Love in the Time of Abortion’s “Had To” Question

by Dwaine Rieves

Twelve, I probably was twelve when I first realized I was responsible for my mother’s miserable marriage. The insight appeared one morning shortly before school. I cowered in the living room, scrunched up against an arm of our green tweed sofa. I clutched a cushion to my chest, stared into the television’s blank screen, and listened. This was the most peaceful place in the house, the one room where we often sat together like a normal family watching television. The shouts from the back bedroom grew louder. They were always growing louder. The loudness always seemed to bother me more than my sisters. Maybe it’s because I was the oldest. I had more loudness to remember. The string in the sofa’s tweed is strong, and the cushion smells of closeness and safety and most of all, my mother. Why she married him in the first place has always been beyond me.

I know the pattern. She stands before the dresser mirror while preparing for work. He is in his underwear, sitting on the bed and watching her. He says she’s written a check that sent them into the red. She says he did it, and when he stomps the floor, she heads to the bathroom to apply the lipstick and blush that secretaries at the hospital are supposed to wear. The arguing continues, and in the middle of cussing and words, she says something about having to get married. “Had to,” is a terrible answer, the last piece in a terrible puzzle. “Had to” is why I’ve never heard either one say they loved the other, why I’ve seen no hints of an anniversary celebration, why we have no pictures. “Had to,” means love had nothing to do with it at all.

“Had to,” also means I was unwanted, which makes all I have learned about what my mother went through even worse than I imagined. At 17, she was pregnant with me, and her feet were swelling. He was 22, and gone a lot. I know she developed a disease called “eclampsia” because she’s talked about it on the telephone with Elizabeth, who is a smart nurse at the hospital. I was a breech baby, high in her womb even as she was seizing on the table. She was bleeding, and Doctor Moore had to use high forceps to pull my head down. High forceps could have crushed my brain and killed me. In fact, she could have died also, which I think Elizabeth keeps reminding her. Yet, my mother and I survived, and “had to” is what caused all this misery.

‘“Had to,” means love had nothing to do with it at all.’

“Had to” is why I grew up often wishing I had been aborted. Maybe terminated at the beginning of her pregnancy. She could have gone to college and later married a man she loved. In my early teenage thinking, the abortion wouldn’t have been a murder or a killing because I wasn’t a baby. I was only the beginnings of a baby, which had begun by chance alone. If they’d had sex at any other time, my beginnings might not have happened. God had nothing to do with it because the God I had grown up with didn’t do things by chance alone, especially when it came to babies. But people take chances with their bodies all the time. Sometimes they can’t help it, which I think God would understand even if respectable people called that chancy nature of human beings shameful.

Or, if not an early abortion, Doctor Moore could have crushed me in her womb with the forceps. “Murdered” and “killing” would not be the words for this procedure either, since my death would have been tragic but also decent, given a decent medical purpose. Doctor Moore most definitely would not have made a medical decision based on chance alone. Too, Doctor Moore had a lot of experience with God-fearing people, which pretty much meant God, in one way or another, would have helped with the procedure. 

Back then, I was thinking about “abortion” long before I heard the word spoken out loud in our house. Best I recall, the word “abortion” was first verbalized in our living room, where we gathered before the television in the early 1970s. I was the gawky and overly sensitive boy sitting on the sofa beside my mother. My two younger sisters lounged on cushions they had bunched on the floor. My father stretched out in his recliner. All in the Family got us started, Edith screeching out the opening duet with her husband Archie. At the start of every show, it seemed the Bunkers couldn’t be happier. Yet amidst the hard-earned happiness, one night Archie discovered his daughter Gloria was pregnant.

Our living room turned somber. We peered at the screen as Archie cringed, for there was no way Gloria and her Meathead husband could afford this baby. Archie seethed, and it wasn’t long before the camera revealed Gloria in bed. The episode closed with a teary-eyed Archie holding Gloria’s hand after her spontaneous abortion, which is what my mother said was the medically correct term even if the Bunkers called it a “miscarriage.” On the screen, when the camera zeroes in on the weeping Gloria, Archie says he loves her. This love hurts. It hurts so much you can’t help but believe God must be helping with the situation. 

Maude told a more challenging story. At 47, when Maude finds out she is pregnant, she has an abortion. Everyone calls it for what it is, an abortion. The episode ends with Maude hugging her husband after her decision. “I love you, Walter Findlay.” Several years after Maude had an abortion, my father was having a risky surgical procedure. I watched my mother kiss him on the forehead before they wheeled him to the operating room. In the moment, she looked like a woman who loved her husband. The kiss presented more questions about love, which I would never ask them directly. I had just graduated from medical school, and questioning them about love would have meant I, a new doctor, had doubts about the respectability of their decisions, let alone their feelings.

My father’s surgery was successful. He mellowed, and the fights grew fewer and different. My folks could complete weeks of anger-laden silence, but then a calamity would arise—say, a storm knocking out the power—and the trouble would get them talking. The pattern lasted until my mother died at 69 of ovarian cancer. A few years later, my father died of heart disease. Several weeks after the funeral, as my adult sisters and I sat before the darkened screen of our family television, we reflected on the lives of our parents. My oldest sister is a nurse, and talkative. She is amazed at how our father in his last years “softened.” She speaks to the blank screen, and then turns to me in amused bewilderment. “Nothing like the man Momma said he was when they married. Remember?”

I want to nod in agreement, but something seems off. I say I never heard her talk about the kind of man he was back then.

“Well, she did. Maybe you forgot.”

I must look alarmed, so my sister palms her hands together before flinging them open with the delight of a nurse who needs to set the doctor straight on a story. “Or…maybe she didn’t tell you.” The implication is obvious, and it pleases my sisters, for clearly our mother had at least one story she only told her daughters.

As my talkative sister explains it, our mother is pregnant with me. She is laboring on the delivery room table. She has been sedated to try to control the seizures. Still, she convulses. The doctor fears a stroke, kidney failure and death. Doctor Moore lacks the staff to conduct an emergency Cesarean section. No blood for transfusion, no one to handle the anesthesia. He can also try high forceps, but the instruments might seriously damage or kill the baby. Doctor Moore steps into the waiting room to speak to my father, who must make a choice. 

I shudder at this image my sister is painting. It is a story that has been hidden from me for decades, details my mother concealed during her conversations with Elizabeth. Details she chose to conceal from my eavesdropping curiosity. Otherwise, Elizabeth and I would have heard all about it. 

My sister goes quiet, and the three of us, we sit with the silence. We rest our eyes on the depowered television. I feel as if I have suddenly reverted. I am twelve and frightened. I feel and have no good words for the feeling. But the feeling hurts, this much I know. It hurts so much I cling to my thoughts as if they were medics. One thought says life is intolerable if my father prioritized me over my mother. Another one says he likely wavered, maybe deferred to the doctor. But wavering doesn’t sound like my father. 

My sister turns to me, and I work to keep my eyes on the green emptiness of the television screen. Her voice is steady when she speaks our father’s words, which she shares verbatim. “Let the baby die.” 

Once more, my sisters and I sit with the silence. But this time, my thoughts are lost within a feeling that borders on numbing. Had our mother been alert, would she have agreed with our father? The question is roiling among many other questions, and I would be tumbling among them also if I was not sitting with my sisters before the television. Here, our positions are safe. They have not changed over time, and now time itself seems to comfort us. Time doesn’t say whether she agreed or disagreed with our father’s decision, but time makes it clear that she wanted his decision to be revealed only once I was old enough to understand it. She had to delay, and time suggests only a mighty complicated love could live in the heart of her delaying decision. 

‘ They tell me they never meant to hurt me when they argued. There was simply no other way around love’s most difficult questions.’

It has been nearly a decade since I learned of my father’s decision, and now I catch myself thinking even more about love and abortion, which suggests a mysterious—and sometimes miserable—connection. 

I have often thought my parents were born into misery, for the 1930s in Mississippi was surely a miserable time for many people. Yet, in the midst of innumerable economic and social troubles, the decade closed with William Faulkner writing a novel about abortion. The Wild Palms tells the story of a young doctor and his pregnant lover. If he truly loves her, the lover insists, the doctor will perform her abortion. Indeed, the doctor loves the woman, so he completes the abortion, which results in a lethal infection. At the close of the book, the doctor is imprisoned in Mississippi for the death of his lover.

The Wild Palms is one of Faulkner’s most challenging novels because, in alternating chapters, it juxtaposes the abortion story against the story of a convict’s escape from prison. The stories are raw and disorienting, which may explain why, a few years after the book’s release, a classroom of Ole Miss students challenged Faulkner to summarize the main theme in his abortion novel. Faulkner’s answer was simple— “love.” He wrote the novel to explore “two types of love.” Faulkner was apparently so terse, the students didn’t pursue the subject. Still, on close reading of the novel, it’s not difficult to identify Faulkner’s two types of love. “Respectable” love is a depersonalized, amorphous kind of love, the kind of love God holds for all humankind. In contrast, “illicit” love is the deeply human love shared between the impassioned couple. In the end, God’s “respectable” love prevails in Mississippi, so the woman winds up dead and the doctor imprisoned.

In a strange coincidence, as Faulkner was exploring two types of love in fiction, the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren was also writing about two types of love. In his book, Agape and Eros, Nygren contrasted the “Christian love” of God for all humanity against the “pagan love” of “eros,” which humans shared among each other. In Nygren’s opinion, the moral goal for Christians was to live a life of agape love. Of course, people living out their agape love would consider abortion unthinkable. In effect, God’s love set the rules and Christians were stand-in gods if they enforced those rules.

Nygren’s perspective was highly influential in midcentury theological teaching, but also one that alarmed C. S. Lewis. Writing in 1960, Lewis feared that a man idolizing the value of God’s all-encompassing love, “begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.” The opinion suggested that prioritizing love as God must know it over the love that people must share with each other could empower God’s stand-ins to make life and death decisions for total strangers. The consequences, as Faulkner had tried to illustrate, might result in a world of dead or imprisoned lovers.

If William Faulkner magically teamed up with the Archie Bunker family still living in my mind, I can picture the questions. Meathead starts it. Should a state prioritize the importance of a divine love that transcends personal boundaries over an individual’s sense of love? Archie shrugs, and Gloria nods, decisively. Her beloved Meathead is on a roll. He raises a finger to the air like Faulkner before a podium. If so, Meathead admonishes, then the state disciples of this divine love are fully justified—indeed, obligated as a governor—to make life and death decisions for other people. For a divine love of all humankind assigns no difference between the death of a stranger and the death of your own mother. Archie is appalled. He scoots forward in his chair. Meathead raises his hands to frame his questions. “Archie, can a state make laws based on the opinions of God’s self-proclaimed stand-ins? Can the state simply ignore the only kind of love that human beings can actually live out in their physical bodies?”

Meathead sounds prophetic. His point is so obvious, the camera scopes out. Edith looks perplexed, and Archie big-eyed. Faulkner puffs his pipe. The scene closes in the living room where I am twelve and staring at a cold television. But this time my young father and mother are here with me, and they are talking. They tell me they never meant to hurt me when they argued. There was simply no other way around love’s most difficult questions. They were simply trying to put things together, and they like to believe they did. And so, we sit together in a silence so deep I can feel God sitting among us. Here, in the living room, where you can clutch a cushion while staring at a television’s blank screen, which is a blessing because it helps you listen.