Inside an Abortion Hospital
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
order for any cook. When our publishers come home from Frankfurt in October, with the new-bound Grass volume under their arms, we will know more. Till then . . . remember that most poignant...
...The Gatt~gno volume, rightfully, bag been widely reviewed...
...Denes's objections may seem to be only slogans strong on emotional rhetoric, weak on moral reasoning, and inattentive to what I believe remains the unavoidable, central issue, the status of the fetus...
...If the world is to have no heirs, preserving its values becomes absurd...
...That demands a level of moral education and discussion that we have yet to see from any camp in the abortion debate...
...indiscreet husbands accompany careless mistresses...
...everything is not going to be all right...
...Magda Denes is a psychologist who, over an unspecified but extended period of time, observed and interviewed staff, patients, and relatives of patients in a private, for-profit New York hospital...
...The compulsive manner, the hint of hysteria, the laments about cosmic injustice reveal the expiational purpose .,f the book...
...Between 1970 when the New York State law banning abortions was changed and 1973 when the Supreme Court declared the ban on abortions unconstitutional, this hospital performed several thousand abortions...
...As a self-described "pro-abortionist with a bad secular conscience," Denes raises two objections to the abortions she witnesses...
...FATHER JOSEPH A. FITZMYER, S.J., is professor of New Testament and Biblical Languages at Weston College School og Theology in Massachusetts...
...LetVts Car~'eU Observed Edited by EDWARD GUILIANO Clarkson N. Potter, $12.95 Lew~ Ca~ll mid D t l W~ld JOHN PUDNEY Scribners, $8.95 ROBERT PRPJLll~ Despite the plethora of recent Carroll studies, the English-speaking world seems "curiouser and curiouser" about the creator of Alice in Wonderland (to use the book's popular name...
...Well, there was once a high-school dropout, his name was Grass and he wrote novels too wonderfully for words . . . (too wonderfully for pictures...
...A middle-aged mother of five weeping and incoherent expresses her inability to cope with one more...
...or is a moral stance a necessary condition for interpreting the raw experience portrayed...
...And this is reenforced by the choruses of reassurance from doctors, nurses, orderlies, and social workers...
...The glare of medical efficiency, legal permission, and women's rights blind them...
...Generativity and the full experiencing of tragedy are fragile weapons in a battle where the big guns have been moral absolutes like, "abortion is murder," or "women have an inalienable right to their own bodies...
...That romantic pessimism underlies her conviction that moral sensitivity about abortion will emerge from a sense of what it looks and feels like...
...It is the core of our morality...
...and that the procedure was carried out by doctors and nurses who harbored a good deal of latent hostility toward their patients and communicated this in subtle ways...
...Lewis Carroll Observed is a handsome collection of unpublished photographs, drawings, poetry and new essays, of which Carroll himself would approve: "And what is the use of a book," his Alice thought, "without pictures...
...indeed her arguments will never stand where despair and expediency combine to argue that there i s no future worth having children for and that the insistent present can provide the only justification for one's acts...
...In Necessity and Sorrow is a subtle and intelligent confession which collapses at moments into a romantic pessimism about the human condition...
...This fact, about which she informs us in the introduction, is impossible to separate from her intense search for the meaning of abortion...
...patients by the exigencies of their lives...
...This book has 77 drawings and photographs, including many penand-ink sketches by Carroll...
...Her reviews have appeared in Thought and America...
...I speak here of the fact that abortion is an abomination unless it is experienced as a human event of great sorrow and terrible necessity...
...I speak of our propensity to deny that we hurt, at the awful cost of turning to stone...
...In Necessity and Sorrow is important because it is a first primer in that curriculum...
...Following doctors as they move from operating room to operating room, Denes records their contempt, their cynicism, and their support for women's rights...
...BOOKS INSIDE AN ABORTION HOSPITAL MARGARET O'BRIEN 8TEINFELS In N e e e s s i t g and Sorr~v: L i f e and Death in an Abortion Hosp4tal MAGDA DENES Basic Books, $10 In Necessity and Sorrow is a powerful and gripping book...
...Later this year Francis Huxley's The Raven and the Writing Desk (Harper & Row)'will be reprinted in America after its initial U.K...
...Did photos of children's bodies in Vietnam convince the already convinced, or did they show those committed to the war its brutal and hidden consequences...
...Till then . . . remember that most poignant and memorable chapter in The Tin Drum that begins, "There was once a musician...
...They ought, nonetheless, to provide the occasion for thoughtful appraisal about the cumulative consequences of abortion in the lives of individuals and our common life as a society...
...No one is responsible for what is happening...
...As with many highly personal books on subjects of moral controversy she wants to both explain and expiate...
...None of this wilt be productive if we fail to recognize what Magda Denes has shown to be at the heart of the struggle over abortion: moral sensitivity, moral reasoning, and individual responsibility...
...The etchings are interesting and well-executed, and they make money...
...The present is endangered...
...Yet Denes's intent in so vivid a portrayal of clinical detail is obviously to convince us that "seeing" will modify the easy acceptance of abortion and open our eyes to "the tragedy of our age that renders us unable or unwilling to acknowledge tragedy...
...nurses by doctors...
...And about the second, she says, "abortion is an abomination unless it is experienced as a human event of great sorrow and terrible necessity...
...appearance...
...BARBARA MUTKOSKI is an assistant prolessor at Bergen College...
...Consider: that by age thirty, hundreds of thousands of American women would have had an abortion, and a certain percentage of them two or more abortions, some beginning at the age of twelve or thirteen...
...His words are too valuable...
...In this reportorial account, one quickly learns that human c a r n a g e l the sight of tiny bits and pieces of human bodies or of a perfectly formed 24-week infant--will never lead anyone at this hospital to deny the denials, to feel the suppressed revulsion that might build limits or reenforce taboos...
...that the procedure was performed in a context where their legal rtghts to have an abortion for any reason were scrupulously honored, but their moral and emotional concerns were minimized...
...Two years ago an English translation of Jean Gatt~gno's excellent biography, Lewis Carroll: Fragments of a Looking-Glass (Crowell) was published here...
...About the first she argues, "the affirmation of generativity is the essence of a world without end...
...The past has no meaning...
...Cumulatively one has the sense of people being pushed and pulled by forces beyond their control: doctors by money and changes in the law...
...A picture, in Orass's case, is not worth a thousand words...
...the 1976 Guiliano and Pudney studies cited above, to date, have not received their share of attention...
...KOeERT rHXLLIPS'S study of Lewis Carroll, Aspects o/ Alice, has recently been published in a new Vintage paperback edition...
...The patients are terrified, frightened, ashamed, and, rarely, indifferent...
...Without it, the future is lost...
...Don't worry dear, everything is all right...
...They need the novels, but the novels don't need them...
...his name was Meyn and he played the trumpet too beautifully for words...
...The power of photos or vivid description is unpredictable and hard to focus...
...Indiscreet wives remove the evidence of their adultery...
...She speaks with embarrassed and anxious parents, uneasy husbands and boy friends...
...justification for abortion...
...for reasons, good or bad, denying the possibility of life to another and temporarily or permanently denying a possibility about oneself will have repercussions that seem neither liberating nor fulfilling...
...WILLIAM O'ROURKE teaches in the English Department at Rutgers University...
...Last year saw a facsimile edition of Carroll's own The Rectory Magazine (University of Texas Press), one of the eight children's magazines he edited as an adolescent...
...The first has to do with a commitment to future generations, the second with the tragedy of denying feelings...
...Am I predisposed to imagine a burden of anxiety and guilt, a numbing of maternal feeling, a certain distancing from those children who are allowed to be born...
...MICHAEL TRUE is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and lecturer at Clark University in Worcester...
...Magda Denes is ne mere observer of that tragedy...
...Indeed, the art reproduced in the book, and Commonweal: 439...
...But where Denes hopes to move us is unclear...
...Perhaps such possibilities are overdrawn...
...The one thing it is impossible to imagine is that, as so many of the figures in this book's pages try to believe, none of this makes any difference---we should worry...
...They help mythologize the man and his literary creations...
...In graphic and gory detail she describes D and C procedures, performed in busy times at the rate of six per hour, and saline abortions which provide women with 24 hours of labor and a dead baby...
...yet such appeals to the emotions can move us in a way that reason or moral principles alone do not...
...parents by flighty daughters...
...His pictures, his etchings, are, if anything, addenda to h i s novels...
...We may wring our hands, we may engage in political activity, we may try to remedy the conditions that have given rise to the OOO @OO OOO REVIEWERS MARGAI~ET O'BRIEN STEINEELS is editor of the Hastings Center Report...
...She interviews the eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-olds who have as little psychological and factual understanding of abortion as they have about sex...
...Though one can't deny Grass's artistic talent, he is first, last and always, a writer--Germany's best living writer, a "court jester without a court," a snail with a worldwide following...
...denial is the universal and unvarying stance...
...It is the pulse beat of secular conscience...
...Is there a way out...
...she too has had an abortion in this hospital...
...Magda Denes explores in a compelling style and compulsive manner the thin edge of existence and its meaning in an abortion hospital...
...Be that as it may...
...But can her vivid word-pictures, so 8 July 1977:438 much like photographs, elucidate a moral stance...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 14
