52Essays2019, #4: Dear Hannah Johnson

I’m traveling in Alabama and came across a newspaper called the Alabama Gazette. It had a front page “article” denouncing New York State’s new Reproductive Health Act, which removes abortion from the penal code and puts it into the public health code, and also permits late-term abortions to preserve a woman’s health or life. I felt compelled to respond to the author’s rant, but I can’t decide whether to actually send this to the writer. Will doing so unleash a torrent of hate e-mail at me? So I’m offering my rant to the Internet, and ask, what should I do?

Dear Hannah Johnson,

Concerning your front-page article, “Abortion vs. Life”:

            You clearly misunderstand what the New York State law that upsets you so is about. It has nothing to do with “killing” an unborn baby at term. New York State’s Reproductive Health Act maintains the 24-week limit under which women can seek abortions, but adds a provision for abortions at any time IF the baby would not survive the birth naturally. Additionally, the act permits abortions at any point if it is necessary to protect the MOTHER'S LIFE OR HEALTH. In other words, it applies only to permitting a doctor or properly trained medical professional to remove a nonviable fetus — that is, a baby that is already dead in the womb or that will die at birth from severe abnormalities — from the woman’s body to preserve her life or her health. In other words,

            I respect your beliefs and your right to hold those beliefs. But you do not seem to respect the beliefs of those who disagree with you. No one in New York State will be forced to have an abortion at any point in her pregnancy. Your article in the Alabama Gazette quotes the Christian Bible, but the laws of New York State and of the United States are not based on the Christian Bible. No doubt you think they should. HOWEVER, the United States is not a Christian theocracy. The United States Constitution states clearly, in the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof....” This means you are free to practice your Christian religion, but you are NOT free to insist that the government enforce your religious beliefs on others.

            In the case of abortion, the life you care about is apparently only the life of an unborn person. What about the pregnant woman? Does she not have a life as well? What would you say about a 48-year-old woman, happily married, whose only child has just left home to attend college — and she finds herself accidentally pregnant? Would you force her to have a baby against her will? Isn’t FORCING a woman to bear a baby against her will akin to slavery? This 48-year-old woman is not hypothetical; it was me almost 30 years ago. I am not sorry I had that abortion at 11 weeks. I am relieved that I was able to have it safely and legally; I am relieved I was not forced to go through a pregnancy at such an advanced age, who knows what effect it would have had on my health. But that was MY decision to make, not yours, or anyone else's.

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It’s another year for the essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. If you’d like to try it, go on over to the Facebook page for 52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or just read some of the essays that will be linked to there.

52Essays2019: My Ideal Life

This week my women’s group discussed what we thought our ideal life would be when we were young, and what we would want it to be now.

            When I thought about what my life would be like when I grew up, I didn’t think in terms of  “my ideal life.” I expected to be married and have children—two or four, but not three; I was the oldest of three and that was an unstable number for me. As a teenager, I wrote lists and lists of names for these children. I had favorite names: Katherine for a girl (most likely after the protagonist of the historical novel Katherine, by Anya Seton, about Geoffrey Chaucer’s real-life sister-in-law), and with a K, not a C, because K seemed like a stronger letter (all those straight lines?); Michael or David for a boy (these names sounded somehow elegant to me, and maybe they were bireligious, being both Jewish and Christian?).

            I also knew I wanted to live in New York City, because so many 1950s movie romances and adventures were set in New York City. And in the five and a half years we lived in Connecticut and regularly came to visit my grandparents in Brooklyn, we drove down the West Side Highway, and I was entranced by the tall, elegant apartment buildings along Riverside Drive that you could see from the highway. I want to live in one of those buildings, I whispered to myself.

            In a psychology class as a high school senior, we had an assignment to create a budget for a newly married couple. Since I assumed my newly married couple would live in New York City, I did not budget for a car. My teacher did not approve; maybe I’d live there, but chances were I wouldn’t (I was then living in a Philadelphia suburb), so I should budget for a car (payments, insurance, gas, repairs). It’s too late now to tell him that I’ve never owned a car and fully expect never to own one in my life. I do drive, but rent when I need to drive.

            In college, if I thought of my goals, I wanted to do something “creative.” Maybe work for a publisher, discovering the next Great American Novel. However that was done, I had no idea. I had an uncle who wrote and published novels, but he never talked about the process, and he also taught college-level history to make a living. I did not want to teach. I knew I wanted a job, but teacher, nurse, secretary were the options available to women who grew up in the ’50s, and none of those appealed to me.

            A few years later, I felt myself to be grownup—I was 21, after all. I got married (that’s a whole other story, and possibly another essay), but by this point I had decided that the world was too dangerous to bring children into it. It was only a couple of years after the Cuban missile crisis, and nuclear war still seemed a real possibility. My husband and I decided we wouldn’t have children and got on with having fun and living our lives.

            Along came women’s liberation. It’s a whole other story, and another essay, why women’s liberation led me to become a mother, but it did. So while I’d already worked for a paperback publisher and a hardcover publisher, on my maternity leave I started on what became my career, as copy editor.

            Was I living my ideal life yet? I was in New York City, in one of those tall, elegant apartment buildings along Riverside Drive that I’d dreamed of as a child (though without the river view I’d imagined). Soon I was working at the Village Voice, a paper I’d been reading since I came to New York, and my husband was a reporter at the pre-Rupert Murdoch New York Post. But I was in the middle of my life and still feeling unsatisfied. It wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t famous—who knew I had that ambition.

            Time passed. I did many other things—teaching, activism, those are whole other stories, and essays. One day, in my early 60s, I was walking down the street on my lunch hour from the weekly trade magazine I worked at, and it hit me: I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing with my life. It was such a comfortable feeling. I was a round peg in a round hole. I didn’t have to keep striving for something more; I was there.

            Am I still there? I don’t know. In many ways, I am very lucky. I am financially comfortable, which makes much possible and removes much anxiety. On the other hand, my husband of many decades died just three years ago, and I am still navigating my life as a single woman in her mid-70s. I am grateful I am still alive and in pretty good health. My ideal life now is to keep on living and writing and seeing friends and family and being interested in the world. It may sound like a Hallmark card, but like many cliches, it has its own truth.  

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It’s another year for the essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. If you’d like to try it, go on over to the Facebook page for 52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or just read some of the essays that will be linked to there. (And I need a graphic for this writing challenge.)