Just As I Thought Read Online Free Page B

first thing that hospital had on its mind at all. Not only that: Even if the doctor had compassion—and in my friend’s case, one of the doctors was very anxious about her—they couldn’t do anything unless they were willing to risk a great deal.
    I think women died all the time when abortions were illegal. The horrible abortions were one way; the other way was the refusal of institutions—medical, church, and state—to care for you, their willingness to let you die.
    It’s important to be public about the issue, and I have been for years. I helped organize one of the first abortion speak-outs in the country, which was held at the Washington Square Methodist Church in New York City back in the late sixties.
    But I’ll be very truthful. I never liked the slogan “Abortion on demand,” and most of my friends hated it. We’d go on marches, and we could never say it. It’s such a trivialization of the experience. It’s like “Toothpaste on demand.” If somebody said there should be birth control on demand, I would say yes. That would make a lot of sense. If I ask for a diaphragm, if I ask for a condom, I should just get it right off the bat.
    But an abortion … After all, it’s a surgical procedure and really a very serious thing to undertake. It’s not a small matter. Just because I didn’t suffer a lot around my abortion, suffering is not the only thing that makes something important. I didn’t suffer, but it was important. And when you say “on demand,” it ignores the real question, which is: Where are you in your pregnancy? If you’re in the sixth month, it’s probably not wise, not good for you, even dangerous. Not that I think if a woman goes to a clinic and wants to have an abortion, she shouldn’t have it when she needs it. It’s just that there’s a lot to think about.
    The last demonstration I went to was in Montpelier, Vermont (Mobilization for Women’s Lives, November 12, 1989). There were about twenty-five hundred women and men. The governor spoke, a woman governor, Madeleine Kunin; and, one of the great highlights, an older woman—older than me, even (I’m sixty-seven)—from Catholics for a Free Choice spoke; and I spoke.
    I said that abortion is only the tip of the iceberg. These guys who run at the clinics—and by the way, our Burlington clinic was really raided, with people knocked down—are point men who make the noise and false, hypocritical statements about human life, which they don’t much care about, really. What they really want to do is take back ownership of women’s bodies. They want to return us to a time when even our children weren’t our own; we were simply the receptacles to have these children. The great novels of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were often about women who knew that if they took one wrong step, their children would be taken from them.
    And another point I made is that abortion isn’t what they’re thinking about; they’re really thinking about sex. They’re really thinking about love and reducing it to its most mechanical aspects—that is to say, the mechanical fact of intercourse as a specific act to make children in this world, and thinking of its use in any other way as wrong and wicked. They are determined to reduce women’s normal sexual responses, to end them, really, when we’ve just had a couple of decades of admitting them.
    My generation—and only in our later years—and the one right after mine have been the only ones to really enjoy any sexual freedom. The kids have to know that it’s not just the right to abortion which is essential; it’s their right to a sexual life.
     
    —1991
    Obviously, the AIDS epidemic had not yet assaulted that next generation when I spoke/wrote this piece.

Jobs
     
    These are the jobs I’ve had in the last thirty years. Some before the war, some after. (When I say “the war,” I mean the Second World War, because if people in my generation were going to die in a war, that would