Behind Every Choice Is a Story

Chapter Eleven: Whose conscience counts?

Whose conscience counts? • 155 Chapter Eleven Whose conscience counts? I made my choice for the love of life. —Sharon, fifty-four There are three exceptions I have seen anti-choice people make with regularity: Rape, incest, and “me.” So I watched with great interest the debate over whether President George W. Bush would approve federal funding for research using stem cells from embryos. Many lawmakers who say they believe the fetus holds equal status with or primacy over the woman made an exception: here, the embryo could be subordinated to the needs of actual people— in this case, their own needs or the needs of the people they love. Such hypocrisy permeates the anti-choice position on reproductive self-determination. Representative Bob Barr of Georgia once told me and several other pro-choice leaders the following during a congressional hearing: “I think the four of you,” he scolded us, “have become very hardened, very cold, and very callous . . . you really have developed , I’m sad to say, a moral blind spot.” 156 • Personally political We had testified that Congress should not practice medicine and that reproductive health decisions should be made by women with their families and physicians, not by government. In my testimony, I told the stories of several women and their experiences with tragic and catastrophic pregnancies that had necessitated wrenching choices. My testimony concluded with the following: This bill trivializes women who must make difficult decisions under circumstances that, quite frankly, would soundly defeat many of us here today. In the quarter century since Roe v. Wade, American women have not had a moment’s rest—not from legislative attempts to restrict their rights, not from violent protesters willing to use any means to interfere with their private and personal decisions. I have personally worked to promote and protect women’s health for all those years, and I am still amazed at those who would say to a woman, “We are not your doctors, we are not your family, but we are going to tell you what to do.” Eli’s coming, do anti-choice politicians care? It was more than annoying to me that I had received the “request” to appear at this hearing while I was in Arizona awaiting the birth of a grandchild. I wanted to be there with my daughter Linda for Eli’s lovingly awaited birth. The anti-choice senators and representatives on the two judiciary committees never did quite grasp the irony of their demand that I drop everything and rush back to appear before them in Washington to defend a woman’s right to abortion at this particular moment. On the plane back to Arizona from Washington, I thought long and hard about who has the moral blind spot and whose conscience counts in these difficult childbearing decisions. When it comes to childbearing, it is the very fortunate among us who have not wrestled with the kind of gut-wrenching life choices that Whose conscience counts? • 157 test who we are at the core. If we’re lucky, we never have to sit in a dimly lit hospital room and listen to a physician lay out an array of grim scenarios, each more heartbreaking than the last. But not every woman is so lucky. As I think back to the hearing room, I do not recall any reflection in those lawmakers’ eyes of the women whose lives and health are in the balance. In their moral prism, there was only room for the fetus. Respect for women is still not there. Their latest juggernaut aimed at recriminalizing abortion is to pass laws and policies that would give the fetus status separate from and greater than that of the woman. These lawmakers are intent on redefining the fetus so that it has primacy , by making the fetus, not the pregnant woman, eligible for prenatal care under the State Child Health Insurance Program. And they’re creating criminal penalties for harming the fetus, separate from penalties for harming the pregnant woman. These measures make the plot of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale seem all too plausible. Women as mere vessels for reproduction may sound like speculative fiction, but we had better stop this emerging legislative strategy now or life may well soon imitate art. Who has a conscience? The same holds true for legislation that allows health care professionals to deny, without penalty, medically accepted reproductive health services...