Monday
This is an updated and expanded version of an October 3, 2012 and a January 23, 2013 post.
In last week’s post about political attacks on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I added a note about a Texas lawmaker who has compiled a list of 850 books (!) that he wants Texas school libraries to (1) report if they own and (2) justify why. One of those books is John Irving’s Cider House Rules, whose sensitive handling of abortion is what has probably drawn the man’s ire.
Before explaining why banning the novel would be an abomination, here’s the background of Texas’s latest political stunt. According to the Texas Tribune,
A Republican state lawmaker has launched an investigation into Texas school districts over the type of books they have, particularly if they pertain to race or sexuality or “make students feel discomfort.”
State Rep. Matt Krause, in his role as chair of the House Committee on General Investigating, notified the Texas Education Agency that he is “initiating an inquiry into Texas school district content,” according to an Oct. 25, letter obtained by The Texas Tribune.
Here’s what the inquiry involves:
Krause informs districts they must provide the committee with the number of copies they have of each book, on what part of campus those books are located and how much money schools spent on the books, as well as information on any other book that violates House Bill 3979, the so-called “critical race theory law” designed to limit how race-related subjects are taught in public schools.
A number of the books contain information about gender and sexuality and some are about abortion. There are also books about America’s racial history. And then there are the books that I’ve heard of, including
the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s dystopian V For Vendetta, and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Morrison’s novels don’t make the list yet, but since they fit two of Krause’s criteria (they pertain to race and they make students uncomfortable), it may be only a matter of time. Stay tuned.
But back to abortion. Texas’s new law incentivizing people to sue abortion abettors and collect the $10,000 fines levied has essentially ended abortions in the state, taking us back to pre-Roe v Wade times. The Guttmacher Institute reminds us what it was like back then:
Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis, extrapolating from data from North Carolina, concluded that an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967.
One stark indication of the prevalence of illegal abortion was the death toll. In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women—nearly one-fifth (18%) of maternal deaths recorded in that year. The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just the number that were officially reported; the actual number was likely much higher.
Abortion plays a significant role in the Irving novel, which has sympathetic characters on different sides of the debate. On the one hand, there is obstetrician, orphanage director, and illegal abortion doctor Wilbur Larch, who doesn’t originally set out to perform abortions but begins doing so when he sees that women are determined to have them regardless. He knows that he can at least abort their fetuses safely.
Then there is Homer Wells, the orphan he raises to be his right-hand man. Under his tutelage, Homer becomes a superb doctor—better than Larch himself—but he leaves Larch after learning about the abortions. His moment of crisis occurs when, trying to save the full-term fetus of a mother who has been stabbed, he and Larch discover that it has been stabbed as well. Gazing upon the dead body, Homer decides that fetuses at all stages of development are babies. The developmental stages as presented in Gray’s Anatomy suddenly look different to him:
Homer Wells had seen the products of conception in many stages of development: in rather whole form, on occasion, and in such partial development: in rather whole form, on occasion, and in such partial form as to be barely recognizable, too. Why the old black-and-whit drawings should have affected him so strongly, he could not say. In Gray’s there was the profile view of the head of a human embryo, estimated at twenty-seven days old. Not quick, as Dr. Larch would be quick to point out, and not recognizably human, either: what would be the spine was cocked, like a wrist, and where the knuckles of the fist (above the wrist) would be, there was the ill-formed face of a fish (the kind that lives below light, is never caught, could give you nightmares). The undersurface of the head of the embryo gaped like an eel—the eyes were at the sides of the head, as if they could protect the creature from an attack from any direction. In eight weeks, though still not quick, the fetus has a nose and a mouth; it has an expression, thought Homer Wells. And with this discovery—that a fetus, as early as eight weeks, has an expression—Homer Wells felt in the presence of what others call a soul.
This perspective prompts Homer to break with the man he loves, although he doesn’t condemn him:
He wasn’t blaming Dr. Larch, either. Homer felt there was nothing as simple as anyone’s fault involved; it was not Larch’s fault—Larch did what he believed in. If Wilbur Larch was a saint to Nurse Angela and to Nurse Edna, he was both a saint and a father to Homer Wells. Larch knew what he was doing—and for whom. But that quick and not-quick stuff: it didn’t work for Homer Wells. You can call it a fetus, or an embryo, or the products of conception, thought Homer Wells, but whatever you call it, it’s alive. And whatever you do to it, Homer thought—and whatever you call what you do—you’re killing it. He looked at the severed pulmonary artery, which was so perfectly displayed in the open chest of the baby from Three Mile Falls. Let Larch call it whatever he wants, thought Homer Wells. It’s his choice—if it’s a fetus, to him, that’s fine. It’s a baby to me, thought Homer Wells. If Larch has a choice, I have a choice, too.
His choice is to abandon obstetrics, for which he has a genius, and go work on an apple farm. He refuses to yield, even when Larch sends him letters attempting to persuade him to return. Larch writes,
If abortions were legal, you could refuse—in fact, given your beliefs, you should refuse. But as long as they’re against the law, how can you refuse? How can you allow yourself a choice in the matter when there are so many women who haven’t the freedom to make the choice themselves? The women have no choice. I know you know that’s not right, but how can you—you of all people, knowing what you know–HOW CAN YOU FEEL FREE TO CHOOSE NOT TO HELP PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT FREE TO GET OTHER HELP? You have to help them because you know how. Think about who’s going to help them if you refuse.” Wilbur Larch was so tired that if he had allowed himself to go to sleep, the bark would have grown over his eyes.
“Here is the trap you are in,” Dr. Larch wrote to Homer. “And it’s not my trap—I haven’t trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you’re trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims and so are you.”
To graphically make Larch’s point, the book gives us an instance of a woman who is dying after stuffing things up her vagina in a failed self-abortion attempt:
Dr. Larch bent so close to the speculum, he had to hold his breath. The smell of sepsis and putrefaction was strong enough to gag him if he breathed or swallowed, and the familiar, fiery colors of her infection (even clouded by her discharge) were dazzling enough to blind the intrepid or the untrained. But Wilbur Larch started to breathe again, slowly and regularly; it was the only way to keep a steady hand. He just kept looking and marveling at the young woman’s inflamed tissue; it looked hot enough to burn the world. Now do you see, Homer? Larch asked himself. Through the speculum, he felt her heat against his eye.
Despite the letters, however, Homer styas away. This leads to one final letter from Larch, who deliberately overdoses on ether because he knows he is dying from his addiction to it:
1. YOU KNOW EVERYTHING I KNOW, PLUS WHAT YOU’VE TAUGHT YOURSELF. YOU’RE A BETTER DOCTOR THAN I AM—AND YOU KNOW IT.
2. YOU THINK WHAT I DO IS PLAYING GOD. BUT YOU PRESUME YOU KNOW WHAT GOD WANTS. DO YOU THINK THAT’S NOT PLAYING GOD?
3. I AM NOT SORRY—NOT FOR ANYTHING I’VE DONE (ONE ABORTION I DID NOT PERFORM IS THE ONLY ONE I’M SORRY FOR). I’M NOT EVEN SORRY THAT I LOVE YOU.
Homer returns to take up Larch’s practice after he himself performs an abortion on a girl who has been raped by her father. In this case, since his son is in love with the girl, he has direct experience with the conflict between an abstract stance and a particular case. After that, he plays a double game. On the one hand, there is what he tells the board that hires him:
On the matter of abortions, [Homer] surprised the board by the adamant conviction he held: that they should be legalized, and that he intended to work through the proper channels toward that end. However, [Homer] assured them, as long as abortions were illegal, he would rigorously uphold the law.
On the other, he privately performs abortions for women who come to him for help. The book tells us,
Sometimes, when he was especially tired, he dreamed that abortions were legal—that they were safe and available, and therefore he could stop performing them (because someone else would do them)…
Moral rules, about which many can disagree when it comes to abortion, must never jettison individual circumstance altogether or they risk succumbing to an inhuman purity. In such instances, morality becomes more about the ideologue’s desire for certainty than a compass to help us negotiate the shoals of human complexity. Or as Charlotte Bronte says in the epigraph that opens Cider House Rules,
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.