Abortion: Trouble in Numbers?

My friend Marion Banzhaf is the kind of feminist who wears an "I had an abortion" T-shirt with "TALK TO ME" scrawled by hand beneath the message.

She worked at feminist health centers throughout the 1970s where she demonstrated vaginal self-exams and performed menstrual extractions. In its 1980s heyday, she was a pioneering member of the AIDS activist group ACT-UP. She recounts the story of her abortion in a film I produced called Speak Out: I Had an Abortion.

The year was 1971, and there were only a couple of states, notably New York, where abortion was legal. Although her boyfriend thought they should drop out of school at the University of Florida and get married -- they could live with his mother -- Marion disagreed. She raised the money for her abortion in one afternoon by standing on the quad, asking for donations.

She then flew from Gainesville to New York, had her procedure, and, after she left the clinic, ran skipping down the street. "I was so happy to see that blood," she says, in a trademark Marion Banzhaf way (somewhat shocking, totally confident). "It meant I had my life back."

Dauntless radical though she is, there is a part of her abortion story she rarely tells. A year after her 1971 procedure, Marion got pregnant again. This time she didn't have to worry about the money. Her new boyfriend pulled out his checkbook and put her on the next flight -- and she knew it was the right decision. "But it was a much harder [abortion] for me personally. I felt I shouldn't let myself get pregnant," says Marion, now fifty-two. "Even to this day, I have shame about it. An accomplished, consciousness-raised feminist like me!"

One abortion, that happens. Two? Well, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, two smacks of carelessness. My father, a doctor in Fargo, North Dakota, expressed surprise when I mentioned the second-abortion stigma to him: "It's odd, given that it's the exact same situation as before, no more or less of a life," my father said. "It's as if women don't really believe they have the right to have abortions."

Dad, like Marion, is often shockingly logical. Still, abortion itself (whether your first or fourth) is so shrouded in secrecy, it's easy to imagine that only certain kinds of women would ever make a mistake like that twice. If "she" did, this almost unconscious thinking goes, it's clear "she" didn't care enough to learn from the first one. Fears about these repeat cases contribute to the unlovely idea that, because terminating a pregnancy is legal, women use abortion as birth control, leading to a cliché of this debate: the "I'm pro-choice, but I don't think it should be used as birth control" line.

In the clinic world, repeat visitors are called, not unkindly, "frequent flyers." The reason that casual term is not an insult is simply due to how common multiple abortions are. "You have 300 possibilities to get pregnant in your life," says Peg Johnston, the director of an abortion clinic in Binghamton, New York. "A one percent failure rate -- assuming the best possible use of contraception -- is still three abortions," she says. "In what endeavor is a one percent failure rate not acceptable?"

According to Planned Parenthood, two out of every 100 women aged fifteen to forty-four will have an abortion this year and half of them will have had at least one abortion previously. Yet virtually everyone I've talked to about multiple abortions said she shouldn't have let it happen again, implying it was her fault.

Why is that? Well, some of it is surely the anti-woman culture, a robust pro-life movement that, when abortion became legal, mobilized to scream at women on what is already not a fun day. But it's not just a vast right-wing conspiracy. Many women -- pro-choice women -- believe that abortion is taking a life (although not an independent life). What justifies that loss of life is the woman's own life. It's almost as if she is saying, "I recognize that this is serious, but my own life is too important to sacrifice for an unplanned pregnancy." But each additional abortion makes it harder to believe she is making an honorable decision.