The news from Israel that Ethiopian Jewish women were given birth control shots without their consent has attracted quite a storm of argument, disillusionment and shock — as has the news of the huge number of extra-legal “black market” abortions, both addressed recently at the Sisterhood.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on the fine points of Israeli public health policy; I only read what crosses my path stateside. But I do think a lot — maybe too much — about notions of reproductive choice, freedom and justice. And I see evidence that not all women who want terminations in Israel are getting them legally. Meanwhile, the state’s restrictions on the procedure are putting them in danger. At the same time, women of color in Israel have been coerced or misled into taking birth control shots. To me, these stories together exemplify how arguments over reproductive issues are oversimplified by our pro-choice/pro-life political tug of war here in the United States.
The fact is, the womb, the place from which life emerges, is a source of power. It will always tempt those who want power, and governments have and will frequently attempt to control women’s bodies and fertility — to take charge of ”the means of reproduction,” to use a spin on a Marxist phrase and the title of an excellent book on the subject.
Several years ago I saw the documentary film “The Last Abortion Clinic,” about the Jackson Women’s Health Organization (JWHO) in Jackson, Mississippi. As the title indicates, JWHO is the last clinic in the state that provides abortions; it serves women from all over Mississippi, many of whom are low-income and have trouble paying for their medical care, to say nothing of arranging the transportation to make long journeys to the clinic. For someone like me, who grew up in a Midwest college town and had lived in Boston and New York, it was like watching a film set in a foreign land.
Still, the landscape depicted in the film was achingly familiar. My mother’s family has lived in Alabama since the 1860s and she grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community in Birmingham. My parents were married in Birmingham and my sister and I were born there; even though we moved north when I was very young, our deep roots and frequent visits combined to make me feel more comfortable in the South than anywhere else.
As JWHO fights to stay open, I’ve thought about “The Last Abortion Clinic” frequently over the past year. Governor Phil Bryant has made no secret of his desire to close the clinic, and thanks to a new law requiring the clinic’s physicians to have admitting privileges at local hospitals, he may get his way. The physicians, all of whom are licensed, have applied for privileges at seven local hospitals but have been turned down by all of them. The reason? It seems that the hospitals feel that granting them admitting privileges would be disruptive to its “function and business” in the community.
Several years ago I saw the documentary film “The Last Abortion Clinic,” about the Jackson Women’s Health Organization (JWHO) in Jackson, Mississippi. As the title indicates, JWHO is the last clinic in the state that provides abortions; it serves women from all over Mississippi, many of whom are low-income and have trouble paying for their medical care, to say nothing of arranging the transportation to make long journeys to the clinic. For someone like me, who grew up in a Midwest college town and had lived in Boston and New York, it was like watching a film set in a foreign land.
Still, the landscape depicted in the film was achingly familiar. My mother’s family has lived in Alabama since the 1860s and she grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community in Birmingham. My parents were married in Birmingham and my sister and I were born there; even though we moved north when I was very young, our deep roots and frequent visits combined to make me feel more comfortable in the South than anywhere else.
As JWHO fights to stay open, I’ve thought about “The Last Abortion Clinic” frequently over the past year. Governor Phil Bryant has made no secret of his desire to close the clinic, and thanks to a new law requiring the clinic’s physicians to have admitting privileges at local hospitals, he may get his way. The physicians, all of whom are licensed, have applied for privileges at seven local hospitals but have been turned down by all of them. The reason? It seems that the hospitals feel that granting them admitting privileges would be disruptive to its “function and business” in the community.
Richard Marker is an advisor to philanthropists, founder of New York University’s Academy for Grantmaking and Funder Education, and co-principal of the firm Wise Philanthropy. He is also an ordained rabbi. In 1968 and 1969, when Marker was in rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he worked part-time as a chaplain at Rutgers University, and then at Hofstra University.
One day he counseled three Rutgers students who were distraught because their friend had died after having a back alley abortion. At a time when abortion was illegal in America, it led him to become a member of the Clergy Consultation Service, whose members referred young women in search of abortions to places where they could have the procedure done safely. Part of the idea behind the Clergy Consultation Service was that clergy were less likely than others to be prosecuted for providing abortion referrals, since they were believed to have legal protection of privileged conversation similar to that afforded lawyers.
As we mark the 40th anniversary of the landmark 1973 United States Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal, The Sisterhood spoke with Marker about what was life was like at that time for young women facing unintended pregnancy, and about his experience as an activist trying to help them. When he began, he was 23 years old. (It is worth noting, as Linda Greenhouse has in a New York Times blog, that last year alone 19 state legislatures enacted a total of 43 new restrictions on access to abortion. Six states accounted for more than half the new restrictions, with the ever-reliable Arizona leading the pack with seven.) This is an edited and condensed version of the interview.
Dear Friend,
I am not particularly good at letting things go, especially in situations where I know I could have done better. Remember when you asked me in an IM conversation if I thought a woman should be able to have an abortion when she is 38 weeks pregnant? I’ve been thinking about what I could — and should — have said in response for a while now, because what I did say didn’t even come close to expressing what I really feel.
I knew that you wanted me to say no, that under no circumstance should a woman in her third trimester be able to have an abortion — that anyone who thought such a thing is unredeemably evil. And my instinct was to say no, because I felt unprepared to deal with the consequences of telling the truth. I managed to say that I think a decision like that should be between a woman and her doctor. But that was not the answer you wanted.
What I would have said is that a woman should be trusted with all decisions related to her body, and so yes, an abortion needs to be an option at every point of pregnancy. Either you trust women or you don’t. It’s that simple.
Are pregnant women people? Not if those who believe in the concept of legal fetal “personhood” have their way. Forty years since Roe v. Wade, the steady rollback of reproductive rights that has taken place in Statehouses across America doesn’t merely affect women who want to prevent or end pregnancies. It creates an alarming legal standard that hurts pregnant women carrying to term, too.
National Advocates for Pregnant Women conducted a comprehensive — and alarming — study in which they investigated the incarceration, detention and forced medical intervention of hundreds of pregnant women based on a wide-range of cases since Roe was enacted.
Their report contains tough-to-read stories, including an instance where a woman was forced to have a C-section against her will (she later died), another case where a woman was kept in jail to deny her an abortion, and a case where a woman who refused prenatal testing was locked in a hospital to force it on her — and the testing was never done. Reproductive justice advocates have long warned that proposed “fetal personhood measures” meant miscarriages could be investigated as crimes, and indeed in some cases, they already have been.
“Carole, do you know what a lamed vovnik is?” a Philadelphia obstetrician/gynecologist suddenly asked me during an interview I was conducting with him in the late 1980s. It certainly wasn’t a typical question a sociologist gets when interviewing a doctor about his medical practice. But Dr. Morris Fischer (a pseudonym) seemed both surprised and pleased that I actually did know to what he was referring.
According to Jewish legend, the lamed vovniks represent the 36 righteous individuals on whose behalf God preserves the world — even if the behavior of the rest of humanity has been gravely amiss. (Thirty-six is the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew letters “lamed” and “vov.”) As the French writer Andre Schwarz-Bart wrote in his Holocaust novel “The Last of the Just”, “If just one of them were lacking … humanity would suffocate with a single cry. For the Lamed Vov are the hearts of the world multiplied, and into them, as into one receptacle, pour all our grief.”
What does all this have to do with Fischer?
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