T.A.

CLARISSA HURLEY

There’s small choice in rotten apples.

The Taming of the Shrew, I, i.

Time: St. Patrick’s Day, 1988

Place: Dr. Everett Chalmers Hospital, Fredericton, New Brunswick

Appointment: T.A. Check-in: 6 a.m. Procedure: 11 a.m.

There were presurgery complications: I lived at home with my parents and had not risen at 5:00 a.m. since early childhood Christmases. I concocted a dubious story about making breakfast for my boyfriend before his long hiking trip in Maine. My parents found this hilarious and offered advice. Father: “Remember to cook sausages! No man can climb a mountain sans sausages!” Mother: “It’s a bad precedent, darling! They are all but stomachs and we all but food!” Laughter.

In the silent Lenten darkness, I pulled the front door shut. Wet, early spring snowflakes slapped the dark pavement and vanished as I waited for the taxi at the end of the street, well away from my house. The friendly, flirtatious driver complimented my outfit, was curious why I was going to the hospital so early, looking so nice. Was someone in my family sick? I said I was a volunteer. I said it was my choice.

In an odd conjuncture of events to which I was oblivious at the time, the judgment of the Supreme Court, two years in the making, had been announced a few weeks earlier, on 28 January. In a split decision, a majority of five judges declared section 251 of the Criminal Code of Canada unconstitutional, in conflict with section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees the right to “security of the person.” My ill-starred pregnancy may have been conceived at the very hour the red-suited sages, like seven sombre Santas, delivered their judgments. About six weeks later, I would act upon a judgment of my own.

My grad school boyfriend and I had agreed there was no point in his coming with me, nothing he could do to help. Actually, he had suggested that, and I had acquiesced. “I’d just be sitting around waiting, wouldn’t I?” Perhaps it sounded reasonable in his British accent. I was twenty-two; he was twenty-five. The discussion had been brief. He was on a student visa and not ready to father a child. I was on my own if I wanted to mother one. For the first time in our seven-month relationship, he said he loved me. He said it right after I agreed to the abortion.

Momentous in principle, R. v. Morgentaler removed abortion from the criminal code—and it did remarkably little else. Provinces grappled skittishly with the implications of the judgment and delivery of the service was largely unaffected. Then, as now, access depended on location. I was one of the fortunate ones. My doctor was sympathetic, directing my performance in her office as she explained the process by which a committee of physicians would adjudicate my situation and approve, hopefully, my termination.

“I need to see tears,” she prompted.

“I don’t feel like crying,” I protested.

“I know, but the committee likes tears.”

I obliged, summoning tears of frustration at the humiliating insult added to the bewildering injury of contraception-evading fertility. But her letter convinced the jury of my nonpeers. I received notice of my appointment, sent to a postal box I had rented for the purpose. I was determined, then, that no one should know. Fredericton is a small town and talk is the oxygen that sustains it. Abortion invites outrage and condemnation; unwed mothers receive disdain and pity. Abortion is slatternly and immoral; single motherhood is pathetic and expensive to the community that enforces it. A committee would know my identity, but not I theirs. I was assured the anonymous jurors who vetted my appeal would be discreet, but I knew they were likely to be friends of my parents.

The doctor who would perform the procedure was professional and remote. His tousled, healthy children and toothsome, fecund wife beamed from the picture frame behind his left shoulder.

“Are you sure this is what you want to do?”

“I don’t feel I have any choice.”

He briefly described the procedure, to be performed under a superfluous general anesthetic. No doubt intending to be reassuring, carefully smiling, he said chances were low that he would perforate my uterus and perform an emergency hysterectomy. All surgery carries risk, but more women die in childbirth. He must have felt some compulsion to perform the surgery, so I appreciated him as one condemned might appreciate a benevolent prison guard. Years later, I would meet him at a lavish gala fundraiser for the regional theatre company he generously supported. He thanked me profusely, with genuine emotion, for the tax receipt I issued. If he recognized me, he made no sign.

An elegant young woman, alarmingly well-coiffed for 6:00 a.m., registered me at the outpatients’ desk. She perused the details of my appointment, pausing to stare at me as a languid disdainful cat watches rain from the shelter of a doorframe. In my world, “T.A.” meant teaching assistant. I owed my department twelve hours a week, marking undergrad essays or looking up books for my supervising professor. Now the letters assumed a sinister euphemism and vague inanity. What was therapeutic in the prurient, prying eyes of strangers, absurd appointment times, the scowling anesthetist clumsily skewering the back of my hand, his punitive rage belied by my transparent skin, the lavender veins lying plump and present, mapping his way to my unconscious. My mother’s shocked gasp days later: “How did you get that ghastly bruise?”

St. Patrick’s Day was big in my family. My father was third-generation Miramichi and spoke in a brogue-tinged dialect. My mother had spent her early years in Cloyne, before poverty sent her family to England and marriage brought her to Canada, where she finally had the two children she craved but had such trouble conceiving. When I arrived home in late afternoon from the hospital, drinks with friends were well underway. Bright red vinyl played Fenian rebel music on the scratchy old turntable. “We are the boys of Wexford . . .” Dad poured me a Bushmills.

“I shouldn’t drink . . . Seminar tomorrow.”

“It’s St. Patrick’s Day.”

It was instruction, not information. I drank it and went to bed, lamely protesting my early morning, my limbs leaden from anesthetic and alcohol. I went to my Middle English poetry seminar the next morning. I finished my MA a few months later. I broke up with the nonfather. We remain friendly, if not friends. We were young, by middle-class Western standards.

Time: Late summer, 1998

Place: Morgentaler Clinic, Fredericton, New Brunswick

Appointment: T.A. Check-in: 11:00 a.m. Procedure: 12:00 p.m.

The new Morgantaler clinic had opened in Fredericton in 1994 on a quiet street on the north side of the river in a building that had been a private home and later a posh restaurant. Protesters regularly picketed, heads bowed, reverently clutching placards displaying vaguely cartoonish representations of bloodstained full-term infants. They were generally quiet and not importunate. My beloved elderly aunt would sometimes come by bus from her convent in Saint John to pray with them. I often offered to drive her so I could listen to her animated stories of wartime, her years of nursing in postwar Japan, the welcome hysterectomy she had had in the 1950s at an American military hospital. I discreetly checked with her about her plans before I made my appointment.

In many ways, the experience was strikingly different. No panel of elders would “yay or nay” my actions; no general anesthetic would augment the risks inherent in surgery. I was older and had my own apartment—no subterfuge was necessary. In other ways, it was remarkably similar. My then-partner, a professional in his forties, possessed an Olympian intellect and the emotional stability of a hormonal adolescent. He left for a research trip in Britain a few days after I told him of my pregnancy. He wanted children, ideally, in principle, but on his terms, his schedule. My timing was bad, he informed me. I also wanted children, ideally, but children are not ideals, abstractions, principles, acquisitions for a CV, or items to be checked on a to-do list. I felt they were a privilege, not a right. Again, I was on my own. Florynce Kennedy famously quipped that if men could conceive, abortion would be a sacrament. For the women who do conceive, abortion is frequently a sacrifice—a giving up of, not a getting rid of.

The appointment was in midday. Clinic staff members were supportive, respectful, and efficient. A sensible nurse held my hand and talked to me through the uncomfortable but brief procedure. The price, of course, was the price. As in many provinces, clinic abortions are a private matter, and the cost of privacy is high.1

Time: Recent

Place: Fredericton Medical Clinic

Appointment: Introduction to new physician

Having moved back to Fredericton from Toronto three years ago, I am relieved and elated to be matched finally with a family physician, following a three-year wait with over four thousand others on an official registry. I am fortunate to be in good health and have not had to rely often on the physician lottery of after-hours clinics or the hospital ER. The administrative assistant hands me a clipboard and requests that I read carefully and sign the “Office Policies” form. I browse through the list of “please do not wear scent” and “please arrive ten minutes early,” etc. The final point makes me draw a sharp breath and I read it repeatedly, as if translating from a language I had not used in years: “This office will not aid or facilitate in the termination of pregnancies.”

I briefly consider throwing the clipboard through the sliding glass partition but decide against the risk of criminal charges—and yet another protracted wait on the family doctor registry. Across the waiting room a nervous young woman texts discreetly on her smart phone as she waits for her appointment. I wonder why she is here, whether she is facing a “choice” that may well be as fraught as mine were in previous decades; whether she will have to scramble to find another doctor in time for a time-sensitive procedure, or raise a month’s rent to pay for a clinic abortion. Reluctantly, I sign the bottom of the form, breaking the pencil lead twice in my furiously clenched fingers.

My enquiry to the NB College of Physicians and Surgeons the following day results in vague responses about “grey areas” and glib optimism that such situations “usually work themselves out.”

The reproductive rights movement in Canada reveres the principle of freedom of choice. It is attractive, compelling rhetoric with which I am loath to quibble. The idea draws on principles held dear in post-Enlightenment Western thought; that we are free to choose seems mulishly axiomatic. Yet I cannot help but feel discomfort, for reasons both psychological and material, with the implications of this emphasis on choice. “Choice” implies that desire trumps circumstance, while I believe the opposite is frequently true. At least since Aristotle’s De Caelo, Western philosophy has problematized the notion of a purely free will. Late medieval philosopher Jean Buridan’s doctrine of moral determinism was satirized in the paradox of Buridan’s Ass, in which a donkey, hungry and thirsty, is set midway between a pail of water and a bale of hay. Paralyzed by the equally compelling choices, the animal dies of hunger and thirst. Options may also be similarly repellent or terrifying. I have several friends who have had abortions: most have had more than one; some have had more than three. In no case have I spoken to a woman who came to the decision based on abstractions of what was most desirable.

The administrative and jurisdictional inequality of abortion access in Canada is well documented. The $450 I paid fifteen years ago at the Fredericton Morgentaler Clinic, a fee that would render the service a fantasy for most teens and disadvantaged women, has risen to over $700 and the provincial Medical Services Payment Act remains unchanged.

In New Brunswick, three hospitals in two cities at opposite poles of the province currently provide abortions, in addition to Fredericton’s Clinic 554, which opened following the closure of the Morgentaler Clinic. More encouraging has been Premier Brian Gallant’s long-overdue removal of the anomalous two-doctor rule in New Brunswick, as well as the decisive majority government election of the Liberal party and its leader Justin Trudeau, an openly pro-choice prime minister.

Given that only seventeen percent of hospitals nationwide offer terminations and nearly all abortion access in the country is restricted to urban centres, the focus of discussion, particularly among young people, has shifted away from abstract moral debate to the pertinent and pressing issue of access.2 Abortion remains most elusive to the women—and communities—who most need it.

Less quantifiable barriers are equally powerful. Gender roles are more confusingly scripted than ever, and young people are steeped in the hypersexualized worlds of social media. To be sexual—and sexy—is virtually mandatory for young women; to be pregnant outside of a conventional partnership remains problematic in all but the most privileged contexts. Birth control, even when easily available, is never fully reliable.

Unfettered choice cannot exist in a world that remains judgmental, unaccommodating, and punitive to unpartnered pregnant women and mothers. While I still support the possibly utopian quest for women’s full reproductive control, the slogan of “choice,” I fear, has not significantly advanced this cause.