Thinking about Abortion(s)

Image Credit: iStock / Rudzhan Nagiev

Along with many others, of course, I’ve been thinking a lot about the abortion issue of late.

I guess I’ll start these reflections with my first exposure to the procedure, fourth-hand as it was. One of my college friends, in my freshman year at Michigan, had an older roommate who managed to impregnate his girlfriend. I remember the roommate was a short-haired fan of Creedence Clearwater Revival, which would make him somewhat of a cultural conservative on the Ann Arbor campus of 1970. His girlfriend had short hair as well. I don’t believe they were really prepared to become parents. This was before the Roe v. Wade decision, and I know she traveled to California for the procedure. I don’t believe the trip or the procedure were a financial burden to anyone, although I don’t really know who paid for what.

My next reflection is based on a novel I happened to read recently, originally written in 1963, and reissued in 2012. The Expendable Man, by Dorothy B. Hughes, is about many things, but much of the story’s plot revolves around an abortion taking place in Arizona. The attitudes expressed in the book are telling: the procedure, along with the necessity for it, are consistently depicted as things that only happen on the fringes of normal human society. The novel is a noir and, in most respects, is more progressive than not for its time, so I think we can take these attitudes…