The Epiphany Of A Pro-Choice Feminist - It's Not Just A Clot Of Phlegm After All

Letty Marple was having a great time in this new, liberated, feminist world that her mother had fought so long and so hard for.  Women would never again be men's chattels nor tied to a reproductive destiny.  Thanks to them, the Pill, and a new self-awareness, she would never again have to worry about pregnancy, childbearing, childrearing, or any other noxious notions of old womanhood. 

So she enjoyed her liberty, her sexual freedom, and her exciting independence. Now that the threat of AIDS had passed and oral contraceptives had long since proved their efficacy and worth, she could enjoy as many man as she wanted when she wanted.   The whole algorithm had changed since women's liberation.  A series of sexual partners was no longer promiscuity or sluttishness but a woman's right to choose - a sexual abandon never before thought possible. 

And if in the unlikely chance that pregnancy were to happen, abortions in New York and California were free and on demand.  The states had taken care of women like her even if the Supreme Court had not. 

And so there was Ganesh, a tech engineer from Palo Alto who was still getting over his family's Gujarati brahmin restrictions, was tentative at first but a Khajuraho prince at the end; and Lance, the racecar driver whose reckless abandon led to crashes at Lime Rock and Daytona but made him a choice, delightful lover; and Pierce, the best of them all, an Anglo-Saxon descendant of Northbridge and the Duke of Northumberland, heir to a family fortune and thousands of acres of rich land on the Northern Neck who could make love for hours in some historic tribute to the generations of Cabots who had preceded him. 

There were quickies and cinq-a-sept liaisons in between, inconsequential minor affairs that did indeed seem like a tart's afternoon work but were part of this unrestrained sexual bacchanal that feminism had unleashed. 

Somehow, somewhere she got pregnant - a missed pill, some glitch in the pharma assembly line, a pull-by date overlooked - but was unconcerned.  A quick trip to New York, a show, and back to the Main Line unencumbered, and free and easy once again. 

This first time she thought nothing of getting rid of 'it', this clot of phlegm in her uterus that somehow found its way there without her consent, this foreign thing which had attached itself to her like some leech. She made an appointment, cancelled a lunch, and took the morning train to Penn Station. 

The procedure as advertised was quick and easy, a D&C, dilation and curettage, a simple spreading and scraping and the thing was gone.  She felt nothing before, during, or after. 

When it happened a second time the 'thing', the clot of phlegm, had taken form - an embryo in a disgusting watery broth, a floating remora, an alien foreign blot. 'Get rid of it', she said to the doctor as he was prepping her.  'That's what we're here for', he said. 

The third time her fantasies were completely out of control, ghoulish and inhuman.  She had waited far too long and the end of her trimester was a few days away, so the dilation and curettage would not simply scrape a few cells from her body, nor conveniently get rid of a nasty bit of unwanted matter, but take care of A Big Thing, a real thing. 

She arrived early at the Planned Parenthood clinic on Seventh Avenue, started to open the door, halted, and turned away.  A moment of clarity, a minute of reflection, a flash of the nuns of St. Maurice, dried up, shriveled up old things preaching abstinence and duty who had never known a man or a thing in the uterus but who had had a point - don't get caught between God and Mannon more often than necessary, especially on such an existential issue.  

 

At the time and through her adolescent years Letty dismissed the nuns as irrelevant throwbacks to the Early Church, insignificant, out of touch moral remainders; but the older she got and the more sexual encounters and unwanted pregnancies she had, the more she reverted to her First Communion, Sister Mary Joseph, and the Stations of the Cross. 

'Goddamn it!!' she yelled to no one in particular on 42nd Street as she headed for her train home.  'Goddamn it to hell'.  Caught between a rock and a hard place, Sisyphus' rock and the hard place of irrevocable, petty, unavoidable secular demands. On the train she kept feeling her stomach. 'Was he moving?'; but then disgusted with herself and the pitiful bourgeois sentiments she was feeling, went to the bar car and downed a double of Jack Black. 

When she arrived at Ardmore, she crossed under the tracks to the down platform to New York, looked for the 2:44, hesitated, and headed for the exit.  She stopped at the Blarney Stone on Evans Avenue, a good Irish pub there to take the sting out of the daily commute, downed two doubles of Wild Turkey and took the N4 up Rutherford Street and home. 

 

The next morning first thing she felt her stomach, worried that she had hurt the baby with all her drinking.  She got up, flushed her system, ate a good breakfast, and went back to bed - she and her baby as she remembered it, the dyad the way it was supposed to be, no matter who the husband who now that she had decided to stay pregnant mattered.  Was it Carlo? Ivan? Novak? Peter? Not that it mattered for she had no intention of tracking the father down, and more importantly each of these lovers was worth every bit of their DNA - handsome, successful, talented, intelligent men all - and any of their fatherhood would be a good match. 

So she brought the baby to term, moved out of her studio apartment to a rental farther up the Main Line.  Before too much time passed she negotiated a new position at a higher salary, arranged for daycare, and adjusted to her new life as a single mom. 

The transition was nowhere as traumatic as she had envisaged a few years ago - the dreaded suburbs, unremitting mommyhood, soccer, swimming, and carpooling.  Diversity - that cherished meme of the well-educated urbanite - vanished into thin air, along with the Salvadoran house painters, Ethiopian parking lot attendants and Korean drycleaners.  Now, it was time to get a husband, all the more difficult because she had a toddler in tow, but not impossible given the rate of divorce and pool of available men. 

That too did not take long, canny prospector that she was, and she moved yet again to an even higher spot on the Mainline, kept her highly-paid executive job, had another child, this time desired and fawned over, and lived happily ever after, 

'Not a clot of phlegm after all', she said looking at her two blonde, blue-eyed children,  'Not at all, not whatsoever'.