On a hot August day forty years ago in southern France, Thich Nhat Hanh summoned me to his private room on the second floor of an old stone farmhouse. “I want you to take the five lay precepts,” he said, referring to the ancient Buddhist guidelines against harming oneself or others via killing, stealing, sexual exploitation, using intoxicants, and indulging in hurtful or dishonest speech. “The people who harmed you as a child violated the precepts. This will protect you.”
Not killing seemed obvious. I didn’t steal. I was faithful to my then-husband. I rarely drank. But how was I to protect myself, I asked Thay, if I didn’t speak up, and harshly if necessary?
“Some people think I am soft,” he said. “But I am strong.” He made a fist, bent one elbow until his sleeve fell back, and displayed his hard round bicep. “Right speech is not a matter of not saying things. It’s all a matter of art and timing.”
A week later, I committed to the precepts and took the dharma name True Lotus. It did not occur to me to examine my two abortions in their light. Perhaps I compartmentalized. Perhaps I figured this was one of the ways that liberal Westerners and traditional Asian teachers diverge—like reincarnation, psychedelics, and the Vietnamese Buddhist custom of serving the most novice male monk before the most senior nun. Or perhaps I didn’t want to think about it at all.
Only now, since the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled a national right to abortion, have I thought back fifty years and examined my actions in the light of the precepts and my values. I offer a moral defense of abortion by situating this commonplace, difficult event not in an ideal universe but within the lives of real women, including mine.
Context is everything. Both my pregnancies, like those of many accidentally pregnant women, arose within a web of relationships and started with a mistake. In 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade decriminalized abortion and just before my senior year in college, I hitchhiked alone from Middletown, Connecticut, to Baltimore, Maryland, to go camping with a former boyfriend who’d just returned from a semester in Paris. I do not understand why I thought this was a good idea. It was thoughtless and unkind. I’d just been fired from my summer job as a pizza waitress for “not having a woman’s touch,” and I wanted a break from living with my parents. I thought the boy understood that I had no desire to rekindle our romance. I was 21. I did not bring my diaphragm.
After we pitched our tent by a lake in backwoods Maine, the young man confronted me: Why had I dragged him all this way if I didn’t want to get back together? Within this penumbra of guilt and betrayal, I engaged in sex with him. When he dropped me back in Middletown a week later, a fertilized egg smaller than a salt grain had drifted down one of my fallopian tubes and landed without a whisper in my womb.
Labor Day came and went. Inside my body, I felt nothing out of the ordinary. The tiny being in my uterus was now a ball of rapidly proliferating cells the size of a poppy seed, known scientifically as a blastocyst. I registered for classes at Wesleyan, moved into an apartment, and definitively ended things with my former boyfriend. A week or two later, I became involved with someone else after a night spent looking into each other’s eyes on LSD.
The being inside me was now shaped like a tadpole and the size of a sesame seed. Women around the world have been secretly trying to miscarry these sparks of life for millennia: scalding in hot baths while soused on gin; jumping off tables; and swallowing bitter aloe, rue, pennyroyal, and toxic turpentine. I tried none of this, even when I realized that my period was two weeks late. In Connecticut, performing or undergoing an abortion was a felony punishable by one to five years in prison.
Pregnancy tests were not available over-the-counter then, so I went to a private doctor in Middletown. Of the weeks of misery that followed, one memory of feeling fully alive and joyful remains. Standing in the kitchen of my upstairs apartment on the shabby end of High Street, getting my pregnancy results over the phone, I felt a tide of warm, surprising happiness flood my body, from the soles of my feet to the tingling roots of my hair. I was fertile. I could get pregnant when I wanted to. Then my heart closed, and in a cold panic I looked for a way to end my pregnancy.
I did not want to think about it, for fear I wouldn’t go through with it. I remembered a Catholic high school friend telling me, “Abortion is murder.” I had never heard the phrase “forced motherhood” or questioned cherishing a life that has barely begun while ignoring the woman unwillingly carrying it. Nor did I know that the Catholic Church and American law had until the mid-1800s largely overlooked abortion until “quickening” at four or five months, when the fetus kicked in the womb and its claim on people’s moral imaginations began. I did know, though, that the legislature of New York State, ninety minutes over the state border, had narrowly voted to legalize abortion three months earlier.
Proponents of legal abortion often say “my body, my choice.” I did not think of the being inside me as a part of my body over which I had utter dominion, and I don’t think that now. Whatever was inside me—zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, or unborn child—had a claim on my moral imagination. And so did I.
I was facing four doors with a tiger behind every door. A Daisy Mae shotgun wedding was out of the question. There was no such thing as open adoption then, and the thought of disappearing into a Florence Crittenton Home and abandoning a baby I’d carried in my womb for nine months was more than I could bear. Even though I’d later learn that my mother was vehemently proabortion, I did not turn to my parents. With my sketchy grades and serial love affairs, I’d already disappointed them enough.
My images of single motherhood were drawn from pulpy True Confessions tales of seduction and abandonment and the Victorian novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Tess, a pure peasant girl, is inveigled into sex by a rich wastrel who employs her on a farm. The baby she bears him dies in infancy. She later falls in love with a respectable young man who abandons her on their wedding night after she trustingly confides her shame-filled past. “Ruined” and unable to earn a living even as a milkmaid, she becomes the kept woman of her original violator, stabs him to death, and is hanged. Yes, it might seem absurd that I thought like this during the so-called Sexual Revolution, but I did. My “choice,” as I saw it, was between abortion and ruination. I sought to regain control not so much of my body as of my future and my life. I skipped classes one morning and took a Greyhound bus to New York.
The Upper West Side gynecologist, who’d been warm and charming when he’d fitted me for a diaphragm two years earlier, now coolly told me that an abortion would cost $1,200. I cried. It was more than I’d earned all summer to cover my food and rent for the school year. I left his office with the embryo inside me, now about the size of a lentil, with the budlike beginnings of arms.
My “choice,” as I saw it, was between abortion and ruination. I sought to regain control not so much of my body as of my future and my life.
Back in Middletown, I contacted a Protestant pastor, part of the liberal Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, which had referred women to safe abortions before they were legal. A week later, I was back on the Greyhound headed for their low-cost Manhattan clinic, where my abortion would cost $350. My former boyfriend had reluctantly given me half the money.
I look back in horror now at how lonely I was and how few people I confided in. I remember my utter solitude that day as I moved through one crowd after another: the packed and stuffy bus; the teeming confusion of Port Authority; the groaning, dirty gray subway; the throngs clattering upward into the noisy light; and the herd of anxious women from all over the country converging on a building on East 63rd Street.
In a crowded meeting room, a male doctor told a herd of us what to expect: oral sedation; an anesthetic injection; dilation and the scraping-out of our uteruses. He asked, “Any questions?” I asked how long I should wait before I had sex again. “Well, you’re not going to be doing that anymore,” he said. “Didn’t you learn your lesson?”
I was led, sedated and groggy, to a small room where a man in a white medical coat waited. I hiked my legs into the stirrups and closed my eyes. I remember no images, only a warm red darkness, voices, sounds, and snatches of conversation. I do not remember a tug in my womb, or cramping, or the clank of instruments. I do not remember a single soft touch, or anyone who counseled me, held my hand, or met my eyes.
A door creaked open and an authoritative male voice said, “You didn’t get it all. She has twins.” I think he added “boys,” though I hope it was too early to tell. They were no longer embryos to me, the size of a kidney bean, with a salamander’s soft fingers and toes. They were my babies, my boys.
As the instruments entered me again, my stoic reserve melted, and tears oozed from the corners of my eyes. I did not make a sound. A Scottish folk ballad called “The Cruel Mother” haunted me. Lady Margaret, impregnated and abandoned by her father’s clerk, goes to the edge of a green wood, where she “leans her back against a thorn,” gives birth to “two bonny boys,” and stabs them in the heart. When she later sees two boys playing at ball and yearns for her own dead sons, they reappear to haunt her: “O mother, O mother, when we were thine, you dressed us not in silks so fine. For you took out a wicked knife and did away with our precious life.” Five years after my abortion, in a session in a community peer-counseling program in San Francisco, I would weep and imagine those two wisps of boys knocking at the door of life, and how I’d shut the door against them.
Afterward, I took a commuter train to Old Westbury, where I slept on the couch of a female college friend and her boyfriend, who were teaching at the state university there. She remembers how sad I was, and how self-reliant. The next morning, I hitchhiked alone back to Middletown, relieved and numb. I don’t remember my new partner asking me much about what had happened, or me crying, or him holding me. In the weeks that followed, I was depressed, withdrawn, and averse to sex. He soon fell in love with another girl and moved out.
II had done the right thing. With my life no longer mortgaged to a disastrous future, I regained some influence—not control—over my life. I finished my BA, paid off my student loans by working for a lawyer in Colorado, and moved to San Francisco, where I got a starvation-wage job writing for an alternative weekly. In time, I would find the luck, guidance, money, and even love I needed to shape a more stable life. I sometimes wonder how my life, and those of others, would have turned out had I not been granted a safe, affordable, legal abortion at the age of 21.
In retrospect, I do not regret my abortion, or my grief. It was a wrenching, sacred, and morally necessary act. I am grateful to the compassionate men in whose hands my fate lay—the liberal Christian clergyman who’d earlier defied the law, my abortion providers, and the Jewish legislator from the Finger Lakes who ended his political career by casting the decisive vote to legalize the procedure in New York. I worry about who will help young women today whose lives are as messy as mine was then.
Looking back, I can see that if I’d observed the precepts before I got pregnant, I might have protected myself and others from harm. I violated the precepts on right speech and not exploiting others when I impulsively suggested that camping trip. I engaged in sexual relations, as Thich Nhat Hanh framed it, “without love and long-term commitment.” If times had been different, if I’d had an IUD, if I’d encountered Buddhism, if I’d been more self-loving, I might not have become pregnant at all. If, if, if. Here, let me hand you a stone.
If I’d carried those pregnancies to term, I believe I would have created greater harm, not only for myself but also for the boy I went camping with and two potential children who deserved a better start in life than I could have given them. I am still a Buddhist. I still honor the precepts. But I no longer give obeisance to abstract moral systems, formulated by small, privileged all-male groups, relying on absolutes and stripped of context and an understanding of how women struggle on the ground. Instead, I think of harm reduction. I sum up the precepts as “do not harm,” or “avoid unnecessary suffering, consider the situation, do your best, and minimize harm.”
I’ve recently learned that among the world’s great patriarchal religions, only Judaism and a few Protestant denominations accept abortion. Thich Nhat Hanh, who more than any other human being changed my life for the better, apparently assented to it in only extreme circumstances—for young Vietnamese refugee girls, for example, raped and impregnated by sea pirates. Even then, he sometimes helped persuade them not to abort because “the tiny living being within them also had a right to life.”
Only now do I understand that absolutist interpretations of the precept were formulated mainly by celibate male monastics who have never babysat a child for an afternoon. Only now do I fully understand how radically Buddhism has been shaped by the patriarchal cultures from whence it sprang, founded by a man who had abandoned his wife and son and had to be implored to share his teachings with women, including the aunt who had raised him from birth. The voices of women in Buddhism have long been muted, and the realities of their lives overlooked, although each new generation of teachers includes bolder women and more empathic men. I look forward to the day when real, breathing women have as much claim on our moral imaginations as tiny living beings they carry in their wombs.
One of the few teachers I found online who echoed my view that abortion is often the best moral way forward was the Tibetan Bön and Dzogchen master Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. “Bringing someone into the world under unfavorable circumstances without the necessary supports for the child to grow and be nourished only increases suffering,” he said in an interview with the Buddhist bimonthly Lion’s Roar. “This is equivalent to dying not just one time but many times in one lifetime, for both the mother and the child. Even though it is against Buddhist precepts to take a life, it is also not virtuous to give birth under circumstances that would increase suffering for oneself or another—a suffering that seems greater than ending a pregnancy that is unwanted.”
Yes, life is sacred. It flows infinitely from form to form, each form precious, flickering, evanescent, and without a permanent “self.” I did not dress those boys in silk so fine. I closed the door of life against them. They are flowers now.
In retrospect, I do not regret my abortion, or my grief. It was a wrenching, sacred, and morally necessary act.
Every seemingly separate thing arises from multiple causes and conditions. Abortion is widespread not only because contraceptives routinely fail but because we live in a culture that worships individualism, denigrates caregiving, underpays women, gives a pass to deadbeat dads, and provides scandalously little support to pregnant mothers and their children, particularly those who are Black or poor.
What happens in our wombs radiates out into the worlds in which we find ourselves. About three-quarters of American women who seek abortions live below, or just above, the federal poverty line. Roughly half are in their 20s, or are unmarried, or already have children. Only 4 percent of abortions occur sixteen weeks or more after conception. According to the 2020 Turnaway Study, those who seek late abortions for nonmedical reasons are often constrained by poverty. Living paycheck to paycheck, they must beg a relative or a foundation like Abortion Access for money to surmount legal barriers, such as compulsory waiting periods, sonograms, multiple doctor visits, and antiabortion counseling. It sometimes takes them weeks to raise money for child care, motels, gas, and plane tickets to clinics in faraway states with more liberal rules. State-created delays, erected by a religious lobby eager to protect fetal life, are intended to discourage abortion. But one of their unintended effects is to force poor women to get their abortions later, when the procedure is potentially more medically risky, traumatic, and morally fraught.
Four years after my first abortion I was hired by the city’s then-prosperous morning daily and rejoined the middle class. At 28, I stumbled into Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the Ventana Wilderness and opened, heart and soul, to Buddhism. A few years later, I married an admirable Zen student whom I’d met at a sesshin. A year or so later, I accidentally became pregnant again. (I’d had my IUD removed in the wake of the lethal Dalkon Shield scandal and was relying again on a diaphragm.) My husband and I viscerally, immediately, settled on abortion: Our young marriage was already rife with unspoken power struggles and bewildering silences. I assuaged my conscience by telling myself I wasn’t saying no to all babies—just to this baby at this time.
Besides, writing was my salvation.
Again, context is everything. On the day my husband and I walked into a women-run clinic on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, abortion had been legal for twelve years. I remember the cloth napkin draped around the gurgling glass aspirator to hide its splattered contents. I remember a woman with perfectly groomed eyebrows holding my hand as a highly trained nurse maneuvered a tiny vacuum inside my womb. I remember my husband holding my other hand, looking into my eyes, compassionate and present. I cried. I was held. Nobody told me the sex of the embryo. It was a sacred and intimate experience, a necessary sorrow. I feel deep gratitude for the compassionate women who helped us, and for my former husband’s kindness.
We divorced seven years later. I have regrets about my behavior in our marriage, especially my harsh speech. But I remain at peace with our abortion and have rarely revisited it. I am not “pro-choice and antiabortion.” I don’t think abortion will ever be “rare.” I am proabortion as a sacred and often necessary moral act. Acorns are not oaks, fetuses are not children, and women are not broodmares. With a clear conscience, I focus my charitable giving on groups like Planned Parenthood, Abortion Access, and Turimiquire, a US foundation that funds the tubal ligations preferred by rural Venezuelan women who often have multiple children before they turn 20.
I have a photograph, taken three months before I first got pregnant. It is May 1970, graduation day at Wesleyan. I am walking along College Row with a crew of long-haired friends, on their way to pick up their diplomas. The couple who would shelter me in Old Westbury that fall are ambling behind me, smiling and dressed in blue jeans. It’s a sunny day. I am tall and slim, almost angular, striding forward in white flared jeans, Dr. Scholl’s clogs, and a characteristically determined look.
Confident and seemingly happy, we look like well-educated middle-class kids with the world before us, and in many ways we were. My woman friend wrote groundbreaking feminist books. Her then-college boyfriend still produces documentaries for public television. I became the writer I yearned to be and the Buddhist I had no inkling I would become. And twenty-four years after I met my second husband, I still revel in a loving marriage whose daily intimacy and ordinary beauty I couldn’t have imagined when I rode that Greyhound bus to New York.
We were young. We were walking the path toward our destinies. It looks like nothing will derail us. May young women everywhere have an equal chance to shape a decent life.
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