Seeing the little ghost

This year is the 40th anniversary of the publication of what seems to me the best column ever written about abortion. Strikingly, a writer supporting abortion penned it, and a pro-abortion newspaper, The New York Times, printed it in 1976.

The author, Linda Bird Francke, originally published it under the pseudonym Jane Doe, but then acknowledged it in a book she wrote, The Ambivalence of Abortion. The column described her feelings as she awaited the imminent operation: “I began to panic. Suddenly the rhetoric, the abortion marches I’d walked in, the telegrams sent to Albany to counteract the Friends of the Fetus, the Zero Population Growth buttons I’d worn, peeled away, and I was all alone with my microscopic baby. There were just the two of us there, and soon, because it was more convenient for me and my husband, there would be one again.”

Francke asked herself how she could “so arbitrarily decide that this life shouldn’t be? ‘It’s not a life,’ my husband had argued, more to convince himself than me. ‘It’s a bunch of cells smaller than my fingernail.’ But any woman who has had children knows that certain feeling in her taut, swollen breasts, and that slight but constant ache in her uterus that signals the arrival of a life. Though I would march myself into blisters for a woman’s right to exercise the option of motherhood, I discovered there in the waiting room that I was not the modern woman I thought I was.”

The story ends poignantly: “It certainly does make more sense not to be having a baby right now—we say that to each other all the time. But I have this ghost now. A very little ghost that only appears when I’m seeing something beautiful, like the full moon on the ocean last weekend. And the baby waves at me. And I wave back at the baby. ‘Of course, we have room,’ I cry to the ghost. ‘Of course we do.’”

A university has evidently used Francke’s piece and another by Naomi Wolf in a course: You can read the two articles here. Wolf, also supporting the abortion lobby, argued for “a radical shift in the pro-choice movement’s rhetoric and consciousness about abortion” so as to admit “that the death of a fetus is a real death.”

One of our World Journalism Institute mid-career graduates, Susan Richter, called Linda Bird Francke and requested an interview, but the author replied, “I’m not up on the issue anymore. You should interview someone more contemporary.” Dr. Richter, a psychiatrist, later told me, “I detected a sense of ambivalence and defensiveness in her. I wish I could tell this thinking, articulate woman that trying to bury old wounds doesn’t work. Post-abortive women have taught me that time doesn’t heal old wounds. God does.”

For coverage of the Jan. 22 March for Life, go to wng.org/topic/abortion