ABORTION: UP THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

1ABORTION: THE IDEOLOGY

At 20 weeks the fetus is about the size of a hamster, though it’s not as developed as a hamster. At 26 weeks the fetus is teetering on the edge of being a Proto Human. Facts, common sense and nuanced thinking indicates to me that aborting an unplanned/ unwanted fetus, soon after one has discovered that one has missed one’s period (this would be the speck-to-tadpole stage) is a useful or necessary medical procedure with no moral or ethical ramifications. Aborting the “hamster” at 20 weeks would be sad or even tragic. Aborting any not-malformed, non-life-threatening fetus after 30 weeks is hideous for all involved and killing any fetus, after that stage of development, is killing a baby using medical semantics as a shield. Aborting a “tadpole” fetus should be no problem but the debate determining at what week, after a certain developmental milestone, an abortion becomes murder, is pending. The rights of the mother to self-determination should remain paramount… until the slippery slope of those final weeks. Partial-birth “abortions” are murders sanctioned for their utility to the body parts/ gene tech industry and would not be out of place in a Nazi “medical” lab. People advocating for the human rights of the “tadpole,” or for the utter-disposability of the near-parturition baby, are both missing the boat for ideological reasons, in my opinion. I write this as a formerly premature (incubator) baby of 28 weeks.

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2A FILM ABOUT THE GENITAL CONTRACT

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3ONE OF SEVERAL PERSONAL ABORTION NARRATIVES

I cooked dinner for A—-  in my sublet flat on Kant Strasse and stuck my head under her short black dress, with its white polka dots,  while she balanced a hot plate of chicken and rice on one knee. I slurped her vulva.  Very large snowflakes were falling by the living room window and I could hear them hitting the sill like bits of cloth. The impromptu tent of her polka-dotted dress was a tabernacle. The muted lighting in there was crèche-like.

She whispered her nickname for me, the Persian word for Rabbit (phonetic spelling KRA-goosh), in my ear as I fucked her, every time I fucked her, which was, suddenly,  quite often. Her nipples, vulva, straightened elbows,  straightened knees and star-shaped fundament were black as her hair.  We fucked most often in her baronial flat,  in her Dakota-like building, owned by her imperious Aunt, with her two black (brother and sister) Siamese cats monitoring the biological gossip.  The cats were a poetic demon visitation: if A— cranked the handle on a music box of ancient melodies, wherever the cats were at the time, they’d gallop into the middle of the living room and hump, in a frenzy,  right there. She went down on a supine me, once, my interlocked hands cradling the back of my then-hairy head,  every mammal in the room black-haired, as the cats nodded sympathetically, perfectly synchronized with A—-‘s head. I came laughing but it sounded like very loud sobs.

She took the time to read all of my short stories. She didn’t believe me when I told her I’d made all of them up. She assumed they were all true, none fictive, and held the fictional exploits against me. Her jealousy was ancient, beautiful, violent.

One night about two years into the affair A—- told me she was sure she was pregnant. She wasn’t. So that was the night we got pregnant (using “pregnancy” as birth control). She deliberately got pregnant, I later realized, in order to experience a pregnancy; a “family”;  with me: to bind us forever with a human sacrifice.

We lived out this “family” for about a week. I fantasized the black-haired baby. Why couldn’t we raise her?

A—-  wanted to be a doctor; she had a career to consider.  She would have to disappear into medical school as thoroughly as though she’d never existed.  I was the vacation she took in advance of all that.  A—- organized the abortion, without trepidation, despite my sheepish suggestions that we actually keep it, raise it,  so I accompanied her and paid for the procedure at the desk, in cash,  on a very early Thursday morning, under chilling fluorescents. It was Autumn shading to Winter, I was the only male in the crowded waiting room.

I read a Vogue during the procedure. The nurse came out into the waiting room and called my name twice while I read Vogue’s horoscope in German. I had A—-‘s purse in my lap but laid it on the chair as I left the room in a misguided gesture of good will. It’s all coming back to me as I write this.

I followed this nurse down a long corridor to a high-ceilinged room,  rather gloomy, uneven with muted light,  divided into perhaps a half a dozen provisional stalls of hospital gurneys each surrounded by three movable walls of cloth. Here, pointed the nurse, but it was the wrong stall. A tall blonde,  Uni-age, wearing a ski sweater, everything below the sweater naked, flax-colored pussy exposed, was drooling unconscious upon a time-yellowed pillow. I turned and found A—- across the aisle. She was still half-under; winter sweater on top, legs and genitals exposed. One eye popped open comically when I took her hand and whispered.  We said I love you into each other’s open mouths and kissed very sexually. I don’t think she knew where she was. Or maybe I was the disoriented one. Why did it feel like a beginning?

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4AN ABORTION AVOIDED, THANKFULLY,  BUT FOR ALL THE WRONG REASON

This is the part in the horror movie at which one yells at the dummy on the screen. The stupidity of the young could power a cornfield.

As K pulled me toward her on my bed that Sunday night before the Monday of the week I was scheduled to escape her, pulling me toward her to make love (one last time)  to her (for the first time) as a free-willed,  adult individual towards whom I owed nothing, no responsibility, providing the only (mild) non-pity aphrodisiac I had known since first meeting her,  I said:  aren’t you going to use your diaphragm?

And sneaky lying clever K said the doctor says i’m infertile because there’s too much scar tissue on my cervix, implying with a look or a gesture that the incest had had something to do with the scar tissue which had supposedly rendered her supposedly safe to fuck sans diaphragm. Compassion was a vintage curio-shoppe hand-grenade that I cradled in my armpit like a charm. Still more than capable of exploding, I learned.

I fell for it. I said,

Okay, (verbatim) but if this gets you pregnant we’ll have to deal with it. (ie: abortion)

Sure, K agreed, but I’m like 100% sterile. I can never have kids (flash forward to the abortion she had with her actual legal Goth-inclined husband in the middle of the 1980s, a fetus they kept in a jar) but there’s nothing I can do about it… so into her vagina my big moronic erection was guided and pressed, by K’s own pelvis, especially deep, therein to release my Son, who is wonderful,  from the chains of non-Existence. The stupidity of the young could power two cornfields.  Could power ten. Don’t ever be young if you can help it: the world will fuck you up.

After the fuck that fucked me up we saw Eraserhead. Fittingly. Knowing already she was pregnant,  having somehow sensed the moment of conception, or willing it,  K,  during the part of Eraserhead  in which Lynch mercilessly permutated his monstrous practical-effects baby through icky death-horrors while I laughed so hard and “insensitively”  (huh?) that I could barely breathe, K gripped the armrests of her cinema seat as if it were a Cronenbergian gynecologist’s chair and wept. I still had weeks of innocence to go.

It was the Xmas season of ’79-’80.

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5A HORROR FILM ABOUT AN ABORTION

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6AN ABORTION-RELATED SONG

In 1978 I was 19 and I fucked a 17-year-old Artist named Sue F. I wrote about Sue F HERE, in section 2 of the post,  in the tale of the time I fucked Sue F. (the second and last time I fucked her) in her bed in her mother’s kitsch-crammed apartment in a blue collar Polish neighborhood in the middle of a blizzard, barely escaping after I fucked her (and dozed) because Sue F.’s jarhead giant of a brother had come home, on leave, the night I was sleeping with her. He’d collapsed on the sofa bed in the living room. Inching by him was like something out of Homer’s Odyssey. Later I was able to piece together, from things Sue said and didn’t say, on the phone or over lunch,  that she’d gotten a me-related abortion without mentioning it to me at the time. Not that I wanted a child with talented-but-norm-embracing Sue F. but, from Sue’s POV, that was probably a fairly Racial Abortion. Most of the women I’ve slept with fell into one of two categories: A.) the goal was to end up having a baby via me or B.) the goal was to avoid having a baby via me (which may be a common feature of the mammalian contract: baby or un-baby, the presence is pivotal in heterosexual relations: we are, after all, designed by Evolution’s circular argument to exist so we can fuck in order to reproduce).  I couldn’t always tell which was which at the time but the latter group definitely proved to be more relaxing at the moment of orgasm.

All of my fictions are fiction but all of my stories are True.