her loved ones
the "indignity" of watching her suffer, lose her cognitive functions,
and, inevitably, soil herself. In comparison, terminally ill persons who did
not kill themselves came off as unnecessary burdens on luckier people who
weren't dying and didn't really want all the fuss.
My sister Antoinette was a nurse so she
knew what it meant when, in 2015, she was told that she had glioblastoma.
Towards the end, my sister had a lucid moment. She looked at me. "I could
have killed myself," she said. "But that is suicide. It's a sin. So I
have to go through this."
I took as much time off from work and
tending to my own medical emergencies as I could. I changed her diaper and
spoon fed her. I was rubbing her feet as she breathed her last. She died in her
own bed, in her own home. When the hospice nurse came to wash the body before
its removal, she invited me to leave the room.
"No," I said. "I'll help."
"This may be hard for you,"
she said.
"No, it's not hard," I said.
I began helping the nurse wash my
sister's body one last time. I grew up with that body. I slept with my sister, took
baths with her, three of us in one tub – no wasting hot water. I fought with
her, and eventually changed her diaper, and was now preparing her for her final
trip.
"Death with dignity." Brittany
Maynard died one way. I applaud her choice. But her choice is not the only way
to die with dignity. My sister slowly lost her cognitive ability. She lost
control of her bowels and bladder. She needed those who loved her to take care
of her and to witness her slow descent. My sister died with supreme dignity.
Having been an abused kid is
complicated, so complicated that I choose not to discuss it with civilians. I
know a couple of people who were abused as children and if I need to talk about
it, I talk to them. They understand that you can recognize what is best in your
parent while still condemning the abuse. So maybe only those friends, my fellow
survivors, will understand what I'm about to say.
On November 20, 2021, Cecily Strong, a Saturday
Night Live cast member, appeared in a clown costume. In between failed
attempts to make balloon animals, squirt water from a plastic flower, and blow
a clown horn, Strong said that she had an abortion when she was 23 years old.
She said that had she not had that abortion, she would never have risen to
being a cast member of Saturday Night Live. Strong is the daughter of a
nurse and an Associated Press bureau chief. At the time of her abortion, she
was a college graduate and member of the prestigious Second City Conservatory.
As I watched Strong's "abortion
clown" performance, I felt contempt, but I felt something more, something
that surprised me greatly. Cecily Strong and Marge Piercy are successful
celebrities. They are the cool kids in the high school of life. People heed
their words.
My mother cleaned houses, worked in
factories, and raised three sets of kids. My mother was one of the smartest
people I've ever met, and I've met really smart people. My mother was the very
best unpublished writer I've ever read. But she was a cleaning woman. No more
than that.
As I watched Cecily Strong, I saw her as
so small, and my mother, suddenly, as absolutely heroic. A wave of respect and
admiration for my mother overcame me. My mother didn't have enough to put
together a meal for herself, though she always made sure that her kids were
fed, if not especially nutritious and delicious meals, but filling ones. Men
with guns were menacing her family. Her husband was a less than perfect ally. She
was old, she was told she might die, and that I might be responsible for her
death. She believed that abortion was wrong. So she allowed the life she
created to continue.
"Love" is a difficult word. I have
always preferred not to mess with the word "love." But respect, mom. Admiration.
Even a little bit of awe. Something you would never have wanted – a little bit
of pity for you. But, most of all, huge, huge respect, for you, my mother.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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