The Taking of Life

A new installment of Hunted, an autobiographical account of God’s action in the life of a Vietnam War era radical activist. New to the series? This introduction provides context for the events described here. An index of other episodes, updated monthly, is also available.

The waiting room was nearly full when we got there. I was the only man. Eileen took the last empty seat next to a woman who looked older than us, early thirties at least. She asked where we were from.

Eileen hesitated. The clinic supposedly served only New York residents. Two weeks ago, when we’d come in for the required consultation, we’d given a local address. This time, though, it wasn’t a hospital employee asking, so Eileen told her. We’d flown up from Atlanta. It was January 1972. A year later, after Roe v. Wade was decided, we wouldn’t have had to.

Picture this room filled the patients—all but one unaccompanied.

“You’ll be all right.” Eileen’s neighbor reached out and put a hand on her knee. She talked to us for a little while about how well the clinic was run. Complications were rare. None of her friends who had come here had had any problem. Now it was her turn. She and her husband couldn’t afford a fourth child. He had no time off, the kids were at school, so here she was on her own. She’d be back in time to rest before the family got home.

Something about the way she said all that shocked me. The friends taking turns. Home in time to make dinner. It wasn’t as if we were taking a life here—at least I didn’t believe then that we were—but even so to treat ending a pregnancy so casually was disturbing.

The nurse called a name. The woman stood and gathered her coat and her bag. Before leaving, she reached down and squeezed Eileen’s hand. I was touched by the gesture, but also puzzled. What prompted her to open up in that way? Were we that needy? And why was I still the only man in the room? It was shocking to see all these women here on their own.

I couldn’t imagine sending Eileen somewhere like this by herself. We were in this together. It was so obvious that she needed me. When we traveled down by train for the consultation, a few days before Christmas, she’d been unusually quiet. We’d been visiting our parents in New England and had just filled them in our our marriage plans. That hadn’t gone over too well. A day later we clacked along on our way to New York, not saying a single word the entire length of Connecticut, but at least we had each other for company. The cold New York streets were bright with Christmas lights and grandmothers carried huge shopping bags, but with our painful errand ahead we scarcely saw them. The trudge through a maze of hospital corridors with ambiguous markings left us both on edge and exhausted.

And now we were back again, still together, our need for each other even greater. The nurse called Eileen. She gave me her purse and the faded parka she’d been wearing since high school. I stood up and put my arms around her. I couldn’t read how she was feeling. The nurse told me the timeline. Partners weren’t allowed back in recovery, so if there was anything I needed to do I should go out and do it.

I hung up the coat, took the purse with me, and retraced our steps through the corridor maze and out into the now-blinding sunlight. It was odd and disorienting not to have Eileen at my side. For a few blocks I just walked, not thinking about where I was going, simultaneous aware but oblivious of what was happening back at the clinic, shielded from it by physical distance, by willful ignorance about how it was done, and by the glib but fatal assumption that we could not have done otherwise.

At a cross street, a faint smell of food wafted from the front of a Chinese restaurant. I remembered how hungry I was. Eileen had to go in with an empty stomach, so we didn’t eat breakfast. I went in and sat down at a table. It felt wrong to spend money on a meal that Eileen couldn’t share, but I had to eat sometime. I pushed that uncomfortable thought out of my mind and concentrated on everything that had gone right on this trip. That was a lot.

Sitting there waiting for the food to arrive, I thought about how different this was from our first pregnancy scare. Back in Providence, when Eileen was late with her period, the two of us planned to leave school so I could work full time and she could care for the baby.

Now that we were living in Atlanta, our choices looked a lot different. My father was allowing me one more year of tuition support, just enough for me to complete my degree. Eileen had a settlement from the death of her father in a work accident. It was enough for her to complete school, but if the expense of having a child depleted the fund, she wouldn’t be able to.

It wasn’t just finances that steered our decision. After two years together, we had a lot more to lose. We had mapped out a future: teaching careers, radical activism, community leadership. If we had a child now, how would such a life ever be possible?

It had been no easy task getting ourselves to New York. Not just getting there, but also finding out where to go, who to speak to, and where to stay. Irma Jean, the local activist leader, had lived in New York and still had contacts there. Usually she helped us however she could, but this time there was a long pause after I told her what Eileen and I needed.

“If you’re not ready for the responsibility of a child, why are you even together?” she said at last.

I froze. What was she up to? Whatever this was, it wasn’t communist doctrine. We were talking about ending a pregnancy, not taking a life. And even if it had been taking a life, as conservative Christians claimed, a true radical wouldn’t have flinched if it contributed to the cause. Come the revolution, we were prepared to take many lives.

I tried one more time. It was the financial responsibility of a child we weren’t ready for. With a newborn on our hands, I’d have to go to work full time to support us. How could we continue in school? How could we become teachers? How could we continue our commitment to radical activism?

Irma Jean thought about this and finally relented. What a relief that was! A few days later she called with the name of the hospital and the phone number for a Party sympathizer who would help us and even let us stay with her for a few days. She never did tell me why she hesitated at first, but later—many years later, when I knew God—I realized it must have had something to do with her past. She hadn’t been a communist her whole life. Before becoming radicalized she’d been brought up Christian and spent a year at seminary in New York. She may have renounced the God of the Bible, but some vestige of what she’d learned about Him and from Him might still be alive in her, buried deep under the layers of denial. If there was a spark left in her conscience, He could have used that to prompt her to warn me.

The food I had ordered arrived. I ate ravenously, still pleased with myself that all the arrangements had gone so smoothly. Time to go and take care of the girl that I loved.

Outside, it had turned colder again. I hastened back to the hospital, and didn’t have to wait long till Eileen was led out to the waiting area. She moved gingerly and looked a little paler than normal, but other than that I couldn’t see any change in her. The nurse told us what symptoms to watch for. We were to wait several days before traveling in case there were complications.

We went back to the apartment so Eileen could lie down. I went out for groceries, and when I came back she sat with me and drank tea while I made dinner. We talked about what it had been like at the clinic, and I detected no sign of the reserve I’d felt the last time, when the took the train down to New York for the consultation. Afterward, she’d complained about how cold the doctor’s hands were, but this time it was warm. In the recovery room all the nurses had been very solicitous. They brought her drinks and hot blankets and kept checking her pulse and her blood pressure. Besides soreness inside, the only uncomfortable thing was the way they looked at you. Tenderly, like they were sorry.

The next day she complained again about soreness, but there were no complications. She came out shopping with me for dinner supplies, and by the afternoon of the third day, we were able to take the subway to Chinatown and buy spices to take home. After dinner that night, as we packed for our return trip, Nancy pressed a wad of cash into my hands and made me promise that we would take a cab to the airport.

It felt very odd taking that money. We were supposed to be proletarian organizers. A cab was a luxury we never allowed ourselves. Climbing into one the next morning, I felt a wave of gratitude. It seemed like e whole world was opening their hearts to us, but underneath their kindness, I sensed an aura of sadness.

Back in Atlanta, life felt normal again, at least in the beginning. We went to classes. We handed out communist leaflets and sold communist newspapers. We met people and recruited them to our cause. We socialized with our comrades. We talked without ceasing about the revolution we were all sure was coming. But that didn’t mean we got off without consequences.

We got married, but the wedding wasn’t a joyous occasion. God did not bless our union.

Our honeymoon was a disaster. I planned poorly. We didn’t have fun.

When we returned from the honeymoon I I felt a new distance between us. Trivial things made me impatient. We got into arguments that didn’t make sense. She retreated into hurt silence.

It went on for a year: mounting tension, growing dread. Then, during my last semester at school, something odd happened: a bizarre string of calamities in the space of just a few weeks, culminating in an announcement from Eileen. She was leaving. Why? Because, she claimed, I’d forced her to have the abortion.

I knew that I hadn’t, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling that there was some kind of connection. All those calamities, one after the other? What if those conservative Christians were right, and what we’d done was not just end a pregnancy, but also taken a life?

I didn’t know God then. I had no answer to all these what if’s. To the confident, calculating, self-sufficient part of my mind they seemed highly improbably. There was another side of me, though, that wasn’t so confident, that mourned the loss of the young girl I loved more than myself. Many years later, when I found God, it was that mourning self that acknowledged the life we had taken and was finally able to seek His forgiveness.