A Book of American Martyrs(56)
Because if there is no baby he will not know. Then he might love me again some other time but if this is known, he will never love me again.
Because we might become engaged. If this goes away.
Because nobody will love me again and I would not blame them.
Because everyone who knows will speak of me in scorn and disgust. Because they will say of me, she has broken her parents’ hearts she is a whore.
Because God will understand. It is just this one time.
HE’D SAVED LIVES. Lives of girls and women.
Girls who’d tried to abort themselves out of shame. Girls who’d allowed pregnancies to go full term seeming not to know that they were pregnant and in the very midst of labor screaming in denial. Pregnant women who’d avoided seeing a doctor though knowing, or guessing, that the fetus had died and that it was death they carried in the womb and not life. Girls who hid their pregnancies inside their clothes, tight-corseted. And their milk-fat breasts flattened against their chests. You would think it was 1955, or 1935. You would not think such terrible things happened any longer.
Out of ignorance? Religious intolerance?
Out of a wish to be good. And to appear good.
Some of them were Pentecostals. There’d been two or three Amish, in rural western Michigan. A scattering of Catholics in the Detroit area.
Some of the very young girls had been made pregnant by—stepfathers, or fathers? Uncles? Older brothers, cousins? They were too terrified to speak. They “did not know.” They “did not remember.” In the Crisis Pregnancy Center at Port Huron just before closing there came a distraught mother with her thirteen-year-old daughter who was three months pregnant showing a round hard little belly straining against her white cotton underpants. Scarcely did the mother listen as he’d tried to explain This is statutory rape at least, your daughter is too young to consent to a sexual act and the mother winced and blushed hearing such frank vulgar speech in the doctor’s mouth and the girl stared downward at the tile floor numbed and mute, stricken paralyzed by shame, pale skin, pale eyebrows and lashes, lank white-blond hair and eyes like an albino’s so he wondered if she might be legally blind, her eyes didn’t seem to focus upon him even when he addressed her in his kindly gentle fatherly voice. And he thought Is she mentally impaired? In frustration and fury thinking Dear God! Neither has any idea what has happened to her.
In their religion (so far as he understood their religion) it did not matter if a pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, abortion was against God’s law. Abortion was a sin and a crime and a disgrace for it was the “slaughter of innocents.” You would not say the word aloud—“Abortion.” The mother had not once uttered this word to Dr. Voorhees in her rapid whispered pleading for help.
He repeated what he’d said. And repeated what he’d said. For much of what he said to such distraught persons had to be said, repeated, numerous times. A dozen times. Statutory rape. Too young to consent. Must report. State law. Serious crime. This child has been a victim. And the mother cried No! Doctor please no it will be the end of our family.
She was begging for the pregnancy to be “fixed.” She would bring the girl to the clinic in the night. She would pay what she had—320 dollars, she’d saved.
And he felt such sorrow, he had to tell her No. Not without reporting this rape.
And the woman was furious finally. The woman was furious at him.
You will suffer in Hell, Doctor! Jesus hates you.
And she took the girl away, and he never saw them again.
ANOTHER HE WOULD NOT FORGET. N—— C—— gave her age as thirty-seven and begged him No one must know.
Waiting for the doctor in the parking lot behind the clinic (in Saginaw) at dusk shivering and frightened telling him in a quavering voice that she was pregnant for the fifth time, she had four young children at home, she could not tell her husband who would want her to have the baby, it was the belief of their church that babies are from God, each baby is blessed by God, wept and pleaded with the doctor who was able to convince her to return to the clinic during daytime hours; and she did return, and signed in, and was interviewed, and examined by one of the young doctors, who estimated that she was seven weeks pregnant; she begged for the pregnancy to be “fixed”—and so she was given an appointment (with Dr. Voorhees: she had insisted upon him) for a surgical abortion, on a particular date, at a particular time, very elaborately the date and time had to be worked out for the woman seemed to have virtually no freedom, no time for herself; every minute of every hour of every day appeared to be prescribed; except on this particular day there might be the excuse that the woman was driving to Traverse City to visit an elderly relative in a nursing home. And so after several phone calls and two postponements (one of them within a few hours of the procedure) the surgical abortion was arranged for the latest possible hour of the day, that would allow the patient to recover from the ordeal of the procedure. And the woman came to the clinic white-faced but determined to go through with the procedure which took, including presurgical prep, hardly an hour. And afterward in the recovery room she was reported to have lain quietly enough, though praying in an undertone, and distracted when asked questions by a nurse. But she’d been all right. She had insisted she was all right. And then, after about ninety minutes, she’d gone away.
You would think, that was the end of it. But you’d be wrong.