Mary Kenny
Mary Kenny considers how a life changing event can be summarised in a 140 character tweet
It was, reported Kitty Holland in The Irish Times, the very “ordinariness” and “everyday” nature of an abortion journey to Britain which prompted two women to live-tweet their journey last weekend.
Yes, a trip to an abortion clinic is ‘so very ordinary’. It is chronicled in stark detail in a compelling short story, ‘Beached’, by Jennifer Farrell, published in The Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction 2005-15. It’s so ‘ordinary’ that the narrator remembers every aspect of the trip to Liverpool, looking back on it subsequently, from a childless middle age, a series of hapless sexual encounters, and now, in a mediocre relationship with an insensitive man.
The father of her child was a TCD student who was never told of the pregnancy.
The procedure, Alice recalls, was akin to being “pushed in and pulled out; cleaned out, like a bloody roasting chicken”. And she ponders on what her child would be like now. “She’d be 25 now, Alice thinks…It’s always a girl, when she thinks of it; a dribbling one-year-old in a pink party dress, a cheeky 10-year-old with pigtails, a pimply, teenage rebel with no cause at 15. Would she be a beauty at 25? A daughter would have been nice, Alice thinks.”
Yes, all so very ‘ordinary’ – a whole life experience could be summed up in a tweet – couldn’t it?
Harrowing
Even more harrowing is a recently published account of working with Planned Parenthood in America, The Walls Are Talking, by Abby Johnson (with Kristin Detrow). Ms Johnson was an abortion clinic counsellor and started out believing that she was there to help women. But the true stories she tells are evidence enough of why she quit, and became pro-life.
She describes her own abortion experiences – including a horrific episode with so-called ‘medication abortion’ (abortion induced by the drugs mifepristone/misoprostol, at about eight weeks’ gestation).
Abbey Johnson goes on to recount many personal stories of women’s experiences at Planned Parenthood, where she was once ‘Employee of the Year’.
Here’s an ‘ordinary’ experience worth a Tweet or two – the case of ‘Angie’, known at the clinics as a ‘frequent flyer’ (the jargon they use for repeat clients).
Angie is a high-spirited woman in her 30s, always laughing and wisecracking, quipping her way through her ninth abortion. She uses abortion as fertility control and thinks nothing of it. “No regrets.”
But after her ninth procedure, surprisingly, she asks to be shown the foetal parts, which are conserved in a freezer after a pregnancy termination (jokingly called “the nursery” by the Planned Parenthood staff).
Reluctantly, Abbey brings Angie the dismembered remains, aborted at 13 weeks. Angie is horrified. She breaks down in uncontrollable tears. She asks to take the POC (‘products of conception’) home with her. “That’s a baby,” she whispers. “That was my baby.”
Clinic
After that, the clinic decides never to show a woman the foetal remains again. They also withold ultrasound pictures of the unborn.
Such an ‘ordinary’ event. You could tweet it – and maybe get a congratulatory response from Simon Harris?
Everyone concerned about this subject should acquire The Walls Are Talking (published on this side of the Atlantic by Ignatius Press and available via Amazon). It’s an extraordinary book. I hope someone will send a copy to Simon Harris, and to all those involved in addressing this topic.
It’s not an easy subject for anyone, but, please, it is not just something very, very ‘ordinary’.
A gifted philosopher
It was only when I read an enjoyable account of life among the French Existentialists that I became properly aware of Edith Stein.
Born in 1891, she was one of the most gifted young philosophers of her time, working with famous names like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidigger. Born Jewish, she was a teenage atheist, and a brilliant brain. She was blocked from academic advancement for being both Jewish and a woman. Then she read the life of Teresa of Avila, converted to Catholicism, and entered the Carmelite order. She and her sister Rosa were taken by the Nazis to Auschwitz, and died there on
August 9, 1942.
She is now one of the six patron saints of Europe, rightly commemorated in the month of August. An amazing person.