Wrapped in the Flag (35 page)

—D
ICK
A
RMEY
, F
ORMER
U.S. H
OUSE
M
AJORITY
L
EADER
(R-T
EXAS
)
¹

Just a few weeks after John Schmitz was crushed in the 1972 elections, I jumped into my new crusade. My decision to go full-bore seemed hasty and impetuous to my friends, but I had had a toe in this fight for five years, ever since I’d married my college sweetheart.

Only a couple of months after our wedding, I found out that I was pregnant. It was a shock, but we accepted reality and turned to our friends for moral support. For the most part, the men toasted my husband’s virility with lots of beer and hilarity, and I tried to get as much information as possible from the women I knew who’d had babies. I was surprised that they knew little more than I did about the whole process. Their main suggestion was to “trust Dr. Nabors.”

Dr. Tom Nabors,
the
Catholic obstetrician on the north side of Dallas, where we were living, assured me that I was healthy. He offered a few guidelines for my pregnancy: smoking—okay, drinking—okay, weight gain—no more than twenty pounds. At the end of the first visit, he patted me on the arm and sent me home to rest. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

A month later, I complained about my violent morning sickness. “It’ll be over soon,” my doctor told me. “You’re three months along now and we can relax.” He calculated my due date as early October—give or take—and sent me home. That evening, I was too tired to eat supper. I crawled into bed while it was still light and I instantly fell asleep.

Out of a foggy gray haze, something big and heavy slammed down on my belly. I could hear myself whining while I twisted and turned to get away from the pain. A voice called out to me. “Wake up,” it said. “Wake up now.”
I awoke, sweating and terrified. The dream slowly faded until I knew I was in my own bed and I was safe. Next to me, my husband snored quietly while I pulled the blanket around my shoulders and relaxed into my pillow.

Ten minutes later, unable to fall back to sleep, I realized how wet and sticky I felt—like I’d rolled in warm maple syrup. Slowly, I got out of bed and tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom. Under the glare of the overhead light, I saw that blood had soaked the lower half of my nightgown. I grabbed a washcloth, wet it, and started wiping my legs. Almost immediately, blood covered my hand and dripped onto the floor.

“Oh God,” I prayed. “Help me. Help my baby.”

My husband, who must have heard me get up, poked his head in. He took one look at the blood, pressed a towel between my legs, replaced my gown with a clean one, and wrapped me in a blanket. In just a few minutes, we were racing through the Dallas night toward Methodist Hospital.

For the next hour, the emergency-room staff tried to slow the bleeding. After a lot of stabs, a nurse finally found a usable vein and got an IV going. Someone else drew blood for the lab while an aide brought ice chips for me to suck. Over all the comings and goings, I could hear the interns who examined me huddled at the back of the room whispering.

“Where’s Dr. Nabors?” I asked.

“On vacation,” one man said. “The doctor covering for him will be here soon. Try to get some rest now.”

For some time, I drifted in and out of consciousness until a voice pulled me back to reality. “I’m Dr. McCarty. I’m going to take care of you and your baby.” This new doc poked, prodded, and pushed forever, it seemed, before he announced, “You haven’t lost the baby.”

The doctor proceeded to talk about things I didn’t understand, things I’d never heard of before that night: dilatation and curettage, cervix and placenta, spontaneous miscarriages, and trimesters. Today, young mothers pore over pregnancy guides and websites, but in 1967, there were few resources available. One,
Pregnancy and Birth
by Alan Guttmacher and Anthony Ravielli, was not recommended to me.
²
Dr. Guttmacher favored contraception—an absolute no-no for Catholic women—and his book would never be suggested by a Catholic doctor. I know this is hard to believe, but in the world of pregnancy and childbirth education, 1967 was still the dark ages.

So, while this young doctor explained and educated, I focused on five words: you . . . haven’t . . . lost . . . the . . . baby. That was all I heard and all I wanted to hear. My attention homed in on the little being clinging to life inside me. I rubbed my belly and willed my unborn child to live. “Your momma loves you,” I said.

Nothing around me broke my concentration until I heard Dr. McCarty say, “While I’m struggling to save your baby, there are women paying doctors to kill theirs. And no one says a word.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, suddenly alert.

“These women don’t want to be pregnant, so their doctors do procedures to end their pregnancies,” my doctor explained. “It’s happening all over, maybe even in one of the ORs in this hospital tonight.”

“I’ve never heard of that. What happens to the babies?” I asked.

“They’re cut into pieces and thrown in the trash.”

“I could never do that,” I swore. “Never.”

Early in the morning, I was sent home with strict orders to stay in bed for the next five days. By then, if all went according to plan, the danger of miscarriage would have passed. My brother volunteered to stay with me during the day so I wouldn’t be tempted to sneak out of bed to answer the door or fix lunch. Luckily, Jay R. turned out to be an eager helper and a terrific one-man entertainment committee.

By day three, the bleeding had slowed to a trickle and I ventured out of bed long enough to take a shower. Later, however, I awakened from an afternoon nap with severe cramping. After what seemed like forever, I passed a mass of tissue and blood, which I carefully gathered in a towel. Tears poured down my cheeks while I said the words of Catholic baptism—
I baptize you, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost
—words reserved for a priest, except in an emergency. I carried the towel with the remains of my baby to the hospital.

After a D & C, Dr. McCarty pronounced me young and healthy. “You’ll have other babies,” he told me.

“I don’t want other babies,” I said. “I want this baby.”

Later, when I called my mother, she echoed the doctor. “You’ll have other babies.”

“I don’t want other babies,” I repeated. “I want this baby.”

“Don’t be so emotional,” Mother said. “Offer up your suffering to Our Lord.”

Like so many women who’ve miscarried, I grieved alone. I held the memory of that tiny being in my heart, and I believed I had sent a new saint to Paradise. While I mourned the life I’d lost, I nursed my outrage toward those women who deliberately killed their babies. “Wrong, wrong, wrong,” I said. “Absolutely wrong.”

In September of 1969, my first son was born. He was the most wonderful
creature I’d ever seen and absolutely perfect. Before I left Dallas for Wisconsin, I had my last appointment with Dr. McCarty. Much of our conversation is lost to me now, but I do remember his alarm about the movement to legalize abortion. “All loyal Catholics will have to do their part to stop abortion. That includes you, Claire.”

Dr. McCarty was at the forefront of the early anti-abortion movement, then an almost totally Roman Catholic movement. As Roy White, the executive director of the National Right to Life Committee, said, “The only reason we have a pro-life movement in this country is because of the Catholic people and the Catholic Church.”
³
The anti-abortion position of the Church was so absolute that there were calls for the excommunication of Justice William Brennan, the only Catholic on the Supreme Court, when he sided with the majority in
Roe v. Wade
.
⁴

In 1971, when I was pregnant with my third baby, my mother gave me a copy of
A Child Is Born
by Lennart Nilsson, the best-selling book chronicling life before birth.
⁵
For the first time, the world inside my womb became visible to me. The little beings captured in those amazing images seemed almost otherworldly with their transparent skin, delicate bones, and paper-thin eyelids. Each one floated in a water world, secreted away until it was big enough and strong enough to live outside the womb. In one photo, the tiny one sucked its thumb, an image that brought me to tears.
⁶
I remembered how my son had found his thumb just after he was born, and I knew he’d been sucking away in my womb for months.

When I was tired, uncomfortable, and sick of being pregnant, I turned to Nilsson’s book. The photos reminded me that my body had built a perfect nursery for my baby. Tired, uncomfortable, and sick of being pregnant was a small price to pay for that precious life.

The feminist movement talked about a woman’s absolute right to control her body, but I couldn’t get my head or my heart around that idea. The photographs proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that though my baby was, for a short time, living in me,
it was not me
.

Many years later, I learned that most of the fetuses Nilsson photographed had been removed from their mothers’ wombs. As Sandra Matthews and Laura Wexler say in their book
Pregnant Pictures
, “They were
dead
embryos.”
⁷
I would have put it differently: those little ones had been aborted.

The Roman Catholic Church teaches that human life begins at conception, the instant when the sperm and the egg unite and God infuses a soul into
that new being. To destroy that life is the most terrible sin, one punishable by eternal damnation.
⁸
Most Catholics don’t know, however, that the Church has not always taken that position. In fact, for several centuries, the Church taught that the soul arrived in the body long after conception. St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest Catholic theologian, claimed that the male embryo became human at forty days. Pity the poor female embryo; she didn’t become human for eighty. But after all, according to Aquinas, the female came from a defective seed.
⁹

When this topic had come up in my theology class, back at the University of Dallas, the boys thought it was hilarious. For me, it was nonsense. But, gender wars aside, Aquinas’s teaching was Church law for hundreds of years.

By the fifteenth century, the Church had refined her position: The developing fetus had no absolute value in its own right. It could be killed, without sin, in order to save a mother’s life as long as the death of the fetus was not the doctor’s first intention. Welcome to the Catholic principle of the “double effect.”
¹⁰
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, no abortions were ever permitted in any circumstances. Even in the worst-case scenario, a good Catholic doctor stood aside while both mother and baby died.
¹¹

In the twentieth century, the Church returned to the “double effect” doctrine permitting a doctor to remove an ectopic pregnancy as long as he didn’t intend to kill the embryo inside. Unfortunately, the same compassion did not extend to those other hard cases: rape and incest. For Catholic doctors, it was never permitted to perform an abortion for a girl who had been raped, even by her own father.
¹²

At the time, these twists and turns meant little to me. The Church said that abortion was wrong because it killed a human baby; I agreed. The feminists claimed that a woman’s right to control her body was more important; I didn’t agree. But until late in 1972, I wasn’t about to “make a federal case about it,” as we used to say.

Then I met Dr. Charles E. Rice, professor of law at Notre Dame Law School and a friend of my parents. By the time I sat across the table from Charlie—he insisted I call him Charlie—I’d read his book
The Vanishing Right to Live
in which he reviewed the Catholic positions on the “life issues.”
¹³
Given his strict views—no contraception or abortion ever—I was surprised to meet a man who was only fourteen years older than me.

During dinner, Charlie delivered a passionate argument against abortion—punctuated with a vivid description of a vacuum machine ripping the developing baby out of the womb and turning it to mush. That evening I lost my appetite and my neutrality.