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Sunday, Aug. 31, 2003 / 5:19 p.m. ~Thoughts On Abortion, After Seeing the HBO Film~ I've just been watching the UniverSoul Circus on HBO. A circus just for African Americans, or as we used to say, black people. A black lion tamer, a black aerialist, a black contortionist, and black men on unicycles playing basketball, amazing stuff. And the women have full bodies, big muscles and round bellies and wide hips, unlike the European white women who are skinny and flat. The audience was fully participatory, and having SO much fun. Nice to see a circus film that shows so much of the audience's reaction to everything. They were up and dancing, and praising Jesus, and the whole nine. I even saw two white people! Weird. I can't even imagine being black in a white world, I really can't. But I have to say that popular music now seems to be about 90% black. MTV is all rap, all the time. What white person doesn't know who Ludacris is, or 50 Cent? These guys are household names now. But that doesn't mean that black people have power, now does it? Not in the government. I'm not going anywhere with this. I'm just observing. And late last night, really late, like until 4:30 a.m. late, I was watching "If These Walls Could Talk", an HBO film from 1996. Sure, I remember it being in the entertainment news a lot, maybe winning Emmys, or Golden Globes, or being nominated, or such, but back then I didn't subscribe to HBO, so HBO films meant nothing to me, but it was on, so I watched, and my god, really, it was difficult to watch, as in I was covering my face, and holding my hand over my mouth, and squinching up my whole body during certain scenes. Three separate stories, set in the same house, 1952, 1974, and 1996, involving women making decisions about their unexpected pregnancies. Demi Moore trying to give herself an abortion with a knitting needle, Sissy Spacek with four children already, two on their way to college, and her own desire to complete her education. And Anne Heche, a seemingly lapsed Catholic, wondering if the baby feels any pain as it's removed from her body. That never even occurred to me, to wonder if the baby feels pain. The fetus. None of us can remember being in the womb, and few of us have any memories earlier than our second year of life. Who is to say? It's such a touchy subject, as much as death, or the 'afterlife', or 'God', or Republicans vs Democrats. But women can't be inserting knitting needles into their uteri, this is not the way to handle it. Abortion must be kept safe and legal, regardless of personal opinion. It is the woman's body, if nothing else. It may be a potential new life, but it's not even a person yet in the first trimester, right? How do we know? How can we say? I don't know, I really don't. There were times in my youth when I thought I might need an abortion, when my own birth control failed, or I failed to use it. And I would think, definitely, I'll have one, if. And then later, I'd think, could I? I don't know. And the last time I had sex, I thought, if I do, if I get pregnant, I'll have it. It's so late for me, this could be my last chance. And that time in college, when I bled so heavily, and I didn't know why, and I passed that clot in the bathtub, that blob of tissue, and Art took it and looked at it and flushed it down the toilet, neither of us really thinking what was happening, and the nurse practitioner asking, "Are you having an abortion?", not "Are you having a miscarriage?", but that's what it was. The end of the movie, "If These Walls Could Talk", was a total surprise to me. Considering all the talk about this film, all the buzz, and me never caring too much, not having access, I never heard how it ends, but it was shocking, it was horrifying, and it was graphic, and when it was over I just wanted to shake it off, so I watched "Ice Age", animated wooly mammoth and sabre tooth tiger and a funny squirrel animal and that other one, the John Leguizamo character, the sloth, and I thought about how that article in EW was right, animated films need comics to do the voices, not famous actors, comics are just better, like Ellen DeGeneres in "Finding Nemo". And today I realized I'd forgotten all about the abortion movie, until it popped in my head again and I had to sit here to write about it. Should anyone kill a fetus? I don't know. Should it be illegal? No. Because women will continue to have abortions, and if you ever consider what a 'back alley abortion' was, or you see Demi Moore act one out, the man coming to her home, not even sterilizing his equipment, her lying on her kitchen table as he sticks that long needle into her uterus, and then her hemorraging all over her kitchen floor, no, that's all you need to know. That's enough. I'm truly worried. Being on the NARAL Pro-Choice America email list, reading of all the pending legislation designed to turn back the clock, back to 1952, back to Demi bleeding all over her kitchen floor, it's more than worrying, it's horrifying, and I fear for the women in this country. There's going to be a big pro-choice march on Washington next April, and I'm thinking of going. And of course I'll never forget being in NYC, visiting my sister in law, hearing her blurt out, quite casually, in a little cafe, the two of us with her friend, the sister of her best friend, that she'd indeed had two abortions of her own... and my reaction of shock, and her misunderstanding my reaction. It wasn't that I thought she shouldn't have or should have, or that two of my own nieces or nephews, or one of each, were terminated, but that she'd done it and not told me, that I never knew until that moment when we were talking about abortion, and how both of these women had had them, and they said everyone knows someone who's had one, and it suddenly seemed like they were talking about wearing high heels, or getting their teeth whitened, but back then, in '92, people weren't yet getting their teeth whitened. We talked about it, she and I, a few years later, and I told her again, it wasn't that she did it, or that she was on drugs and couldn't take her birth control because she was zonked out of her mind, or that it was the only solution, in her mind, at the time, but that we'd talked about gynecological problems, and issues, and women's rights, and she'd never told me. She'd never told me. She said, "It never came up", but that was a cop out, as it HAD come up, so many times, and she lived this lie of omisssion. It left a scar. No, not every woman has been raped, not every woman has had an abortion, and not every woman, like every man, can understand what it's like, just because we're women. It's all food for thought. Cost of the War in Iraq
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