What Abortion Looks Like: Then, Now, and Soon
Also known as, Bildungsroman Blitz: Feel Bad Edition
The United States Supreme Court and its overturning of Roe v. Wade is bad, to make an understatement of the year. Reproductive justice and access to abortion is good, to make the second understatement of the year. If you disagree with either of these premises, feel free to click away now.
It has been a few months since that initial howl of despair, and the way I decided to cope—shocking no one—was to write about two plays that use the medium of theatre to depict medication abortion. I was deluded enough to think I could publish something quickly in response to the chaos, to think that exploring this subject would not send me down several rabbit holes. But to talk about these plays is to talk about the history of abortion, the history of pop culture’s representations of abortion, and how race and class are often obscured in mainstream coverage of both histories. So, it should surprise no one it took me until September to at least imagine I could tackle this all from a well-informed place.
We are going to look at the two plays that sparked this essay—How the Baby Died by Tori Keenan-Zelt and Dry Land by Ruby Rae Spiegel—but we are also going to look at investigative journalism, podcasts, and another play that I will try to be kind to as I examine how it fails to meet this moment. If you, dear reader, take anything away from this essay, I want it to be that choosing a side is not an enemy to good storytelling.
On May 24, 2022, the podcast Sawbones published an episode titled “History of Abortion”. I did not listen to this episode until after Roe v. Wade had been overturned exactly one month later. The podcast, which explores different facets of medical history, usually has a light-hearted tone, but co-host Dr. Sydnee McElroy has never shied away from switching it up to serious explorations of racism in medical history or the dangers of vaccine misinformation. It’s not often, however, that Dr. McElroy gets audibly choked up, which she did when telling the story of Gerri Santoro.
Gerri Santoro was a 28-year-old woman who died in 1964 after she and her significant other attempted a self-induced surgical abortion. Gerri had only recently separated from her abusive husband when she became pregnant with another man’s child, and she was certain that her husband would kill her when he found out. A photo that was taken of Gerri’s dead body was later circulated widely in Ms. Magazine in 1973. As Dr. McElroy says:
“I would highly advise, if you decide to look into this case further, be very careful. Because the image that accompanies, like, any article you want to read about this case, was used a lot in the rallies for abortion rights, and it was the police photo that was taken when they found her. And I would highly advise you not to seek that out unless you know what you're about to encounter. [holding back tears] And personally, I don't—I don't think anybody wants to see that. But, um... but it is evocative. And heartbreaking.”
For Ms. Magazine and the pro-choice movement of the 1970s, the decision to share the photo was something they thought was necessary to counter the growing anti-abortion movement and their messaging. Journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz, who wrote the article in Ms. that the photo accompanied, said:
“The abortion opponents were just beginning to use the fetus in the bottle images,” Gratz says in an interview for a 1994 film about the victim. “It was a very effective photographic campaign and we just didn’t know how to balance that campaign with anything. What has always been the answer to aborted fetuses is dead women.” (link here)
I am personally inclined to agree with Dr. McElroy, in the sense that I deeply regret seeing the photo. If you would like to learn more about Gerri, there is a 1994 documentary called Leona’s Sister Gerri available on Kanopy. I have not had the stomach or heart to watch it yet. I am the opposite of a squeamish person, but the context of the photo is something that makes me emotionally nauseous. Strap in, though, because the plays, articles and films I am going to talk about do not shy away from blood and viscera.
Gerri’s story immediately reminded me of a brilliant—and brilliantly bloody—play I had worked on, Tori Keenan-Zelt’s How the Baby Died. I first read Tori’s play when I worked as the Literary Manager for Playwrights Foundation, a new play development organization that curates the annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival. The festival is a series of staged readings of unproduced plays. Tori’s play is wickedly funny and wildly theatrical, and it’s one of my great professional joys to have worked with her as a dramaturg for the festival. The play awaits its world premiere at Cleveland Public Theatre during the 2022-2023 season.
How the Baby Died is set in the present, something the audience is keenly aware of due to the almost oppressive presence of Amazon’s Alexa in the house where the play takes place. Smartphones and Wi-Fi may exist, but our protagonist Stace, like Gerri before her, needs to keep a pregnancy secret from a controlling husband and attempts to self-manage her abortion in less-than-ideal conditions. She is hiding out in the home of an old friend, Aaron, and his husband Ben, who have recently adopted a baby girl. Aaron presses the comically unmaternal Stace into service as a nanny while she looks for acting gigs. An opportunity to audition for a theatre company specializing in Grand Guignol (read more about them in my previous newsletter) collides with a crying baby, Ben’s eroding sanity as a new parent, and improperly administered abortion medication.
This is a play that lasers in on multiple absurdities. The reality that babies are messy vomit-machines contradicts Aaron’s desire for an Instagram-ready family image. Aaron ends his paternal leave early so he can work on an app to “disrupt fatherhood”. Stace is chosen as a nanny instead of an expensive professional because the play is set in a self-described “Late-Stage Capitalist Hellscape”. And Stace’s Grand Guignol audition, where she plays a “Murder Nanny”, satirizes the presumed villainy of an unattached woman. (Or as Jenny Lewis would sing, “A Lady without a baby.”)
Notably, How the Baby Died is not focused on Stace’s lack of access to abortion services because of restrictive state laws (though she is from Ohio). Stace, married to a doctor, is privileged in her access to wealth and healthcare. However, her husband’s proximity to the medical establishment, to the place where legal abortion is gatekept, is why Stace is having trouble:
STACE: Oh, it’s. Well it’s about this lady who can’t do the surgical one because her husband’s like this big gynecologist, and you know they all know each other -- because conferences and shit -- so she just like takes a pill kit from his office and gets the fuck out of Cincinnati but she doesn’t really have anywhere she can do it and also she doesn’t have the Internet.
And now, an Abortion History Interlude.
About a month after the Sawbones episode, the podcast Death Panel published an episode, “The End of Roe”. This podcast focused mostly on the future of abortion and reproductive justice by discussing what changes were currently taking place in different states and strategies to take going forward. Death Panel is, in their own words, “about the political economy of health” and interrogates the American health care system from a leftist perspective. There were two main things that stuck with me about this episode:
The first was something I will be coming back to a lot: the mainstream (i.e., liberal, Democratic Party) fight for a legal right to abortion ceded too much ground from the jump by positioning the movement as one about choice, and specifically a choice that is complicated and difficult.
Abortion as something that lives in the dystopian American medical establishment is not the goal going forward.
Abortion, much like birth, used to be under the domain of midwives. While it was not without controversy, it was common. In fact, if someone wanted to induce a miscarriage with herbs like pennyroyal before the fetus quickened (typically around 16-20 weeks), this was not considered an abortion. This began to change when the nascent American Medical Association sought to eliminate the competition:
Then, after the American Medical Association formed in the 1840s, it launched a campaign to make abortion illegal at all stages of pregnancy. The AMA’s campaign painted abortion as immoral, and by 1880, it secured criminal abortion laws in nearly every state, granting doctors the authority to decide when the procedure was acceptable. The effort grew, in part, out of physicians’ interest in limiting competition from midwives and homeopaths. Pregnant women, especially the poor, continued to seek the care of midwives, many of whom were immigrants and women of color; medical journals began referring to midwives as abortionists, describing them as dangerous and ignorant. Although studies established that midwives had better maternal mortality outcomes than physicians in the early 20th century, the overwhelmingly male AMA almost succeeded in driving them out. States began writing new laws restricting midwifery, and the share of births that midwives attended dropped from half in 1900 to 15 percent by 1930. (“Whatever’s your darkest question, you can ask me”, Lizzie Presser writing for The California Sunday Magazine)
While this campaign begins to put the familiar morality spin on abortion, it is little more than a smokescreen for control. Put a pin in this for now.
Ruby Rae Spiegel’s play Dry Land is a coming-of-age story about Amy, a working-class teenager in a small Florida town. Amy is pregnant and very much does not want to be. She cannot confide in her mother (too religious), her ex-boyfriend (he’s an ex for a reason), or her best friend (the town gossip), so she enlists the help of Ester, her awkward swim teammate.
The play’s engine is the ticking clock of Amy’s pregnancy, and the escalation of Amy and Ester’s DIY methods mirrors their budding but fraught friendship. When the play begins, Amy and Ester are trying a litany of black-comedy (and somewhat unserious) abortion methods: punching Amy repeatedly in the stomach, joking about drinking laundry detergent, as they each keep their inner lives carefully guarded from one another. When they begin to grow close, and after the wealthier Ester helps Amy procure either mifepristone or misoprostol online, Amy suddenly lashes out at Ester, seemingly rupturing the relationship. Fortunately, Ester does find Amy during her harrowing medical abortion experience (more on that in a bit) and makes sure that Amy makes it through, even if their friendship might not.
When I recently re-read Dry Land, I was struck by a deep sadness in Amy’s character. What’s poignant about Amy’s journey is that even without the pregnancy, she has a deep fear of being trapped in her town because of her class. The play ends with Ester prepared to leave for college on a swim scholarship, a guaranteed future that Amy is still not sure she has. Rebecca Moss’s piece for Elle, “How Ruby Rae Spiegel's Play 'Dry Land' Confronts Abortion on Stage”, does offer a more hopeful read on Amy at the end of the play, and highlights something crucial that abortion stories are often missing:
After the abortion, Amy tells Ester about the dinner parties she will have one day, the man she will marry, and how her guests will appreciate expensive cheeses. She envisions a life for her future self that is much larger than her life as a once-pregnant teenager—but what she is really expressing is resiliency. This is one of the most significant and absent stories in the current abortion rhetoric: not that women have abortions, but that when they do, they are ok and life goes on as before.
In my area’s local production of Dry Land, directed by Ariel Craft at Shotgun Players, the scene of a janitor cleaning the girls locker room after Amy’s abortion was scored by Lucinda Williams’ “Learning How To Live”. The lyrics to this song really underpin Moss’s point and my own bittersweet read on the play:
I'll take the best of what you had to give.
I'll make the most of what you left me with.
I'm learning how to live.
I am happy to report that Dry Land has been produced many times and will hopefully continue to be produced widely. When Spiegel and her agent were first looking for a theatre company to produce the world premiere, they got pushback. In an interview for WhatsOnStage, Spiegel shared:
Spiegel: I met with a lot of companies in New York and often they said: We love this play but we can't do it because our audiences would not be OK with this. One company even asked if one of the scenes could be cut.
WOS: Was it a pivotal scene?
Spiegel: It was the abortion scene, so very pivotal. (link here)
That abortion scene—graphic, visceral—is the most electric and theatrical element of the play. The audience watches Amy’s cramping, bleeding, and shitting, in real time. The audience watches Amy expel the fetus from her body (though the stage direction says, “we don’t really see it”). It is terrifying for the characters, and if staged properly, equally terrifying for the audience.
This is not because medical abortions are dangerous and scary. When administered properly during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, abortion medication is overwhelmingly safe. Rather, Amy’s experience is traumatic and unsafe due to the restrictions placed on her as an underage pregnant teenager in Florida. If the pills weren’t so hard for her obtain, she could have safely taken them earlier. Amy’s access to a surgical abortion, the safest method at her stage of pregnancy, is cut off for many reasons—parental permission, high cost, and location.
And now, another Abortion History Interlude.
Spiegel was partially inspired to write Dry Land after reading Ada Calhoun’s article for The New Republic, “The Rise of DIY Abortions”. Both Calhoun’s piece and Lizzie Presser’s story for The California Sunday Magazine (referenced above) are deep journalistic dives into at-home medical abortions, from the perspective of modern-day midwives and people who, usually marginalized by class and race, seek at-home abortions as their only economically feasible recourse.
Calhoun’s article is framed around Jennie Linn McCormack, a single mother of three in Idaho who sought an abortion due economic instability:
“I didn’t want to raise it in that situation,” McCormack says, “nor put more on my children and me that I couldn’t handle. I had no money. No car. I didn’t have anything.”
McCormack did not have access to a clinic for a surgical abortion or an OB-GYN and miscalculated her gestation length. She ended up taking abortion medication when she was 19-23 weeks pregnant, and expelled a sizable fetus:
McCormack wrapped it up in more bags and put it out on the back porch, on the shelf of a covered barbecue. It didn’t feel right to her to throw it away. A week or so later, unable to figure out what to do, she finally confided in a friend. He called his sister, and his sister called the police.
McCormack was charged in 2011 with a felony for having an “abortion in a manner not sanctioned by the state”, but in 2012 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision that essentially states, “since it was so hard for McCormack to obtain a legal abortion, it was unjust to charge her for having an illegal one.” The ruling only applied to McCormack’s case, and so lawyers working with McCormack filed a motion for this to be applied more broadly to other people facing prosecution in Idaho. Cases like McCormack’s, however, seemed to be at odds with the mainstream pro-choice movement:
Hearn’s latest suit has not attracted support from most reproductive rights groups, which are perhaps nervous that McCormack’s rather messier case may rise up through the courts before the other paincapable lawsuits. If it reached the Supreme Court, it would hardly be their ideal test for reevaluating the federal position on abortion. “Many advocates for women’s rights appear to want women’s real stories and their real life troubles out of courts,” says Hearn. “They want it to be doctors in white coats.”
Presser’s article is framed around an underground network of women (names anonymized for the story) who had learned how to provide home abortions. Many of the women in the network came to the work after previously seeking out abortions, and learning about how safe and affordable home abortion could be:
Like Anna, most are low-income women who have felt frustrated by their experiences. Clients seek them out because they can’t afford an abortion by a physician, or they want privacy, or they prefer home remedies to conventional medicine, or they want attentive care, or a clinic’s just too far away.
The work that Anna and others are doing, and the knowledge they are spreading, are in tension with the party line at Planned Parenthood:
“Most people thought we were well past the days of women taking matters into their own hands,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in response to the report, “but laws that make it impossible to get safe and legal abortion are taking us backwards.” For Anna and others in the network, though, home abortion felt like a step forward — a way for clients to take control of the process…“The reproductive rights movement has used a very powerful narrative for many years now,” says Jill Adams, the chief strategist of the Self-Induced Abortion Legal Team, a group established three years ago, “that if states continue to pass restrictions and clinics close, people will be forced to take matters into their own hands, and that will mean death and destruction. We need a new accurate narrative.”
A fascinating episode in the article is Anna’s attempt to connect her work with the work of the Jane Collective, a similarly underground network of women in the 1960s/70s who self-educated themselves on performing surgical abortion procedures. The Jane Collective had shut down months after Roe v. Wade was decided and placed legal abortion in the hands of the medical establishment. As Anna tells it:
A couple of years ago, Anna tried to track down members of the Jane Collective. She was hoping to feel a connection with the older generation of underground providers. But when she reached the founder, Heather Booth, she was disappointed. Anna felt that Booth didn’t understand the need for the network. She told Anna that in her view, today’s pro-choice movement had to focus on keeping abortion safe, accessible, and legal. (When asked to comment on home abortion care, Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America declined.)
Speaking of Roe v. Wade, it’s time to talk about another widely produced play about abortion.
Roe is a play by Lisa Loomer that chronicles the lives of the two women at the center of the Roe v. Wade court case: Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued the case, and Norma McCorvey (aka “Jane Roe”), the plaintiff. Rather than a straightforward docudrama, the play is structured sort of like a memory play, with dual unreliable narrators. Weddington and McCorvey recall their shared interactions in different ways, highlighting the disparity in their class and cultural circumstances. It is a play that I find fascinating and frustrating.
As a young dramaturg, I had the privilege of reading a very early draft of Roe. That draft gave me great pause. I was resistant to the play’s Both Sides framing of abortion. This was pre-2016, but even then, I remember panicking that the play was dramatically effective at poking holes in the legitimacy of Roe v. Wade as a ruling.
The “Both Sides” framing, as it turned out, was very intentional on Loomer’s part. To some degree it was necessary, Loomer argues, because of McCorvey’s real-life journey from being the face of Roe to participating in anti-abortion activism. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, who commissioned the play as part of their American Revolutions series, published an interview with Loomer where she says this:
Amy Richard: American Revolutions asks playwrights to select a significant event in American history. How did you land on this one?
Lisa Loomer: Fate. I was taking a walk with my husband and I picked up a message that Bill wanted to talk to me about an American Revolutions commission. I said to my husband, “How much you wanna bet they want to talk about Roe v. Wade?” It turned out that Bill wondered if I might have interest. Initially, though, I was not interested in doing a play about a case or a courtroom drama. I take the issues very seriously, and I write about very serious issues, but my plays often have an unusual theatrical style. I was not going to write a straight drama. But then when I did the research—and it’s a little hard to talk about, because I don’t want to give away Norma’s story, Norma McCorvey, who was Roe—but her story, her real story was so amazing. It was so inherently theatrical, so . . . bent . . . that following this fascinating character allowed me to tell the story from a unique point of view.
AR: And without giving too much away, the way it was bent then allowed you to show the vastly different perspectives around Roe v. Wade?
LL: Yes, right, which is certainly something that I’m always interested in. It gave me all the perspectives in one play. The true story gave it to me. I didn’t have to manipulate it. (link here)
I don’t disagree that McCorvey’s life story, full of contradictions and juicy plot twists, makes for good drama. I think the most interesting parts about Roe are the class tensions between McCorvey—an uncouth, lower-class woman from Texas—and Weddington—a representative of mainstream upper-class second-wave White feminism. It’s not dissimilar to the above cited tensions between the at-home abortion providers and Planned Parenthood. I also tend to agree with this review, that Roe doesn’t dig as deeply into this tension as it could:
However, the narrative is clearly biased in a liberal and exclusionary feminist direction. For instance, Loomer never honestly questions the intentions of wealthy liberal white women in relation to using Norma and other women for their own gain. There are only small glimpses into a more accountable narrative, like in the line “You had money and I didn’t; that was the difference.” (link here)
Let’s circle back to the “Norma McCorvey becomes an anti-abortion activist” thread. I’m a firm believer in “depiction does not equal endorsement”. A skilled dramatist should be able to make you empathize—to an uncomfortable degree, even!—with someone whose views you find abhorrent. However, it is deeply concerning to me that Roe features real life pastor Flip Benham and Operation Rescue (now known as Operation Save America) as “normal” representatives of the pro-life side of the “abortion debate”. If Operation Rescue sounds familiar to you, it might be because of their campaigns against Dr. George Tiller, a provider of late-term abortions who was assassinated by a donor to Operation Rescue in 2009. For clarity I will state that Operation Rescue did split into two separate organizations by the time of Tiller’s assassination, and Benham oversaw the other group. But to me, that is a distinction without much of a difference. This splintering began in the 1990s, by which point people associated with the then-one Operation Rescue had already been killing abortion clinic workers (“Abortion Clinic Slayings May Kill Operation Rescue”, James Risen writing for the Los Angeles Times, August 10 1994).
None of this context comes through in Roe. Look at how many reviews cite Benham and Operation Rescue, quite neutrally:
“And by including real-life characters such as the charismatic Flip Benham (Jim Abele), an Evangelical minister and anti-abortion activist, Loomer allows all sides of the various arguments to be heard.” (The Atlantic)
“But the play’s success in humanizing Benham and others at Operation Rescue, and its suggestion that McCorvey may indeed have been manipulated, provided some counterweight.” (SCOTUS blog, lol)
“Loomer has said that she aimed to air all sides of the abortion debate, and the play passes the microphone among a broad cast of characters, including Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who authored the decision; the evangelical minister Flip Benham, who briefly recruited McCorvey to Operation Rescue, the extremist group accused of conspiring in violence against abortion providers; and the imagined women in a clinic waiting room, whose emotions run the gamut from moral torment to nonchalance.” (The New Yorker)
Even The New Yorker quote, which does describe Operation Rescue as extremist, still seemingly gives Benham’s view the same weight as people getting abortions. If I were a playwright and I were going to put a charismatic Christian fundamentalist in my play, I would aim for Tony Kushner’s version of Roy Cohn in Angels in America—a great character full of contradictions, a character who makes compelling arguments for their POV, but also a character who is clearly absolute scum.
Despite my baby-dramaturg fears in 2015, Lisa Loomer’s Roe did not kill Roe v. Wade. I don’t think any work of art about abortion should be burdened with the responsibility of a political project that has been in the works for decades. But Roe highlights, intentionally or not, the shaky ground that the original ruling stood on. Roe v. Wade established a Right to Privacy, not a Right to Access Healthcare. Furthermore, despite the party line being that Roe v. Wade gave women a right to choose, the actual decision gives women this right only in consultation with their doctors. In Justice Harry Blackmun’s own words:
The abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently, and primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician.
Loomer’s play also highlights—again, intentionally or not—that for those who want to protect abortion access, nothing is gained by agreeing to the pro-life/anti-abortion terms of the “debate”. Flip Benham was never going to “agree to disagree” about abortion philosophically. It’s why I prefer to call him anti-abortion, because that is his side’s goal—to eradicate abortion and ensure that pregnancy remains an effective tool of control.
As I was reading reviews of different productions of Dry Land, I was struck by the common refrain that the play does not take a political/moral side about abortion:
“We’re never asked to take sides on the contentious issue of abortion; those sides are never actually even mentioned by the characters.” (Arts ATL)
“‘Dry Land,’ mercifully, doesn't ask us to take sides on the abortion debate, though it does pointedly suggest that restricting access can lead to riskier alternatives.” (Chicago Tribune)
“‘Dry Land’ puts abortion on the table, without any pro-choice or pro-life flag waving.” (YourObserver.com). This reviewer also incorrectly describes Amy’s abortion medication as the morning-after pill, yikes.
While I don’t know if any of the reviewers meant it in this way, from my perspective, there is no moral debate to win on abortion. Of course Dry Land doesn’t ask us to take a side. There are no sides to take on a moral debate because there is none. It is a false premise set up by those who want to control the economic and political power of pregnant people, and it’s time to stop playing by their game.
Doreen St. Félix, a writer for The New Yorker, reviewed a recent documentary about the Jane Collective (see above), The Janes. The article is called “‘The Janes’ and the Power of Pro-Abortion Imagery”. St. Félix writes about a moment in the film where Eileen Smith, one of the Janes, is casually seated at her kitchen table, demonstrating how she used medical instruments to provide abortions.
The moment is extraordinary for its ordinariness. Here is a picture of the procedure as a domestic activity: abortion removed from the environment of the hospital, as much a temple antipathetic to women’s health as is the Church, looking like a kind of kitchen knowledge, passed down the matriarchal line. At the table, Smith looks modern, capable. But also confrontational, impolite. It’s that knowing smile. The image, if it is an image, is rousingly pro-abortion, not meekly pro-choice.
If there is a conclusion I can offer to this essay, it is that I want the plays, films, and literature about abortion going forward to be pro-abortion, not pro-choice. I also want them to finally stop being so overwhelmingly White. I love both How the Baby Died and Dry Land, but both are stories that, via casting, can still focus narrowly on White Women. One of my favorite recent movies where a main character takes abortion medication is Saint Frances, but it is again focused on a middle-class White Woman. Reproductive Justice has been a movement focused on and fostered by indigenous women, women of color, and trans people. I hope the next generation of art about abortion that gets produced takes that focus.