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But I can claim at least one unique distinction: to my knowledge, I'm now the author of the only New York Times bestseller even written on that foolproof commercial subject--partial birth abortion.
Truth to tell, my publisher implored me not to write this book. Their reasons were straightforward--that so-called "partial birth" abortion is unpleasant; that even most pro-choice folks oppose it; and that, by also taking on parental consent, I would repel much of my potential audience. But the reasons I wrote it, and what I found out when I did, go to the heart of what we're up against, and what we need to do.
For the two or three of you who may not have read my novel, I should briefly reprise the plot.
A fifteen year old girl, Mary Ann Tierney, discovers six months into her pregnancy that her fetus is hydrocephalic- likely, but not certain, to have no meaningful cerebral development. Her only way of knowing for sure is to deliver a full-term baby by means of a classical cesarean section- creating the small but measurable risk that she can never have children again. The only way to prevent that risk is by securing a late-term abortion. And Mary Ann's mother and father- a Catholic law professor and principled pro-life activist- oppose all abortions as a matter of conscience.
The legal context I've created is quite real. Under Roe v. Wade and its progeny, Congress or a state can ban all post-viability abortion unless necessary to protect the life or health of the mother. But "health" has never been defined. Does it include mental health? Does physical health include reproductive health? And how severe must the threat to health be to justify abortion?
To address all this, I imagined a fictitious but very plausible law-the Protection of Life Act. The Act provides that no minor can have a post-viability abortion unless a parent consents--based on a doctor's advice that continuing the pregnancy threatens life or health--or a court otherwise so finds. The act further confines "health" to a strictly defined threat to physical health--in essence, that the threat is not only severe, but more likely than not to occur.
Under this law, Mary Ann does not qualify for an abortion ordered by the court. Her parents refuse consent. So her only hope is to challenge the constitutionality of the Act in court--over her parents' opposition--in time to obtain an abortion.
Why did I invent this unpleasant dilemma? Because it enabled me to confront the two toughest issues the pro-choice movement faces: so-called "partial-birth" abortion, and the parental consent laws. But it was only after interviewing women who've had late-term procedures, doctors who've performed them, an array of legal and medical experts, and all the available data, that I became certain of what the truth about late-term abortion really is. It's this: the campaign against partial-birth abortion is a callous hoax--a slander on the women who've undergone them, and a cynical effort to attack all abortion rights by vilifying those who support them. And it demonstrates something we can never forget--that we, not they, occupy the moral high ground.
That's not what most people believe. They believe that post-viability abortions are common, and that they are performed on the healthy fetuses of healthy mothers, often moments from birth, by heartless doctors sanctioned by a pro-choice movement so inhumane that even the most distasteful kind of butchery does not offend them.
If that were true, that's what I'd have written. But it's not.
Here's the truth as I found it and as all of you know it all too well. Late-term abortions proceed from the cruelest fetal anomalies--such as the absence of a brain or other essential organs--or, rarer yet, when pregnancy prevents the emergency treatment of the mother for mortal risks from cancer, diabetes, heart disease and the like. They're performed only by a handful of brave and principled doctors. And they are exceedingly rare--roughly one of fifteen hundred abortions performed every year occur after twenty-four weeks.
As part of my research I interviewed several women who had such abortions, one a pro-life Catholic. Their situations involved deeply wanted children, in pregnancies gone hideously wrong. These fetal anomalies presented various threats to maternal life or health: at a minimum, that the fetus would die inside the mother, impairing her clotting mechanism--which, in the worst case, could have led to an emergency hysterectomy. By the time we spoke, this tragedy was several years in the past. But none could talk of it without deep emotion, often to the point of speechlessness or tears.
Yet the pro-life movement implies that these women--and those like them--have chosen virtual infanticide for no better reason than their personal convenience. They've invented the term "partial-birth" abortion-a term nowhere known to medicine--to summon horrific images and obscure the medical facts. They fudge whether "partial-birth" means all post-viability abortion, or a specific procedure most often used in legally-protected pre-viability abortions--but only in one in 3,200 cases. And they've drafted a host of state laws--so far struck down by the Supreme Court--which define "partial-birth" so vaguely that they threatened to criminalize abortion for all.
This strategy is ruthless, and it's brilliant. And so is the pro-life advocacy of another sentimental favorite--parental consent laws.
These laws--which exist in most states--require a minor to obtain the consent of, or at least notify, a parent before getting any abortion. The minor's sole alternative is to persuade a judge that she is sufficiently mature to make such a decision, or that abortion is otherwise in her best interests. Never addressed is the question of why a minor too immature to decide for herself is nonetheless suited to motherhood.
Yet most Americans support such laws. They believe that their purpose is to protect minors from rash decisions, and emotional damage. They look in the mirror, and see a good parent. And so they project their image of their own family on every other family in America.
Their assumptions, regrettably, involve a serious failure of empathy and imagination. They skip the question of whether their families--or most functional families--require an act of Congress to communicate on a matter so important. They never ask whether Congress can create in a moment of crisis the trust which a more troubled family has been unable to develop over the course of a child's life. They forget those families which are starkly different from theirs--incestuous families, abusive families, alcoholic families, or divided families where the parents use a child as a weapon against each other. They overlook families who view a daughter's sexuality with such overwhelming shame that they would rather have her dead than pregnant--or, at the least, out in the streets. They never imagine how difficult it is for a teenage girl to go to court alone; how often such difficulty will fall on the poorest, the least-educated, the least resourceful; how frequently such laws will prevent a minor girl from acting at all.
But one result which requires little imagination: parental consent laws will lead to more unwed teenage mothers. And that, the more intellectually honest pro-life leaders admit in private, is precisely their intent-to reduce abortion among teens.
Fine. So let's challenge them to say so, in public. And then we can have a debate over whether the deeply held belief of a minority of our population--that a fetus is an inviolate life from the moment of conception--should be transmuted into a social policy which compels more pregnant teenage girls to become mothers.
For anyone who loves their children, or their prospective children, our argument is compelling. An unplanned birth creates far more damage to most girls --emotional and otherwise--than does abortion. The incidence of depression is far more frequent, and far more lasting. Their education, and economic viability, are severely diminished. Their skills as parents are less, their resentment of parenting greater. And so, inevitably, their children as a whole do far less well in life than the wanted children of mothers who are more mature.
These pregnant girls have faces, and names--like Becky Bell and Spring Adams, whose stories I encountered in my research. Becky Bell feared that obtaining the consent of her loving parents would disappoint them, and so died from an illegal abortion. Spring Adams was forced by a parental consent law to tell her mother that her father had raped her, with the result that her father killed Spring, her mother, and himself. These, too, are American families.
You, more than anyone, are working to protect girls--and women-like these. And yet the right to choose has never been more endangered:
How did this happen? In large part because during the last election, when it mattered most, a lot of our constituency--people who believe themselves pro-choice--lulled themselves to sleep. For far too many, Roe is not only a permanent protection, but a one-way ticket to denial, enabling them to feel pro-choice while supporting those who are anti-choice. But the pro-life folks have no such illusions--they vote this issue first, last, and always, and they never, ever let up.
That's their privilege. But if we can only persuade the public at large that choice is truly at risk, we have by far the better argument--or rather, arguments, because a woman's pregnancy occurs in a myriad of circumstances.
Should concern for fetal life cause us to order women to have children because their birth control has failed--as has happened in the majority of abortions?
Should we force families to have more children when they can't support the ones they have?
Should the law compel women traumatized by rape or incest to then become mothers against their will?
Should teenagers forfeit their future because they made the same mistake so many of us made at a similar age--or later?
Should we consider a woman's life or health a fair exchange for a doomed fetus?
Should our only answer for a professional woman without a partner be that she should have just said no?
Should we, in short, treat pregnant women as the losers in God's-or nature's --lottery?
And should we take our moral cues from a movement which--far too often--seems to love our children most before they're born.
For most Americans, those questions would answer themselves. But more Americans must confront them. And that comes back to us, and the commitment we must demand of those who support the right to choose.