Without a net

metabolizing loss of bodily autonomy

It is taking me a while to metabolize this new reality.

And I am surprised that my response is not contained to concern for others, and distress at the general political and social implications. There is a layer of irrational visceral, embodied fear, a cellular memory, of a time before my body was my own. My body and my vulnerability are always the last pieces of myself to come into my awareness.

I didn’t live long in a pre-Roe world. It passed in 1973 when I was in third grade and I was too embroiled in my own family drama. My mother had just been able to get her tubes tied - with my father’s permission - built up a sufficent credit rating with her newly granted credit card, and then told my father she was divorcing him.

But Roe was still hotly debated, and felt freshly won and precarious when I came into adolescence. I lived in two communities, due to the divorce, where it was profoundly objected to by a conservative majority. But as its implications became clearer to me, what Roe could mean to me, and the way my life might or might not unfold it became very clear that Roe helped lay the pathway out.

I would never make it up and out if I became pregnant and couldn’t access an abortion. I could never have a life, not a life of my own.

When I turned seventeen I set up an appointment at the free clinic up the hill from the junior high. I’d first clocked the clinic when I was much younger- while eating hamburgers with my mother across the street at Hobo Joe’s Family Restaurant. I watched three high school girls heading into the clinic after dark, without their mothers - and knew this was a resource to take note of. And at seventeen, here I was, a high school girl, on a rainy night, without my mother, going to see a doctor. I left with a brown paper bag with a dial of birth control pills stuffed in my back pack. I hid them in the corner of my waterbed mattress. I knew that if I couldn’t tolerate the pill, if it failed, or I had some other birth control failure that I could go back there if necessary, and that I would.

I took the pill for three full months before having sex for the first time. My mother found my pills a few months later while snooping through my room, and told me to meet her immediately at the gas station where she worked. Although she fancied herself a feminist in 1981 and had a stack of Ms. magazines on the coffee table, she sobbed and screamed and called me a slut. I was resolved, calm, unmoved. I told her that if she were a sane parent she would be proud of me for being so responsible and self-respecting. I knew I was guarding my most precious asset: my autonomy, my road to freedom.

My other home, my father and step-mother’s home was staunchly anti-abortion. Together they facilitated the local Young Life group for Christian teens, and they regularly talked to the girls about “keeping your knees closed” and preserving themselves for marriage. They encouraged several pregnant high school students to carry their pregnancies to term, and some to marry the fathers. My father and step-mother would tell them how proud they were of them, how brave they were, and would help the the girls who dropped out of high school to find part time jobs.

There would be no parents to pay for an abortion if I needed one.

My father’s home was a minefield in more ways than one. Three older step-brothers, their large crew of friends, and my parent’s open door policy for any teenager that needed “pastoral support” meant that I was often the only girl child in a house that might be sleeping seven to ten boys and young men at any given time. I was not permitted to sleep with my bedroom door shut because the air conditioning to the upstairs was filtered through my room.

“You are just a spirited filly that needs to be broken - ” my father who had never seen a horse in his life would tell me. “You’ll need to find a man with a good set of spurs.”

Even my father’s adult buddies were encouraged to remind me of my place, my rightful role in the world. His best friend “Tubby” was a bachelor who had a tradition of taking all his friend’s daughters out for a “special day” when they turned thirteen. There was one rule: The birthday girl had to wear a dress and pantyhose. It was talked about for years in advance: “Oh, you are ten now? Only a few more years until your thirteenth birthday and know what that means! Be sure to get your nylons!” The men on the boat or in the golf cart would all chuckle.

When thirteen came, Tubby arrived at the house and my step-mother waved goodbye to me as I shut the door on the passenger side of Tubby’s Cadillac. He drove us to his “favorite shoe store” almost an hour away. “They all know me here!” he bragged as we got out of the car and crossed the parking lot.

He kneeled on the floor himself to measure my shoe size. “So. Weird.” I thought, as the shoe store guy just let Tubby do his thing. He said something to the clerk who brought out several boxes. I don’t recall looking at any shoes on the shelves, or even Tubby browsing through the displays. The store guy seemed to have the ritual down.

Tubby then sat his huge frame on the tiny little shoe stool, the one with the foot ramp in front, and unlaced my blue Chuck Taylor’s that I had drawn all over with red ball point pen. I hated dresses, and had no “appropriate” shoes to match the one dress I owned: A western style denim shirt dress, with red hearts embroidered on the yolk and pearl-capped snaps down the front. He then placed and removed several pairs of black suede six inch stilleto heels onto my thirteen year old feet. I remember the toes of the pantyhose were rubbed black by my dirty sneakers.

I wobbled around when he instructed me to, and stood for him near the angled shoe mirror. He pressed the toes to check the fit like my mother did. And then he drove me home with a shoe box on my lap tied with a bright red bow. I stared out the car window wondering what the hell I was going to do with these ridiculous shoes. (I didn’t wear them or throw them out until my late twenties when I finally realized that Tubby, long dead from a heart attack, had surely been looking up my dress.)

When I talked on the phone that night to tell my mother about the birthday she gasped: “He’s a Funny Uncle!” You must never let him near you again!!”

“What’s a funny uncle?”

“HE IS! If he comes over to that house again you must leave immediately!”

When he came again a few weeks later, I called my mother’s sister, and she drove two hours out and back to fetch me. My father’s house was so full of teenagers coming and going that no one had noticed I was gone when I called the next morning. With my aunt pointing her finger and mouthing silent words at me I told my father that I would not return until he promised that Tubby would never be at the house again when I was there. Privately, I wasn’t sure why all this was necessary, sure it was weird and creepy - but this all felt like business as usual and I didn’t understand why my mom and aunt were making such a big deal of it. My aunt took the phone from me and told him she would put me on a plane back to my mother right this instant, or at any point in the future if she ever heard that man was hanging around the house while I was there.

This is just one story of initiation into the specific mode womanhood that was laid out for me - one that I can tell, because dead men can’t retaliate. There are many stories I still won’t tell, even at this age, almost forty years later, because it is frankly still too dangerous to tell them.

Roe meant my body could never be ultimately controlled by such men. I could never be trapped in such a world, I would never have to foreclose on a career or my education. I would never be prematurely pressured to marry such a man.

Roe was the escape route, the get-out-of-jail-free card, the emergency if all else fails plan, the safety net that would catch me if the tight-rope to freedom I was walking ever snapped, or if my foot slipped, or if the winds of fate knocked me off course or into greater danger than I could protect myself from. I never fell into that net, but Roe was the assurance that if I did I could stay free.

I marched in support of abortion access in Los Angeles and New York. I argued and agreed to disagree with religious friends. I defended clinics from the harassment of Operation Rescue. I never needed to actively use those rights, but knowing that elemental right to control my own body, my own fate empowered and soothed and preserved me nonetheless. I built out my own infrastructure toward a life of my own, as an individual with far less terror. I knew that the the world I was escaping from could never reach out and drag me back. I would never again have to live as an accessory, a supplement, an appendage in a world of men.

I keep reminding myself that the fall of Roe does not mean that we have gone all the way back in time. I am post-menopausal, in a state with codified reproductive freedoms (for now). Medical self-managed abortion and plan B can be mailed in brown paper packages. My daughter and my son’s partner have me and my support and my resources. I tell myself that communities and nations do not surrender such elemental rights easily, and that there exist liberatory networks and funds I can support to try to help protect women in girls who are in circumstances like, or worse than the ones I escaped. We have gone back, but not all the way back, and there is much that is valuable to work to preserve. All is not lost.

Buy my body is slow to digest such reassurances. It listens for moment, and will sometimes stand down - but only to parade rest, never at ease. Each morning it wakes with a start, trying to remember what important thing has gone missing. It knows the safety net that kept it free is damaged and that freedom is now a more precarious and dangerous proposition for us all.

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Today’s Business:

Two organizations I am encouraging you to support:

• The New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Supporting access in protected adjacent states is more important than ever.

• and the National Network for Abortion Funds.