The Last Word
Matulis, Sherry
THE LAST WORD Sherry Matulis ABORTION. 1954 Iget it all the time, from nearly everyone I know. "Why do you do it, Sherry?" they ask. "Why make things, uh, difficult for yourself? I mean, my lord,...
...I knew that had I given birth to a child conceived under those circumstances, I would not be able to look at it without remembering...
...And for a long time thereafter, that was all I remembered...
...When I was finally able to make him understand this, my husband reluctantly agreed to take me to the local back-alley abortionist—an alcoholic quack who buried more than one of his mistakes...
...My husband was ready to stick me in a straitjacket...
...Like a knife, I thought...
...Far more, I'm sure, than was necessary...
...And I could not stay that way...
...What else, with two full moons...
...I was pregnant...
...The "it" that I do, the thing I'm getting all this good unsolicited advice about, consists of campaigning for freedom of choice...
...Eyeball-popping pain...
...He must have been waiting close to the building, in the shadows...
...After the scraping-it-into-an-already-nearly-full-bucket procedure was over, he offered me twenty of my one thousand bucks back for a quick blow job...
...Lots of it...
...Almost—but not quite...
...And they're also right about not having anything to be concerned about—so far as the possibility of my ever becoming pregnant again...
...I was pregnant by that fiend...
...I remember whistling—not out of fear but out of happiness...
...And remembering would mean hating all over again...
...I had to hand this drunken butcher one thousand of them before I even got through the door...
...Lots and lots of it...
...I was twenty-three, pleasantly married, the mother of two planned-for and well-loved children (the number later grew to five) and working nights in a cocktail joint...
...He wanted me to go through with the pregnancy—or rather, he wanted me not to kill myself, or to be killed by the only sort of abortionist that was available at that time...
...And I wasn't willing to put either myself or a child through that...
...Both full...
...After I had swallowed my two-aspirin "anesthetic," I was told to climb up on what resembled a dirty kitchen table and hoist my skirt...
...ha!—left 'em on before...
...I didn't see him until he was on top of me, and I still remember very little about the act itself—not because I'm trying not to any longer but because when he threw me down on the blacktop, my skull cracked and I blacked out...
...I do deliberately put myself between the rock and hard place—as often and as vociferously as possible...
...Only to find myself wishing, about a month later, that I hadn't...
...He thought that once the baby was born, we could both accept it as our own...
...The back of my head was sticky-wef...
...Twenty-seven years ago, I was physically and financially brutalized, not only by two cretin-thugs—the first who raped, the second who robbed—but by a myopic, bluenosed, and totally hypocritical society: a society that revered ignorance and made it the criterion for most of its laws...
...I remember the moon was full...
...I detested the taste of alcohol, but I held my nose and downed two pints of Everclear...
...somehow I managed to get home...
...But I could not, not ever...
...And they're right, of course...
...I mean, my lord, at your age, you certainly don't have anything to be concerned about...
...Blood...
...My doctor would not help me, so I feigned migraine to get a prescription for ergotrate—which, I think, gave me a migraine...
...I remember thinking how not too many moons distant I would be in a home of my own, a place with decent plumbing and a yard for the kids, the place I'd been working for, between babies, for years...
...One merciful concussion and a couple of hours later, I was again staring at the moons...
...The knife was no longer there, but it had been, and my guts were oozing out of a neat X. Holding both hands against something I hope never to feel again in my life, somehow I managed to get up...
...It took at least a minute to realize that it was part of my intestine...
...It was all I could bear to...
...And good person that he is, he probably would have tried...
...There followed a few obscene comments about my underpants and how I could take 'em off now, but I should have— ha...
...a society that made it a felony for any woman to own and control her own internal organs...
...This was in 1954, when a dollar was worth perhaps three times what it is today...
...But now, especially regarding abortion...
...Not in the sense that "good" is docile or tractable or pliant or amenable or submissive or for one second willing to sit silently by while anyone tries to bring back the back-alley quack, the one they'll never have to patronize—not because they don't have abortions but because they do have pull...
...This article was adapted from her longer piece, "Never Again," published by Protect Abortion Rights in Madison, Wisconsin...
...a society which really hasn't changed very much for the better, and which is now on the verge of reversing the only good thing to have happened in the 1970s...
...Yeah, both of 'em...
...One night, I got off the 1:20 a.m...
...And as I tried to get up to retrieve it, I felt a terrible, searing pain in my midsection...
...I went on a two-day castor oil diet and lost five pounds and a quart of'hemorrhoidal blood—and nothing else...
...And all I could think was, Well, no wonder...
...In all aspects of life...
...That's why, even at my age, I do what I do.M Sherry Matulis is a poet and science fiction writer in Peoria, Illinois...
...and somehow, with a lot of suturing and a couple of weeks' intensive care and an infinite amount of love from a husband who rushed home from three states away and never left again, I managed to survive...
...bus and started my usual trudge home, cutting the three blocks to two and one-half by what we called the schoolyard shortcut...
...Another trip to the hospital, another ten-day stay, a little bout with peritonitis, a half-dozen transfusions (all of which we could ill afford and which put me back to square one when it came to owning my own home) and the old girl was good as new...
...Looking down, I saw this odd, ugly mass of something perched atop my abdomen...
...But there was a time...
...And I was not pregnant by my husband...
...I remember thinking, Full moon brings out all the flakes and fruitcakes—and there had been plenty of them that night, grabbing and groping in the bar...
...Then pain...
...Most of my clothing had FRANCES JETTER been torn off and scattered...
...And when I woke up, everything intact, I got out the meat mallet and began pounding my almost-healed abdomen...
...I scalded the lower two-thirds of my anatomy squatting in hot tubs...
Vol. 45 • August 1981 • No. 8
