Thinking about my mother and grandmother, and the choices we’ve lost with Roe overturned
The day before Roe v. Wade was overturned, I opened the door to a funeral home in Missouri and locked eyes with the man who molested me when I was a teenager. He was holding court by the guest book, so I slipped around back and spent the next hour, until he left, hugging and comforting friends, skirting the funeral parlor like an animal avoiding a known predator.
In recent days, a ten year-old rape victim in Ohio had to be sent out-of-state for an abortion because Ohio law would force her to give birth. Is this what parents dream of for their daughters? In Mississippi, House Speaker Philip Gunn declared that abortion is unacceptable, even if the victim is 12 and impregnated by her father or uncle, citing his “personal beliefs.”
Conservatives often tout “personal beliefs” when imposing their laws on girls and women, which now include policing private healthcare and charging us and our doctors with crimes. This bears a striking resemblance to the Taliban, under whom “restrictions on behavior, dress and movement were enforced by the morality police officers who drove around in pickup trucks, publicly humiliating and whipping women who did not adhere to their rules.”
I was seven when Roe v. Wade became law, which means I grew up always knowing I could make my own reproductive choices which, thank God, I never needed to make. I was lucky. But thanks to Roe, I took for granted a lifetime of freedoms and choices that my grandmother and mother never had.
Grandma Ann had nine children. Early in her marriage, she was in a bad car crash with her girlfriends in which her teeth were shoved up into her face and her bottom lip ripped off to below her chin. Grandpa Red would not allow a plastic surgeon to touch her, saying maybe this, by God, would keep her from running around. Sometimes, when he was drunk, he held her at gunpoint. One of her babies was born way too early, with severe brain damage, after he threw her down the stairs.
He kept her pregnant so she could not leave.
My mother “had to get married” twice. Two months before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, she gave birth to her third child. She was 27.
I was the oldest, and I remember waking at night to the sounds of her and my stepfather fighting. I would sneak out of bed and watch them throw glasses, toys, ash trays, and lamps at each other, the scratchy sound of my mother’s new, Charlie Rich record on the turntable:
And when we get behind closed doors
Then she lets her hair hang down
And she makes me glad that I’m a man
Oh no one knows what goes on behind closed doors.
My young mother, making minimum wage at the Hosiery Mill, would soon be divorced with three kids. She asked Grandpa Red if they could help. No, he said. She should have thought of this before getting herself knocked up. She was stuck. How would she afford childcare, rent, food, diapers, clothes? Who would take care of us when she worked nights and weekends?
In the end, my mother kept me—I was almost nine and could stay home nights alone, scary as that was—while making the devastating choice to sign over custody of her first grader and her baby to their father. The baby would soon call another woman “mommy.”
For years, I would find my mother alone in the kitchen, lights off, smoking a cigarette, quietly sobbing.
I think about my mother every time I hear pro-life advocates ignorantly pontificate about how simple all of this is. Just carry the fetus to term, they say, someone out there desperately wants a baby. These people seem to believe giving your baby away is as easy as giving your favorite sweater to a stranger because they’re cold.
Roe v. Wade was never just about abortion, no matter how much self-serving, Talibanistic politicians like Mississippi’s Phillip Gunn—glad to be a man, like those Charlie Rich lyrics—say it was. Roe gave us choices and control over our lives, our futures. Roe meant men like my abuser did not hold all the power to ruin a girl’s life.
The day after the funeral, I drove the five hours home to Lawrenceburg, listening to radio pundits break down the end of Roe v. Wade. I thought about my grandmother, with her facial scars and nine children, and about my mother, stuck, with no choice but to give away her children.
Parents, are these the lives you dream of for your daughters?
Because there will again be hundreds of thousands of girls and women relegated to living like my mother and my grandmother. Your daughter may be one of them. And for this I feel a burning, pounding, overwhelming sense of rage.
Teri Carter is a writer in Anderson County .
