So I haven't said much about it up until now, but then someone linked to the expansively-titled 2009 Salon article How abortion changed the world, which puts on proud display, flags fluttering, exactly the kind of thinking that could justify a Kermit Gosnell. The article provides a brief biography of 50s-to-70s underground abortionist Harvey Karman (a name which, coincidentally, sounds exactly like something they'd invent for a fictional abortionist based on Gosnell if they ever wanted to do a CSI episode). "Much of Karman’s early history is hazy," the article reports, "but one horrific incident stands out. In 1955, one of the women who sought Karman’s help died of an infection, and he was charged with both murder and abortion. A court rejected his insistence that he was a mere middleman between the woman and a doctor, finding that he himself had tried to induce a miscarriage using a speculum and a nutcracker." (Horrifying indeed, but the article doesn't make it clear enough for my liking whether the term "horrific incident" refers to the woman's death or the two years Karman spent in jail for it. If the latter, I can't help remembering those CNN reports of the Steubenville rape case, which all but wept over the destruction of the rapists' rosy futures while ignoring the victim's plight entirely.)
However, you can't keep a good man down: in two years Karman "emerged unfazed to resume the work that had become, for him, a kind of crusade." He took up a few hobbies such as film studies and working with juvenile delinquents, but "abortion remained his consuming passion." (Most pro-choice people would have to take issue with the wording of this: very few people really like abortion, even those who see it as a necessity. Helping women ought to be a consuming passion; abortion is not an appropriate consuming passion for a sane individual.) Eventually, his passion led him to create the prototype manual vacuum aspiration syringe, and this development is reported on with cavalier good humor and a general spirit of fun. Karman, according to his friend Dr. Malcom Potts,"was a very dexterous person. He used to make model airplanes when he was young. I once locked myself out of my car, and I’d never seen anybody break into a car as quickly as Harvey did. And he’s pretty good at breaking into the uterus." At this point, of course, I'm flickering my eyes to the top of the page to make sure this is really Salon.com and not some sick satire website.
Over and over, the article casually admits that Karman, this man with a consuming passion for finding new ways to break into the uterus, might possibly have been a pretty shady figure, however lovable: "He added a Ph.D. to his name, though his degree came from a dubious Swiss diploma mill." Still, we're assured confidently that though "[w]ithout a doubt, there were abundant reasons to be suspicious of him ... he was no mercenary backroom butcher." I am reminded irresistibly of Mark Twain's In Defense of Harriet Shelley, in which Twain rips mercilessly into a contemporary Shelley biography that justified the poet's wrongdoings in broad terms: "The ordinary forms of speech are absent from it. All the pages, all the paragraphs, walk by sedately, elegantly, not to say mincingly, in their Sunday-best, shiny and sleek, perfumed, and with boutonnieres in their button-hole. It is rare even to find a chance sentence that has forgotten to dress."
How do we know that Karman was "no mercenary backroom butcher"? Because "many recall him as more interested in spreading word of his discovery than in profiting from it, giving free demonstrations to interested doctors and health care workers." In the first place, the possibility that spreading word of his discovery might lead to profit seems not to have occurred to the author of the article. But even if we should take the term "mercenary" out, even if we take it upon ourselves to judge on the word of this unnamed "many" that he was not after money, the rest of the phrase remains. No, he was no coy backroom butcher; he was a theatrical butcher, a stage butcher, eager to bring his brand of butchery to the public eye. Perhaps I'm being too broad in my assessment, but hearing his friend wax eloquent about his prophetic skill with model airplanes and his uncanny knack for breaking into cars has me worried. It's as if Dr. Potts were trying to shill his buddy as a Houdini, proud of his stunts and eager for an audience.
Keep in mind that this article was not written as a profile of Harvey Karman, inventor of the manual vacuum aspiration syringe. The article is called "How abortion changed the world." So why, why does this shadowy figure who happened to invent a popular abortion device but whom even the author of the article admits to have been more than a little sleazy receive top billing? Isn't there someone more admirable, perhaps someone more misguidedly geared toward the general goal of helping woman and less passionate about the act of abortion for its own sake, who might be appropriate? What on earth would make us, assuming we were entirely undecided about the issue, get behind this giddy gamer of a non-doctor who treats the womb like a rubic's cube to be accessed with nutcrackers and syringes? Well, the rest of the article will tell you, when it eventually gets to the subject of woman a good five paragraphs later. "[T]he global commitment to reproductive rights represents an important attempt to unite humankind against an ageless scourge: the wholesale devaluation of women."
I'm going to back up all the way to the beginning of the article and find the only Karman quote it contains, the abortionist's only word on the subject that the columnist finds worthy of note (since inventing the manual vacuum aspiration syringe mostly speaks for itself). "It seemed like every guy who got a girlfriend pregnant, everyone who had remotely heard about me, said, 'This guy knows about abortion,' " he told Ms. Magazine in 1975, referring to his days as a psychology student who, according to the article, "helped a number of desperate coeds find ways to terminate their pregnancy".
It's all about the guys, spiriting their girlfriends past the state lines for personal convenience, trusting their girlfriend's lives to the word of some unqualified student who they heard might know a thing or two. And the unqualified student, I might add, is quite proud of his early savvy on the subject, even in retrospect. I would elaborate on this aura of pride, but I'm remembering those little feet, floating in jars.
Still, though, no commentary on this piece would be complete without a mention of its final line, the last hammer-stroke to the nail that drives it home. It appears below, emphasis mine.
I hate to sound like a stereotype of this movement that I'm a part of which, in a better world, would not even be referred to as a "movement". But as long as Salon is going to write things like that without irony, I am going to reply without irony and with all my heart.
God help us.
The intertwined tyrannies of culture and biology.
The intertwined tyrannies of morality and reality.
The intertwined tyrannies of humanity and femininity.
The intertwined tyrannies of the soul and the body.
When a black freethinking man is murdered, it's not a crime against black freethinking men; it's a crime against humanity. When a white Jewish woman is murdered, it's not a crime against white Jewish women; it's a crime against humanity. When a baby, skin unseen, gender unknown, religion uncomprehended, is destroyed in the womb before its birth or snipped with a scissors outside the womb after its birth, it is not a crime against babies or fetuses or even women. It is a crime against humanity itself.
By trying to create a world where, contrary to nature, sex does not get a woman pregnant, we're trying to completely transcend humanity, like those people who say, "Let us build a tower that will go all the way to Heaven." Only at the moment we're striving, with all the scientific and mechanical complexity we're capable of, for something that's already been invented, for something so clever and compartmentalized that Karman could only have dreamed of inventing it, for something that can be accomplished with a swift turn of the knife: suicide, a neat device to dispose of the soul by throwing it away and the body by landing it underground. Then, free forever from the intertwined tyrannies of culture and biology, we'll be able to reap what remains.
The answer to that is "precious little".
Oh, Allie. This is so true. All of it. You get your points across so eloquently, and so charitably. Every single undecided person needs to read this post.
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