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Show --....-. MOLLY IVINS f JOSEPH SOBRAN ' COMMENTARY l. Ii -- lo i!. COMMENTARY - .., ~ Womens ' right to choose abortion remembered Those dizzy feminists and double standards Before Roe vs. Wade ... Trying to Gorney recounts the public reaction to remember how we felt and how we talked Fin.kbine's predicament: a letter expiessing about abortion and what we did in those the hope that someone would strangle days is like trying to remember a time Finkbine's other four children "because it's when you weie in pain-you remember all the same t hi ng," and a note from that there was pain, but you can't really Pennsylvania saying, " I curse you and call back what the pain felt like. curse you and curse you and everything For one thing, abortion was never you do for the rest of yoru filthy life." publicly discussed in the 1950s and rarely Finkbine had to go to Sweden for the discussed among women privately. It was abortion. taboo. Even at the women's college I The rubella epidemic of 1963 -65 attended, the stories I heard were second· extended Finkbine's dilemma to thoohand: So-and-so had gone to Europe for an sands: If you knew your baby was going to · abortion, so-and-so dropped out because be born blind, deaf and deformed, what she "had to get married," as we used to say. should you do? What had been a topic that Even in my sh eltered high school, there wasn't discussed became a national debate. were giils who "had to get married." The fight spilled into state legislatures. In my high school days, we were divided First, California and Colorado relaxed their into " good girls" and " girls who slept laws, permitting a woman's mental state to around. " In retrospect, my contemporaries be considered, and other states began and I were clueless that it's hard to know debating outright repeal. whether to laugh or cry about it now. From the point of view of women of my By the time I became sexually active, generation, abonion itself was never that birth control pills were available, but I clear-cut an issue. We differed vastly on recall discussions about how diliicult it where we drew our lines; Despite the was to get them; you had repeated denunciations of to be married. Would you "abortion as birth conjust lie? In my recollectrol," I have never known tion, all doctors at the a woman who had an time were older men, and abortion casually, as just it was impossible to imasome episode she could gine talking to them about toss out of her mind. having an affair. Many whom I knew as the Beyond embarrassment hardest fighters for the was what wom en felt right of women to make when they got pregnanttheir own decisions are the fear, the anxiety, the 1:::c•NI<,,U women who them-selves 11 terror, the anguish. It may had to get married". sound melodramatic, but Among active feminists, it was real at the time. efforts to get the courts to By the time [ became a rule were followed closely. reporter, the abortion issue When Roe vs. Wade came had started to sneak into out, we w eren't sure it the women's pages. We was the right case, and were never able to figure Sarah Weddington, at 26, out how to get accurate wasn' t a big name among numbers, but m any of us feminis ts or lawyers. If had sources at public you've never heard her tell hospitals who would give 1;.;_.;;::;..:=.....;...;;...:...:::~:;...;;;.,;;__....;.....:.::;;....;..i the story, I recommend us deaths from a category they called her book A Question of Choice. "botched D&Cs"- back-alley abortions. The decision came down on Jan. 22, When we started extrapolating from t)le 1973. We met in hallways and in restrooms numbers we could get, the results were that day; we called one another all over the mind-boggling. Infections, hysterectomies, country. Of course, we cried and thanked deaths-the toll was ghastly. God, the court, Sarah, one another. Those · As wom e n began to talk about the who had lost friends or family members to problem more, information spread. There restrictive abortion laws-and I include was an abortion network on the West those who died of botched abortions or Coast; there were clinicas in Mexico many committed suicide under the pressure, but Texas women w ent to . Wealthy women those who had nervous breakdowns from flew to Europe. Solidly based estimates at unwanted pregnancies, those whose bad the rime went as high as l million illegal abortions resulted in hysterectomies, and abortions a year. those who in other ways never recovered0 ne of the most publicized early we remembered them. We thought it was controversies centered on Sherry Finkbine, the most glorious, most wonderful, most who had a children's television program in liberating victory. Arizona. She bad four children and was in We never envisioned the burnings, the the e.atly stages of pregnancy in 1962 when bombings, the mmders that would come. some idiot gave h er thalidomide as a We just thought we had, finally, won the tranquilizer. She went public with her right to make our own decisions. decision to get an abortion. The book Articles of Paith: A Frontline Molly Ivins is a nationally syndicated History of the Abortion Wars by Cynthia columnist. One definition of a misogynist might be a man who thinks feminists are typical of women. The feminist movement lacks .a thermostat: It keeps overheating madly. In his new book The End of Sanity, Martin L. Gross lists hundieds of examples o( ideological lunacy, qn race, sex, religion and other topics. Feminist examples surpass all others, in both quantity and preposterous quality. It's been decreed, somewhere or oth er, that the sexes are not only equal but barely distinguishable, so any differences are due to untold centuries of male domination. Of course the very fact that men have dominated women so utterly thioughout recorded history might be considered prima facie evidence of male superiority, rather than a mere refusal to recognize women's equality; but maybe that' s just phallocentric male logic speaking. ln any case, enlightenm en t has finally arrived. We have the privilege of living in the age where the insignificance of sexual differences has, at long last, been not only established, but codified in law and manners, and even in the armed forces . 350 women were sent i nto "combat duty" on the U .S .S. Eisenhower (named for Mamie Eisenhower, one trusts). Despite a rule against "fraternization" between the sexes, Gross notes, six couples soon asked to be married by the captain, while several "sailors" got pregnant and had to be removed from the ship. At newly nonsexist West Point, a female officer, Lt. Colonel Maureen LeBoeuf, is now " Master of the Sword," in charge of physical fitness for all cadets . When asked why female cadets are required to do 18 -push- ups, while males are still required to do 42, "she replied that women are almost as qualified physically as men were 40 years ago." In the movie G.J. Jane, Demi MoOie was absrndly shown as a super-tough recruit i n-the Navy SEALS, kicking lots of Arab males around (and showing up American males in the process). No body seems to have infOimed Ms. Moore, the producers or the scriptwriters that a sailor isn't a "G.I." Getting such details right might have enhanced the film's gritty realism. (Unlike, say, Bruce Willis, Ms. Moore needed a snintperson to do her calisthenics.) Back in civilian life, Grnss notes, the stock brokerage firm of Gruntal & Co. has adopted a policy of firing men for sexual harassment if they so much as stare at women, or ask a co-wOiker for a date after having been turned down once. · Chivaliy, though not dead, is wellnigh illegal. T he U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Comm ission officially decrees that a "pattern of complim en ting a woman" can be grounds for a sexual harassment suit. Even the pettiest hurt feelings can be gussied up as political causes. A s tudent at the University of Minnesota, for example, accused a professor of " sexuaJ haiass men t," because !she said! he pa id more attention to the men 's term papers than to hers. On the one band, feminists insist that women are just as capable as men physically and intellectually. On the other hand, they, like many ot he r claimants of official victimhood, always insist that existing standards be lowered - or that new double standards be adopted to enable the m to compete. Actually, it's competition their claims are designed to avoid. Such claims of equality aie really admissions of inferiority. Jewish males dominate many professions; they weren't given favors, and they never as ked that law and m edical schools lower standards for Jews to compensate for "past discrimination. " Black males dominate professional sports, but not because anyone pitched underhand to Jackie Robinson to atone for slavery and segregation. Today the old culture of ach ievement has given way to a cul ture of whi ning, in whic h achievem ent is actually su spect-interpret ed as evide n ce of privilege or unfair advantage. In this atmosph ere, the only way to get equality is to demand compensatory privilege (reinforced by silly fictions). But people who are really oppressed don't want double standards, because double standards are the very things that oppress them. We're spending our time laboring to solve problems that no longer exist. ;..;..;===-===== Joseph Sobran is a nationally syndicated columnist. |
