Sh*t To Help You Show Up May 6, 2022
What Integrity Isn't
I’ve never had a medical abortion. Yet, I couldn’t honestly tell you if I’ve ever ended a pregnancy on purpose. Why? Because when I was in college I started using herbal abortifacients as a matter of course anytime my period was 5-7 days late, even though I was using birth control. Reliably, within a handful of days they stimulated my bleeding— a sure sign that, whether or not I’d been pregnant prior to taking them, I wasn’t now. Which was all I really needed to know.
I didn’t need to know whether I’d been pregnant yesterday. I just needed to know that I unequivocally wasn’t today.
This sort of early termination of pregnancy was so common as to be considered outside of the confines of the law in the United States for much of its history. Prior to “quickening”— when the mother can feel the fetus start to move— the pregnancy wasn’t even considered to involve a being separate from the mother. So, to drink a tea to “bring on your courses” wasn’t considered ending life as much as taking care of life— one’s own.
There is much debate about why various politicians since the mid-1800s have pushed state-level abortion laws, which only recently extended to these early stages of possible pregnancy. Some say it was eugenics— trying to reduce the birth rates of women of color. Others say it was to force middle-class white women to give birth so the country wouldn’t be overrun by black and brown babies. Still others say it was to protect women from poisons and unsafe surgical procedures. I suspect all are true of one male politician or another. Regardless of their reasons, the fact remains that all of those motivations were born out of patriarchy, an ideological and social system that does not afford women full autonomy and personhood.
The trouble with leaving abortion to women to manage and decide prior to “quickening”, of course, was that then a woman had to be trusted to know and be honest about when it had occurred because no one else could verify her story. And, god forbid, we trust a woman. That’s not in the patriarchy playbook.
Roe v. Wade sidestepped the question of whether or not women are trustworthy by making abortion an issue of equal protection and privacy, which were covered under the 14th Amendment. This then led to the many decades of debate on when “life” begins, because shouldn’t that “life” be protected as well? Not to mention whether reproduction was a private issue. I mean, if women aren’t full citizens then how can they have privacy?
That explicit debate on when life begins (and the implicit one on whether women are fully autonomous humans and citizens), of course, was ignited and fed consistently by the Republican party, which, starting in the 1980s, decided to hang its hat on support from evangelical conservatives. Prior to that point, support for (and opposition to) abortion was pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.
Now, it’s a partisan issue, but let’s be clear about the underlying problem. As high up in each party as women may be, it’s still a man’s world, which is why we’re having this whole discussion in the first place.
I will confess that the issue of abortion rights brings me smack up against one of the most boggling and difficult questions for me about integrity. Can two people with diametrically opposed views both be in their integrity?
The original definition I began using here at Let Your Life Speak simply involved discernment, followed by action, and the willingness to face the consequences of that action. Couldn’t a clinic bomber or someone who kills abortion providers be covered by that definition? Technically, yes. So, where does that leave me?
Down in a pit of despair, that’s where.
In order to work my way out of that pit, I have to go back to the etymology of integrity. Integrity comes from the same root as integer, the word for a whole number. The Latin is integritatem, meaning “soundness, wholeness, completeness.” So, integrity is not simply a practice but also an idea of wholeness.
How can I be a whole person, a whole citizen, without bodily autonomy, i.e. the right to govern my own body? And how can a fetus, which until fairly late in the game literally cannot exist outside of my body without the aid of modern medical technology, have bodily autonomy? Aren’t they the definition of “not autonomous”? Therefore, lacking wholeness, or integrity of self? So, isn’t defending the “life” of a being that has no integrity of self, itself a position that lacks integrity?
But then, of course, we’re brought around to the question of community, which is an essential aspect of being human. What do I owe to the broader community? Do I owe my reproductive capacity to the community?
Do I owe the community a willingness to never end a potential life, even if to do so negatively affects my own? Who gets to decide what is “negative”? And who will bear the consequences of that negativity? Me? The child? The biological father? The wider community?
Does a community that asks me alone to bear the consequences of that choice have integrity?
Going further down the community obligations rabbit hole, is there any instance where I can take a life and still remain in my integrity? For instance, is self-defense integrous? What about the fact that I’m not an organ donor? If I refuse to share parts of myself that I can live without, or don’t need after I’m dead, allowing another person to live, is that integrous?
What do I, with my one life and body, owe the world?
In the end, I still don’t know where the line is when it comes to integrity and philosophical disagreement. I suspect it’s placed somewhere in the realm of tactics and methods, not out beyond a belief in the essential value or autonomy of other people. Out there? That’s not integrity to me.
Where do disagreement and integrity coexist for you? Where do they not?
Lastly, I will offer you this poem, which speaks to my condition, as we Quakers say.
Right to Life
by Marge Piercy
A woman is not a pear tree
thrusting her fruit into mindless fecundity
into the world. Even pear trees bear
heavily one year and rest and grow the next.
An orchard gone wild drops few warm rotting
fruit in the grass but the trees stretch
high and wiry gifting the birds forty
feet up among inch long thorns
broken atavistically from the smooth wood.
A woman is not a basket you place
your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood
hen you can slip duck eggs under.
Not the purse holding the coins of
your descendants till you spend them in wars.
Not a bank where your genes collect interest
and interesting mutations in the tainted
rain, anymore than you are.
You plant your corn and harvest
it to eat or sell. You put the lamb
in the pasture to fatten and haul it in
to butcher for chops. You slice
the mountain in two for a road and gouge
the high plains for coal and the waters
run muddy for miles and years.
Fish die but you do not call them yours
unless you wished to eat them.
Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.
You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,
fields for growing babies like iceburg
lettuce. You value children so dearly
that none ever go hungry, none weep
with no one to tend them when mothers
work, none lack fresh fruit,
none chew lead or cough to death and your
orphanages are empty. Every noon the best
restaurants serve poor children steaks.
At this moment at nine o'clock a partera
is performing a table top abortion on an
unwed mother in Texas who can't get Medicaid
any longer. In five days she will die
of tetanus and her little daughter will cry
and be taken away. Next door a husband
and wife are sticking pins in the son
they did not want. They will explain
for hours how wicked he is,
how he wants discipline.
We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother's blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to the sun. Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.
I will choose what enters me, what becomes,
flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,
no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine, not your calf
for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold
shares in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a non-negotiable demand.