Ayelet Waldman Quotes
I had a second trimester abortion. I was pregnant with a much-wanted child who was diagnosed with a genetic abnormality. I made a choice to terminate the pregnancy. It was my third pregnancy, and I was very obviously showing. More important, I could feel the baby move.
Waldman, Ayelet. Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. Doubleday, 2009.
He was referring to Eisenstadt v. Baird in which the court had just ruled on the quoted passage. Some opponents of the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision claim that the opinion came out of left field and had no logical chain from past jurisprudence, but as this quotation pointed out, Roe was the inevitable logical conclusion of an entire line of Supreme Court thinking. Opponents mostly sought reversal on fundamentally moral grounds, not legal.
Churches are political organizations too and are subject to the forces of their membership. In the case of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 they passed resolutions to assure the right of a woman to have an abortion to protect her health. The position on abortion changed steadily thereafter to even pass Constitutional amendments to ban abortions except to save the life of the mother. See {614356},54122, {614358}, {614359}, {614360}, {614361} for the dynamic history of the change.
This is very surprising to most modern observers. If a pregnant woman died, there were in some cases those in the family who were just as happy that she passed away before the child was born as the laws of inheritance and succession were dependent on which children lived. The father might be away, and someone would not want a new or another heir, might just bury the pregnant woman. The Romans actually had some very sophisticated medical skills. Julius Caesar, for example, was born via what we today call a “Ceasarean Section.” If a pregnant woman was close term, and she dies, the Romans had the skill to do a C Section on the dead woman and could sometimes save the baby. That ancient Romans considered the fetus as a potential life, is sometimes used by anti abortion forces. However, if they do their research, they would find that Roman law allowed abortions. The decision however had to be the mother’s and the father’s. What this law did is to preserve the possibility of the fetus’s being born alive with surgery when the mother was dead and the father might not be near.
Ayelet Waldman is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist. She has written seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and four other novels. She has also written autobiographical essays about motherhood. Waldman spent three years working as a federal public defender and her fiction draws on her experience as a lawyer.
