A Novel That Asks, What if Abortion Were Again Illegal?
Grace Paley’s collection of nonfiction writings “Just as I Thought” contains a brief memoir of what it was like to live in the United States back when abortions were illegal. Her essay “The Illegal Days” is precise and vivid on the way that criminalizing abortion affected the life of every woman, young or old, pregnant or not, sexually active or celibate. No woman over 10 or under 60 could expect to receive good health care, especially if she arrived at an emergency room with menstrual problems or uterine hemorrhage. When Paley herself was experiencing a miscarriage, the doctor she telephoned begged her: “No! Don’t come,” lest he be suspected of having induced a termination. When a friend arrived at the emergency room of a Catholic hospital, she was told she couldn’t be treated until a test confirmed she wasn’t pregnant; the test would take two days. Eventually the cause of the friend’s bleeding was discovered: not a pregnancy, but a tumor in her womb. Paley writes, “Your life, a woman’s life, was simply not the first thing that hospital had on its mind at all.”
How far are we now from all that? Vice President Mike Pence, a man who has already shown his eagerness to restrict abortion provisions, is one impeachment away from the presidency. The possibility that America might return to those repressive days has been rising like a whiff of nightmare, the stench growing stronger and stronger.
Leni Zumas’s new novel, “Red Clocks,” imagines a near future in which this country’s laws have changed — by federal decree, abortion is illegal in all 50 states. Unwilling to risk alienating a major trading partner, Canada has agreed to shore up “the Pink Wall” of its southern border, and arrest and extradite women trying to enter the country to have an abortion. In vitro fertilization has also been outlawed, and soon to take effect is new legislation, entitled “Every Child Needs Two,” that will prevent single women from adopting children. Zumas has a perfectly tuned ear for the way measures to restrict women’s lives and enforce social conformity are couched in the moralizing sentimentalism of children’s imagined needs. The new laws’ twin purposes — to force women to have babies they don’t want, and then to stigmatize and undermine the resulting single mothers — are such a clear and well-constructed extrapolation of the current debate that I doubt any reader will need to suspend disbelief for even a moment.
“Red Clocks” follows four women living in a small town in Oregon as they grapple with this new reality. Mattie is a gifted teenage student at the local school; a few brief liaisons with her inept boyfriend lead to the inevitable outcome, and to Mattie’s counting her weeks of pregnancy and sifting through her meager options. Her teacher Ro is in her early 40s and trying to get pregnant via artificial insemination. Ro counts days and weeks too, hoping for good news, while working on a book about a 19th-century female polar explorer. Mattie and Ro both have their reasons to consult Gin, an herbalist who lives in the woods and whose tinctures and ointments might offer them a solution — although, as these treatments are illegal, Gin’s clock might also be running out. Ro’s friend Susan has everything Ro wants — two children, a rent-free home given to her by her wealthy parents, the seeming stability of a long-term relationship. But Susan is also marking the days on her own calendar, wondering how long she can last in an angry, bitterful marriage.
The friendship/hateship between Susan and Ro, the ways in which each experiences the mere existence of the other as both a reproach and a criticism, is one of the great delights of this lyrical and beautifully observed reflection on women’s lives. Ro cannot stop thinking of Susan’s offhand remark that “you don’t truly become an adult until you have kids.” Susan is preoccupied with the thought of Ro’s questioning her reasons for changing her surname: “How come nobody’s allowed to criticize a woman’s decision to give up her name for a man’s name? Just because it’s her choice? I can think of some other bad choices that—.” Both women keep lists: Ro’s is a self-flagellating inventory of reasons it’s a bad idea for an unwed 42-year-old to raise a child; Susan’s is a lengthy accounting of the unrelenting and grindingly dull routine of raising children: “Herd crumbs into palm. Spray table. Wipe down table. Rinse cups and bowls,” and on and on. Susan’s resentment of Ro’s rich intellectual life means the exhausted mother can’t empathize with the single teacher’s loneliness. But Ro’s corresponding resentment of Susan’s full family life means she can’t empathize, either, with her friend’s boredom and despair. These carefully chosen details feel urgent in our present moment, when women are constantly encouraged to compete with one another to attain an unattainable ideal of our gender.
If there is a criticism to be made of this highly absorbing novel, it is that it feels perhaps a shade too contemporary, and never quite reveals the horrors that would surely follow if the pre-Roe v. Wade days were to repeat themselves. The one disaster that has occurred — to Mattie’s friend Yasmine — is elided from the action of the novel, and rendered soft-focus and ambiguous. The reader is left to wonder what it would be like to be a pregnant teenager of color under these new laws. Mattie’s journey to try to terminate her pregnancy is far less demeaning and terrifying than the hardships endured by some women living in states with few legal, safe abortion clinics. Gin stands trial, but it’s clear from early on that the forces conspiring against her would have seen her accused of a crime with or without the new laws. Having read one’s Paley, one feels while reading Zumas’s book that yes, this imagined dystopia is terrible, but the reality would be far worse.
Maybe, though, it is almost impossible to write the truth about these things without seeming — how like a woman! — hysterical. As with the return of fascism and the measles outbreak, it’s difficult to believe that mere foolishness and complacency could return us to the bad old days until we actually see it happen. And the novel gives the reader much to enjoy in the meantime. Zumas is a skillful writer, expertly keeping each of her characters in balanced motion, never allowing one to dominate the rest. Her cunning device of not revealing the name of each character in the sections she narrates grants us a multidimensional perspective on all four women, highlighting their roles in one another’s stories. It’s a beautiful metaphor for the interdependence of women’s lives — for the way that, as Paley would remind us, the laws that imprison or criminalize one of us narrow the options for all of us.
Floating over the narrative of “Red Clocks,” too, is the figure of Eivor Minervudottir, the subject of Ro’s biography. This Arctic explorer’s fierce yet cool interest in the natural world provides Zumas’s suggested answer to the question: What is a woman when she is by herself? If, as Virginia Woolf posited, “a woman must have … a room of her own” — and, one is tempted to add, a womb of her own — to be able to create, then why are we so fearful of what nonsexual, nonreproductive passions could emerge from female solitude? And, if Minervudottir’s tale never quite coheres, never quite touches the rest of the book, then her very ice-floe remoteness becomes a stark reminder of our society’s detachment from a world in which a woman could simply and happily be left alone.
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