GIVE ME A BREAK
Mum, what's an abortion? Like a lot of important questions, this one broadsides you when you least expect it. Do you stick with the medical facts? Share the devastating emotions involved? You have to answer, because if you don't, they'll look it up on the internet anyway.
There was a time when the female intelligentsia regarded anyone who wasn't pro-choice as thick. In Ireland, we love our scapegoats. At the moment, the scapegoats are alcohol, drugs and the demise of community spirit. (Hearing middle-aged people on weekend chat radio analysing the social ills of "young people" drives me nuts.) But for decades, the scapegoats were "unwed mothers" (a horrible phrase to write, much less say, so I use quotation marks). Young single women pushing baby buggies around town were seen as irresponsible spongers.
And if any middle-class son or daughter parented a child out of wedlock, and with the support of the grandparents, no less, sharp tongues wagged and spat. How could educated parents allow their children to ruin their lives like that? There were middle-class intelligent renegades, of course, who believed in life, but for most "intelligent" people "illegitimacy" was for the working class.
But now, I notice, middle-class parents have come round 180 degrees. When we see unmarried young women and men in their early 20s having babies without even necessarily living together, we rejoice. We admire the grandparents for being so life-affirming and we envy them the gorgeous baby they have to dandle on their knees. Maybe it's a post-9/11 thing, this appreciation of life. Maybe it has to do with no longer being in thrall to a male-dominated Catholicism that made many people feel compelled to rebel. The desire we have to see our children having babies, instead of aborting them for the good of their careers, might even have something to do with the epidemic of infertility among thirtysomethings, so that parents in their late 50s and 60s, who themselves had babies late in life, wonder if they will ever have the joy of being grandparents.
Female friends of my age have told me how thrilled they'd be if their early twentysomething daughters in steady relationships had babies. Women in their 20s, in committed but unmarried relationships, have told me how their own mothers - going against the conventional wisdom that women should have careers and houses before they procreate at 35 - have inquired hopefully whether they've considered having a baby yet.
I suppose all of this began to crystallise for me when I finally got around to seeing the film Juno, which has a 15 cert, although I think it should be shown to all 12- and 13-year-old first years (with their parents' permission). It's the most effective sex-education film I've ever seen.
Juno encapsulates our about-turn on what we used to call "unwanted pregnancy" (another bad phrase, because unless it was rape, you wanted the sex, and if you weren't using contraception, you were acting like you wanted the baby). It's an Oscar-winning, pro-life, pro-contraception, pro-adoption, pro-adoptive single motherhood, sex-education script written by a former erotic dancer. Who'd have thought we'd see the day? The film exposes our judgmental disapproval of fertility unless it's conducted by the perfect rich, middle-class heterosexual couple in the perfect house. It tells young women that getting pregnant when you don't want to is going to bring you agony, but that you'll survive. It exposes the emotional violence of a particular type of abortion clinic that degrades women. It even celebrates the lone lunatic outside the clinic who reminds women going in that their unborn foetuses "have fingernails". In essence, it presents all our confusion around young people's attempts to be sexual in a highly sexualised world that separates heterosexual sex from procreation and, just as worryingly, from intimacy.
Around the time I saw Juno, the desk fairy placed Cutting Up Playgirl, a literary autobiography about sex, by Carrie Jones, on my keyboard. Oxford-educated intellectual Jones has never enjoyed sex with men past the first flush of novelty because she is afraid of intimacy. In her wildest dreams, she is erotic, masochistic, adventurous; in real life, she feels "frigid" (another horrendous word). After sex with 23 men over a lifetime, this fortysomething can't have sex with her husband now that she has two kids. She has discovered that the warped view of women's sexuality presented by pornography has infiltrated her brain, making her incapable of normal, sometimes dull, married sex.
I wonder how many other women, like Juno and like Jones, suffer from this distance we have made between sex and intimacy and procreation, as though they are completely different things to be compartmentalised in different areas of body and mind. Mothers can't be sexy. Sex can't be emotional. Procreation isn't sexual.
Mum, what's an abortion? I hope you'll never have to have one. I don't want you to have to make that choice. All sex can lead to a baby, whether you're using contraception or not. Don't let anyone degrade you. Be true to yourself. Whatever you decide, I'll be there for you. What more can I say?
