Author’s Note: A book’s first purpose is to lead its writer into a place that is much more emotionally complicated, much more fraught, more entangled, more layered, more confusing than she had expected. It should always end with far more questions than answers. That is how she knows she is doing it right.
A difficulty particular to this book, is that we are living in an abortion landscape that is changing at lightning speed, and will continue to, even though in order for the book to come out on schedule, I have to stop writing today. I console myself with the knowledge that the freedom to control what happens to one’s own body is not only the foundation for gender equality, it is the foundation upon which other human rights are built. Regardless of future Supreme Court decisions, whatever happens from state to state, somewhere in this country, right now, someone is being forced into motherhood and marriage before their fifteenth birthday, someone seeking contraception is being told she needs to get her husband’s consent, someone is forcing his wife to have sex in a state where marital rape is not illegal, someone is being denied gender affirming surgery, someone is punished for trying to be who they are, and therefore bodily autonomy is always a thing worth talking about.
So here is a book of facts and impressions in and around the subject of abortion. I went places here I did not anticipate going. And wound up somewhere I had not expected to get.
Gallop
There are so many reasons I didn’t want children it seems impossible I might get them all down on paper, even in the space of a book. One of those reasons is that having me made my mother so desperately sad. Another of those reasons is that I spent the first seventeen years of my life frightened to the point of paralysis by my father.
Here are some others:
I have known from a very young age that there are far too many people on the earth and we are very rapidly running out of resources. My husband, the soil scientist, tells me that when a species is left to multiply unchecked it eventually spoils its nest. By virtue of my privilege, born white into the American middle class, I have had access to contraception unavailable to many women around the world, and have therefore believed, since I call myself an environmentalist, I should avail myself of it. And while I do understand that population-concerned efforts have historically included some horrific racist shit, I am personally willing to do my part not to bring another white person into the world.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
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I have said often that if I could trade my own life to bring back all the extinct whales, dolphins and porpoises, to bring back the 2.9 billion birds we have lost since 1970, to put meat back on the bones of the still living polar bears, and give them a chance to avoid extinction, and the narwhal, and the Mexican grey wolf, and the California bears, I would do it in a heartbeat. Easy to say, without a gun to my head, but I know what I know. I definitely would not add to the problem of my resource consumption by creating another consumer. If I had ever been hell bent on motherhood, I would have chosen to adopt.
I like animals more than people, puppies more than babies, foals more than babies, even kittens more than babies, and I’m honestly not all that crazy about cats. I wrote one time in an article that if I could give birth to and raise a leopard cub, for example, that would be the sort of motherhood I might find irresistible, and is a thing I might consider even now.
I love my life the way it is, and have loved it just as fiercely since the day I set myself free from my father’s house. It is perhaps because of that ecstatic sense of freedom, that I have never believed the people who told me I needed a child to feel fulfilled. Writing books and teaching has fulfilled me. Mentoring the undergraduate and graduate students who fill my classes has fulfilled me. I have even mothered some of them, in my own slant way, and that too has fulfilled me. I had a great deal of energy for that latter-day mothering, because I hadn’t spent that energy on children of my own.
I was a travel writer for decades—occasionally I still am—and as a result I have gotten to visit more than 80 countries. I know how to navigate by the stars, how to mush a team of dogs, how to ask an Icelandic mare to move out in a tölt as opposed to a trot or a flying pace, which I also know how to her ask for, how to steer a double kayak through a series of sea caves with tiny openings called the nostrils, how to carve giant slalom turns down the side of a mountain in fluffy foot-deep powder, and each of these things have fulfilled me too.
And let’s say those other people are right, and having a baby would have fulfilled me more than any of these things by so much it would blow my mind and set my hair on fire. Well then, I would say it is truly okay that I have missed out on it. I would say my mother drank herself to death because of the unrelenting unhappiness bringing me into the world brought her. I would say, yes but have you ever galloped along a wild glacial river bank on a very fast and trustworthy horse?
Welcome to Colorado
On November 27, 2015, Robert Dear opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon outside a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, killing a police officer and two civilians and injuring nine others. The three people Dear murdered that day were Ke’Arre M. Stewart, 29, who ran back to the clinic to warn others after being shot, Jennifer Markovsky, 35, who was accompanying a friend to the clinic, and Garrett Swasey, 44, a police officer and first responder to the shooting.
“Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom”
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Eyewitnesses in the parking lot described Dear as wearing a “cold stone face” as he began firing and pursued a crawling man through the parking lot and into the clinic. After a standoff that lasted five hours, SWAT teams crashed armored vehicles into the lobby and Dear surrendered. After the arrest, multiple propane tanks were found near Dear’s car leading police to believe he had planned to fire on them and trigger an explosion.
At his trial, Dear interrupted the proceedings almost constantly, ranting against Planned Parenthood and abortion, calling himself a “warrior for the babies,” until the judge ruled him incompetent to stand trial and confined him, indefinitely, to a mental hospital. After the trial one of his ex-wives said, “He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic, but does not follow the Bible in his actions. He always said that as long as he believes he will be saved, he can do whatever he pleases.”
Robert Dear lived in Hartsel, Colorado, a town even smaller than my rural Colorado town—not really a town at all, but more of a cluster of buildings—a place I happen to drive through on my way between the Front Range and the ranch on a semi-regular basis. Now the town is a landmark, as are the Fuck Joe Biden and Fuck You For Voting For Him flags on a nearby homestead. As were the ten billboards spread all over Colorado Springs during the two years before Dear opened fire, that claimed, entirely falsely, that “Obama Care funds abortion.” As is the billboard that now greets drivers coming in from Utah, which says “Welcome to Colorado, where you can get a safe, legal, abortion.”
Angry Woman
When this book comes out, I will be called an angry woman, the one thing, against all reason, women in this country are least allowed to be. It is hard to imagine how any thinking woman who witnesses the deep hypocrisy of the policies that affect half the citizenry and their dependents could possibly be anything but. “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters,” Adrienne Rich said, in one of the more formative poems of my life.
What I actually am, much more than angry, is confused and heartbroken. That women’s bodies are still owned by rich men, that the Earth is dying at our hands and we are doing nothing to help her, and many of those who wish not to contribute to the teeming masses who are consuming every last resource at lightning speed will now be forced, by those same rich men, to give birth to more consumers.
I am also heartbroken not to be valued as a contributing citizen, as a deep and complex thinker, as someone who might contribute in a meaningful way to society other than by overpopulating the already overpopulated. I am heartbroken that I will not, for whatever time I have left, trust the highest court in this land to act in my best interest, to act in any of our best interests, to act in the best interest of the Earth.
I am heartbroken that I live in a country where many in leadership are bought by corporate interests. I am heartbroken that while the climate is collapsing all around us, we are still arguing about whether people are allowed to be who they are and love who they love. If we could agree to cease, for a year or two, arguing about whether children in Florida can know that slavery existed or whether or not they can check Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem out of the library, we might get to work solving real problems like divesting ourselves of fossil fuels.
I am heartbroken for the pregnant girls and women who will kill themselves because they can’t find enough hope or enough money or someone who will risk being sued to drive them across a state line. For the families for whom one more mouth to feed sends them over the edge into poverty, into divorce, into chaos.
I am heartbroken that as a population we have turned a blind eye to the wisdom and generosity and respect and cooperative spirit the people who tended our lands before colonization offered to show us, that as settlers we became slaves to abstractions like money and progress and power, when we ought to have revered mountain and forest, ocean, and sky.
Grab Bag Candy Game
I imagine most of you, if you have picked up this book, have probably had an abortion. And if you did, it is more than likely you were screamed at as you walked in and out of the clinic. Maybe the clinic sent you an email warning you of this in advance. Probably you were called a murderer. Probably they put signs right in your face with unrecognizable piles of bloody pulp on them. Probably they screamed that you were going to hell.
Those people have screamed at me, one time when I was indeed going to have an abortion, but most times I was just going in for my yearly pap smear, for my regular cancer screenings, for all the stuff a woman has to do if she wants to stay alive. Imagine the courage of the people who work, year after year inside those clinics. How often their nightmares involve a Robert Dear.
Outside my window tonight, lightning is flashing, rain is pounding the metal roof, and when I wake up tomorrow the first snow of the year will grace the top of Red Mountain. For the first summer in more than a decade, because of an unusually wet spring, no fires threatened the ranch this summer, and this storm will certainly seal the deal. We had a variety and abundance of wildflowers (flax, bluebells, lupine, penstemon, lupine, fleabane, columbine and every color of paintbrush) in the high county that we hadn’t seen in decades, and the tiny seasonal creek the dogs like to drink out of when we go for our pasture walk thinned in late summer but for the first time in years, it never failed. I take the time and space to write all of this because it proves to me, and maybe also to you, that the bad thing doesn’t always have to happen. What this reminds me is that we are not dead in the water, until we decide we are.
My most fervent hope is that by compiling this information and telling you as much truth as I know about myself with all my contradictions intact, I might free you from your shame, your fear, your self-imposed bondage. I might help you to show yourself mercy. I might help you feel empowered, and free.
Pam Houston is the author of the memoir “Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country,” “Cowboys Are My Weakness” and “Air Mail.” Houston teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing MFA program, is a Professor of English at the University of California-Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. She lives in Colorado at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
