Without Malice
Cynthia Gorney's new history
of the conflict over abortion could serve as an advertisement for an imperiled
form of journalism: the long, meticulously researched narrative of ideas in
which unglamorous noncelebrities drive the action. If that sounds off-puttingly
worthy even to devotees of serious nonfiction, then too bad for us. Some of the
best journalism of the last quarter-century or so belongs to the same
genre--Jane Kramer's and John McPhee's and William Finnegan's work for The
New Yorker and nearly all the late Anthony Lukas' writing. It is getting
harder to do for the very reasons it is worth doing: It can require years of
reporting, which doesn't sit well with the keepers of our buzz-driven
publishing culture. It demands of its practitioners a quality of
listening--even, alert, self-effacing--that seems increasingly rare in this
first-person age. It doesn't sell a whole lot of ad space.
None of
this is to say that narrative nonfiction is some sort of selfless or inherently
democratic form. It's not oral history; the author is there on every page, as
enticed by vanity as any journalist is--maybe more so, because his is the kind
of journalism that aspires most nakedly to the status of literature. But at
least these writers confer a kind of dignity on their subjects, if only by
attending so closely to people's own explanations of what they believe. And
when it comes to showing us the means by which everyday people are taken up by
history, how they shape it and are in turn shaped by it, there is no genre more
accommodating.
In this tradition and with scrupulous fairness, Articles
of Faith brings to life the arguments and experiences of sympathetic
characters on opposite sides of a great moral divide. Gorney's setting is
Missouri, which, as a microcosm for the history of abortion and the opposition
to it over the last three decades, is an arbitrary choice; she seems to have
chosen it mainly because her editors at the Washington Post sent her
there in the late 1980s. In the end, though, the conceit works--partly because
St. Louis was the site of the first sit-ins at abortion clinics; partly because
it was a Missouri law restricting access to abortion that inspired one of the
Supreme Court's most important post- Roe cases, William L. Webster vs.
Reproductive Health Services ; partly because we are primed to think of
almost any Midwestern state as "typical" in a way that New York or California
is not; and mostly because Gorney found two such fundamentally appealing
characters there.
On one
side is Judith Widdicombe, an obstetrical nurse who volunteers at a suicide
hotline and can't help noticing how many of the women calling in are
pregnant--and desperate about it. This is the late 1960s, abortion is illegal
and dangerous, and at the hospitals where Widdicombe works she has seen women
bleeding and blue-white with shock in the aftermath of botched
abortions--terrified women, dying women. And so Widdicombe, "a big, smart,
opinionated woman" with two young sons, a sweet, shy husband who runs a
newspaper delivery route, and a modest little pea green house in a nice
neighborhood, begins, systematically, to break the law. It is Widdicombe who
eventually runs the abortion underground in pre- Roe Missouri, telling
women where they can find somebody relatively clean and relatively safe to
terminate their pregnancies and sometimes smuggling them into her own spare
bedroom afterward to suffer the aftereffects of the operations in
clenched-teeth pain. And it is Widdicombe who, in the wake of Roe vs.
Wade , opens the first abortion clinic in the state, the Reproductive Health
Services of Webster fame. "This was women's business," is how Gorney
describes Widdicombe's thinking about what she does. "And, if you were a nurse
who took care of women--for that was how Judy thought of her work in labor and
delivery, the care of women--you did what they needed you to do, you helped
them have the baby or not have the baby, they came to you in crisis, and you
eased them to the next place. Either way, it was a kind of delivery."
On the other side is Samuel Lee, a would-be
seminarian with a ragged beard and the look of "an Old Testament prophet or a
Russian monk." Lee is a pacifist and an intellectually serious one. In 1978,
inspired by the civil-rights movement and his reading of Gandhi, Lee dreams up
and then organizes the first sit-ins at an abortion clinic, and so helps to
steer the anti-abortion movement from its polite letter-writing phase to its
angry street-theater phase. Lee is convinced that no one has proposed a more
logical time for "the moment of an individual person's beginning" than the
joining of egg and sperm for the simple reason that there is no more logical
time. He compares his moral duty to rail against abortion to his moral duty to
intervene if he saw a man on the street beating his child with a club. He is a
purist but not a fanatic.
One
virtue of having chosen these particular characters--a gruff, empathetic nurse
instead of a polished, pro-choice lobbyist; a thoughtful, vaguely leftish
Catholic as opposed to a fire-breathing evangelic--is that we can live with
them for 500 pages or so. But, implicitly, the choice serves a more didactic
purpose as well. Articles of Faith makes it abundantly clear that even
the most decent people both sides have to offer--people such as Widdicombe and
Lee who will occasionally talk to each other instead of merely hurling
epithets--can find no real common ground on abortion. Whatever compromise
Americans come to on abortion won't be the product of a warm and fuzzy dialogue
between pro-choice and pro-life activists. (It is more likely to emerge out of
what polls show most nonactivists on the issue believe, namely, that abortion
should be, as the slogan goes, "safe, legal, and rare." Call it muddled or call
it nuanced, but most Americans seem to want to preserve the right to abortion,
pretty much unrestricted, in the first three months, and to allow states to
limit it sharply thereafter. They want abortion to be legal, but they think too
many people seek it out for the wrong reasons.) As Gorney notes, the
well-meaning organization known as Common Ground Network for Life and Choice, a
national project that brings pro-choice and pro-life activists together in
discussion circles and makes mediators available to help resolve their
differences, has succeeded mainly in inflaming partisans on both sides while
producing "extremely modest tangible results."
The other advantage of this sort of textured narrative is
that it inevitably turns up bits of the past that more ideological accounts
leave out. Gorney gives us a fascinating glimpse, for example, of the
involvement of the clergy in helping women obtain illegal abortions in the late
'60s. Widdicombe herself worked for something called the Clergy Referral
Service, a network of some 1,000 Protestant ministers across the country who
decided it was their pastoral duty to shepherd unhappily pregnant women to
underground doctors willing to perform abortions. (They took their lead from
the Rev. Howard Moody, a liberal and outspoken Baptist who occupied the pulpit
at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village.) This is the kind of history
that pro-lifers don't care to discuss, because it suggests the existence of a
moral, as well as a political, dimension to abortion rights. The idea that some
men of God might regard their commitment to a woman housing a fetus as more
important than their commitment to the fetus itself is anathema to people like
Lee. And pro-choicers are likely to ignore the abortion-abetting ministers
because their own history of the movement puts feminist activists more or less
alone on center stage.
There are drawbacks to any
journalistic genre that requires the writer to stick to one or two main story
lines. (Gorney introduces us to hundreds of other activists, but it is
Widdicombe and Lee who propel the narrative.) Since Widdicombe is apparently so
much less given to moral casuistry than Lee, Gorney sometimes risks leaving us
with a vague impression of abortion-rights activists as tough pragmatists at a
loss for loftier arguments, and anti-abortion activists as philosophers with a
common touch. Lee, whose dedication to both nonviolence and Catholicism soon
marginalized him in a movement that had become increasingly dominated by
militants and evangelical Christians, is perhaps even less representative than
Widdicombe. (For a thorough account of the anti-abortion movement's turn to the
right and the new militancy of organizations such as Operation Rescue, readers
can refer to the recently published Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion
War , by journalists James Risen and Judy Thomas.) Moreover, Gorney ends her
book in 1989, with the Supreme Court ruling in Webster . This is hard to
justify since the decision marked neither the culmination of the court's
thinking on abortion (the Casey ruling in 1992 was at least as
influential) nor an obvious turning point in the abortion wars. It caps her
story simply because it caps Widdicombe's battle with Lee.
Gorney will probably be
praised for having drawn unusually nuanced portraits of abortion activists on
both sides--humanizing them and in so doing narrowing the gap between them. But
her real accomplishment is something like the opposite. The more
compassionately and conscientiously she reconstructs Lee's views and
Widdicombe's views, the more irresolvable their differences seem. It may be
that only this sort of journalism, with its sympathetic attention to the
intricacies of its characters' thoughts, could do justice to these
differences.
