By Laura Bramon Good
Two days after Obama’s inauguration, the crowds barely gone and the Mall barely cleared of trampled water bottles and blankets, the March for Life came to town.
It was a Thursday and I headed to work early, looking forward to the post-inaugural respite of an empty metro train. Instead, the turnstiles and trains were crammed with people in neon orange stocking caps: teenagers, moms, brown-skirted Brothers, all decked out to spot each other during the day’s march, about which I had forgotten. They took head-counts and shrieked and stole each other’s caps and then disappeared, to the relief of us commuters, at the Chinatown stop.
As they filed off the train, I gathered from their shouted conversations that they were headed to a pre-rally Mass. Slipping into one of their vacated, still-warm seats, I half-wanted to follow them off the train, slip up the escalator and into their midst to watch a public spectacle unlike any I had ever seen in D.C. But I knew that I wouldn't.
Despite the democratic convenience of living in Washington, I have marched on the Mall only once. Otherwise, I have observed. When I was just out of college, I lived a few blocks from the Capitol, where regular busloads of shouting, preaching, praying zealots lobbied me and my numbed neighbors, hounding us on the sidewalks and shoving pamphlets at our closed hands.
I tired of the crowds' fervor and I hated walking the gauntlet of vying sides, but I always enjoyed the odd puppets, wigs, and placards, the theatrical kitsch of belief. I especially loved the vehicles—a giant, oinking pig with Vermont plates, a flatbed truck ferrying stacks of fake Oreos—until I saw the abortion truck.
Everybody in D.C. knows it: a moving van plastered with giant pictures of bloody, mangled fetuses. The first time I saw it, I was driving to dinner with some acquaintances, unaware that any protesters were in town. Mid-conversation, I swung my head around and came face-to-face with a huge, rubbery, inky-red mass on the flank of a chugging van. It took me a moment to realize that it was a human profile, tiny and dead. I tried to recover, choking a bit, unsure of what to say.
"That is obscene," one of the girls scoffed. "I can't believe people do that." She meant the truck, not the act. The rest of us were silent.
I came face-to-face with the truck again a few years later, during my one foray into protest: the historic 2004 March for Women’s Lives on the National Mall. My mom and my sisters, all of whom are pro-choice, had talked about coming to the March with the Planned Parenthood of Mid-Missouri or a feminist professor at the Baptist college that all of us sisters have attended.
In the end, I was the only one there. I stood on the South side of Seventh and Constitution, lonely, awkward among the counter-marchers, new to the pro-life movement and feeling the fear of a family traitor. I held a carefully chosen "Feminists for Life" sign and tried to shout along with my side of the crowd, but I was so ashamed: of the bloody posters, of the boys with bullhorns shouting: “Shame on you!" and, sadly, of the giant Mary of Guadalupe banner, stretched as wide and taut as an old-fashioned firefighter’s net—as if, at any moment, the ladies who toted it would turn it on its side to save someone jumping from a fiery building.
All the while, the abortion truck roamed. I watched its red body make scuttling laps around the Mall, mercenary, ultimate. I think at one point it was parked along the Mall's side street, and that I passed it as I dropped my sign, turned my T-shirt inside-out, and crossed Seventh Street: the physical line separating pro-life and pro-choice. I wandered the crowd, listening to the Mall carousel's tinny songs crank under the swelling chants. I wove my way to the tables where they gave away the last of the bright-pink Planned Parenthood commemorative buttons. I took two or three for my mother.
The Tuesday after the March for Life, exactly one week from Obama's inauguration, D.C. got an overdue snowfall. I took the bus to work. Full and warm, the 52 lumbered down 14th Street and emptied out at the Archives, leaving me to glide south alone, on Seventh Street, across the Mall, now dimpled with footsteps of the Inauguration-goers and the Marchers for Life. We passed the corner where I stood several years ago, and I thought about how I had stared into the faces of the women who flowed down that street, imagining that I saw my mother, my sisters, my grandmother across the barricade. I would have cheered and waved when I saw them go by. I would have reached out for their hands.
a couple of weekends ago, i read susan wicklund's sobering memoir "this common secret: my journey as an abortion doctor" in one sitting. it was grim and hard to take; i think anybody, pro-choice or pro-life, would need a walk around the block after reading it.
one reason why i was able to stay with the book is that it is wicklund’s pro-choice allegiance is fairly tempered. by her telling, she went to great lengths to ensure that each woman for whom she performed an abortion was truly choosing to "terminate her pregnancy". at the end of her career, wicklund ended up getting fired from a clinic because she was too "patient-centered". whether or not a reader thinks wicklund's compassion is well-placed, it is clear that she is not an abortion-on-demand, at-all-costs pro-choice poster woman. knowing this, i was more willing to take her anecdotes at face value.
one of wicklund's most powerful anecdotes centered around a teenage girl who went to great lengths to secure an abortion without telling a pro-life aunt and uncle with whom she had a rocky relationship. if i remember correctly, the young woman asked to see the aborted fetus after the procedure had ended. the abortion took place very early in the girl’s pregnancy – in keeping, according to wicklund, with the majority of the abortions that wicklund performed. the teenage girl looked at the pouch of cells and said something to the effect of, “i can’t believe that my aunt and uncle care more about this bunch of cells than they do about me.”
her reaction was sadly similar to several other patients that wicklund discusses in the book, patients who were hugely surprised to see that a legal abortion at wicklund’s clinic did not involve the bloody baby’s body parts that were being showcased, poster-sized, by protesters outside the clinic. what struck me as even more sad was that, according to wicklund, these patients took this discrepancy to mean that the pro-life community as a whole was one of fraud and mania.
i’m not opposed to telling the truth or standing up for it. as the only pro-life person in a strongly pro-choice and very close-knit family, i know what it means to have uncomfortable, difficult conversations about this issue – over and over again, at every holiday, at any opportunity, as my family works very hard to win me back to their fold. what gets difficult for me is when a commitment to the emotional truth super-cedes facts – scientific, spiritual, and philosophical – on which respectful and empathetic dialogue can be built.