Our Gang

A little over 40 years ago Phillip Roth published his novel "Our Gang".  It was written during the dark days of the Vietnam War and in the period when Richard Nixon, wound tight as a drum head, came unhinged.

I lost my copy several years ago in a garage sale and am not inclined to retrieve one from Amazon.  If memory serves me, one chapter of the book dealt with giving the right to vote to the unborn.  This potential untapped voter pool, if gotten to early (and this was early) could just push Trick E. Dixon (Roth's pseudo for Nixon) to an even greater victory.  Some time was devoted as to how to garner the votes necessary to make it law.   That was the time, even tongue in cheek, that the thought of the government's involvement in the unborn came into my brain. It was all fanciful but part of the subplot was to keep unborns alive so they could vote properly.

Nine years before, there was a big brouhaha about a woman name Sherri Finkbine who took a drug called Thalidomide which wasn't properly tested and approved and was found to have caused severe deformities in children when their mothers took it while pregnant. Ms. Finkbine couldn't obtain an abortion in her home state of Arizona without fear of prosecution and finally found her way to Sweden for the procedure. I was in 8th or 9th grade when this story came out and it was forbidden to be discussed in our school by a zealous board of education who also swooped in and picked up the Life Magazine copy that published the story. She lost her job and was smeared from coast to coast as a wanton woman with no moral compass.

I watched the debate last night and heard Mr. Ryan's explanation that matters dealing with abortion and the fetus generally as well as woman's reproductive rights in particular were best solved by legislation and law rather than through the "unelected courts".  In a broad sense we have flip-flopped as a nation in the last half century and the focal point was probably Roe v. Wade.  What drove our consciousness back then was the abortion issues in Finkbine and as satirized in the Roth book came about because of legislation and no final court word on the subject that was found later in Roe.  The courts ruled because the laws were such a mess and a hodgepodge.

Now Mr. Ryan wants to lead us bravely back to the days of yesteryear.  The good old days were not so good.  One of my HS friends, a good catholic girl from one of the local catholic high schools who served with me on the county youth council, and simply got pregnant, ran away to get an abortion, and never came back alive.  Kathy was a good person but she died and it was a tragedy. Some of us who knew her fairly well knew what was up,  but at her wake and funeral her parents lied to everyone that she died of an infection (true) of unknown origin and nothing more was explained.  It couldn't have been. She had also broken the law in seeking an abortion and her parents were accomplices as was the doctor who signed the death certificate.

Lawmakers who passed the laws that brought her to death's door didn't mean to do it of course. It was simply an unintended consequence of laws passed by men who were acting on what they thought was a woman's "best interest".  The courts eventually rescued women from the hands of male led legislation and with the uptick in the woman's movements  a core observation was that women were laboring under laws enacted mainly by men, most all of whom were well meaning, but were in the end, NOT women and not within the female mind; the mind of the body that carries a child. 

We watched a well meaning and probably very nice fellow last night state his wish to take reproductive rights out of the judiciary and back in the hands of elected lawmakers.  It is an interesting gambit.  I liked the 50's and 60's of my youth a lot.  I didn't like that part of it.  Not losing a friend that way.  This is one clock I'd rather not turn back.