Uncanny Magazine Issue 49, page 3
She joined as a counselor, driver, and sometimes-assistant after accompanying a friend to an appointment. Call this number, her friend’s doctor had said. They only charge what you can afford. And sure as shit, Alice helped scrape fifty dollars together and fifty dollars is what it cost. She looked around that living-room-turned-waiting-room, full of frightened teenagers and weary moms-of-three, and she knew she wanted to help.
Abortion hadn’t always been the purview of psych wards and hospital review boards; it hadn’t always been a begrudging concession on one’s deathbed or a desperate gamble in a germ-ridden hotel room.
It used to be the work of midwives and healers, friends and neighbors, those with wombs learning the workings of their own bodies.
Which is why the members of Jane are learning to perform the procedure themselves.
It is 2091, and Grace has no idea how a womb works, but somebody does, and she’s heading his way.
Even with the blackout, she is too paranoid to hire a driver—everything leaves a trail, everything—and so she takes her little brother’s electric scooter from the garage. Ambrose asked that she convert her money into gift cards rather than transfer it directly to him, and she’s shaken by how many potential pitfalls she hadn’t even considered.
Grace’s destination—a parking lot with many exits, behind a hydroponic garden that used to be a mall—is fifteen miles from her home.
She leaves before dawn. Every streetlight is a searchlight, every passing face a spy. She’s on that stage with her mother again, the bullhorn blaring MIRACLE CHILD! MY MIRACLE CHILD! And she’s in her high school health class being told to abstain, make good decisions, have the integrity to wait, do not lift the veil of her body to an unworthy partner, and certainly do not lift it before being wed. She’s failed her parents and her God and her teachers and her boyfriend and herself, but none of them need to know. She’s going to hell, but not today.
Grace doesn’t make it five miles before there’s a horn blaring and her father shouting out the window and her mother sobbing in the passenger seat. Her father’s wristband is flashing at the proximity—the scooter has an old geolocator tag that Grace had completely forgotten about.
Later she’ll learn the details (Sal panicked and told her mother), but at the moment all she knows is that her parents are here, they’ve caught her, the door has slammed shut.
It is 2083, and Grace’s mother is a single spear in a vanguard. Half the world is burning or flooding and the other half is arguing bitterly over who should take in refugees, if at all. (They’d postponed this future, a hard push in the ’30s and ’40s, a desperate revival of green initiatives, wholly reactive and far too late—but it was only a stall, in the end.)
Amelia is marching because she fears being outnumbered. She’s marching because she believes it’s her duty to save babies and place them in homes with good Christian values, because the scientific establishment is out of control, a cabal of demons on Earth locking an entire generation out of salvation.
She doesn’t know or understand all of the terminology, but she’s equally scathing toward every problem facing America today. Invasions at the border and children making up genders and godlessness in schools and lesbians in every sitcom and the greatest problem of all looming over the rest: the intrusion of technology into natural-born bodies. An entire economy of soulless elites enabling—encouraging!—people to tailor their hormones and alter their organs, to implant med chips and tracking devices, monsters who are giving their tech cute names like rabbit test when it isn’t cute at all, it’s a means to leap at the first sign of conception and take control of a natural process that ought to be left to God’s will alone. (The hypocrisy of installing that same test in Grace will never occur to her; the right people have taken over monitoring it.)
The long and short of it is: her daughter will be raised better.
It is 2092, and Grace is a disappointment to her mother.
“Breathe,” says the nurse.
Grace is breathing. She’s also crying. She read what she could find about childbirth but nothing prepared her for the reality. At one point she is struck by the desperate, irrational desire to call Ambrose—at least he would tell her honestly what’s about to happen. But that temporary profile is long gone; his number long disconnected.
“Breathe,” says the nurse.
Grace is gasping. Her mother is at her side, but they are hardly speaking at this point. There are drugs, but she is in terrible pain. When the anesthesiologist ups the dose and half of Grace’s body immobilizes, she has a panic attack.
The anesthesiologist’s voice penetrates the haze. “…something for the anxiety?”
Grace’s mother says yes. The drugs trickle in, and Grace can’t remember most of what happens next.
It is 2092 and there is only so much comfort modern medicine can provide. Even if Grace’s mother had hired a doula (“You don’t need one,” she had declared. “You have me.”)—even if she had, what could a doula have said to make Grace feel any better? The deed is done.
A nurse holds up the infant, which is squalling in even more terror than its mother.
Barring any gender revelations to come: it’s a girl.
It is 1817, and Asenath Smith is in love with an Episcopal preacher.
His name is Ammi Rogers, and he’s been banned from the ministry in Connecticut for promoting separation of church and state. He works instead on the lucrative traveling preacher circuit, where he’s grown exceedingly popular—particularly amongst the ladies.
Asenath, twenty-one years of age and grown up in a family of independent-minded women, met the controversial figure when he was giving comfort at the bedside of her dying grandmother, God rest her soul. She was smitten. She was smote.
When Asenath realizes she is pregnant, she goes straight to Rogers, secure in the fact of their upcoming marriage. They’ll only have to hasten the date.
But Rogers won’t marry her unless she ends the pregnancy. Most people ignore it when babies are born less than nine months from the wedding, but that courtesy will not be extended to him. His reputation is already under attack.
He gives her medication, but it doesn’t take.
He attempts to use a tool, but that doesn’t seem to work either, so he flees town. Several terrible, pain-ridden days later, Asenath gives birth: a stillborn.
The ensuing scandal is intense—the attempts at prosecution even more so. There is no seduction law in Connecticut, no statute banning abortion. He is arrested nonetheless.
The first trial fails when Rogers abducts Asenath and her sister, locking them up until they agree to withdraw their testimony. They keep their promise and refuse to cooperate at the second trial, but their former statements are presented anyway. In lieu of any charge more accurate, Rogers is convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to two years in prison.
The firestorm rages on. The coercion of Asenath Smith is central to the debate, but the debate does not include ways to ensure that women like Asenath can escape coercion. The General Assembly instead takes aim at medicinal abortion, eager to push midwives and grandmothers (many of them immigrants or formerly enslaved) out of the business—the first antiabortion legislation in the nation. Abortions approved and performed by doctors will remain protected for some time longer, putting these delicate bodily decisions into more authoritative hands.
This conclusion misses the point.
It is 2107, and Grace’s daughter is fifteen years old. They’ve been living on their own for five of those years, finally out of Grace’s childhood home and into a one-bedroom apartment in a downtrodden part of town. Most of Grace’s neighbors are from India, and it’s a relief to escape the constant scrutiny of her former neighbors, a relief to no longer be ducking her head in shame.
It isn’t Olivia that Grace is ashamed of, even though that is what everyone expected of her. (She loves her daughter, despite it all.) Rather, she’s ashamed of how long it took her to get out of that house. A decade of minimum wage shift work and listening to her mother’s remonstrations about her character and the burdens of babysitting and social embarrassment, as if she hadn’t kept Grace under strict supervision for eight months to ensure it would happen—
But it’s over. These past five years have been peaceful. They’ve been revelatory. Her own life is under her own control (to the extent that working fifty-plus hours per week to afford pasta and imitation butter feels like control). Grace has cut ties to her church and only answers her mother’s calls one third of the time. Life isn’t what she hoped for, but she’s learned to live with her life.
And then May comes.
In May, Olivia goes to a party after school and comes home sick. She can’t remember a thing, but she’s aching, she’s distressed, she has nightmares that move like shadows in candlelight. They run a blood workup but whatever was in her system is gone without a trace.
Three weeks later she falls onto Grace’s shoulder, panic-stricken, in disbelief, and in that second before the words tumble out of her mouth, Grace already knows. It’s her rabbit test.
(It wasn’t installed at Grace’s request, or with either of their consent. Med chips are mandatory from age 6, the rabbit test from age 10. It’s been a statewide law since 2102, and Grace can’t afford to leave the state. The protesters who were so quick to condemn its use in private decision-making had no qualms about using it for surveillance.)
“What do I do?” Olivia cries. Over and over. “What do I do?”
Grace’s mouth is dry. The words come out faintly. “I can fix this,” she says. “If that’s what you want.”
“How?” Olivia whispers.
They stay up late that night, discussing the options. Grace tries not to reveal how badly she is shaking. She talks Olivia through the risks of trying to fake a miscarriage versus the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. She tries to give her the information she wishes she’d had, building the conversation without a blueprint.
“Have you run a search?” Grace asks abruptly.
“No, I came straight to you.” Olivia reaches out hesitantly, as if to pull up a screen. “Should I…?”
“No!” Grace claps a hand over hers. “Don’t search. Don’t breathe a word to anyone, not even your best friend, do you understand?”
At the moment, the law only condemns the procurer. Olivia is a minor. Her body belongs to Grace in the eyes of the law, and therefore Grace is responsible for what comes next.
She does everything she can to cover her tracks. An anonymous account from a throwaway device, an exchange location in a terrifying part of town where the network is always down, an even more terrifying night spent rubbing her daughter’s back, coaching her through the cramps and nausea, making note of the size of her blood clots and rehearsing the story they’ll tell the doctor the next morning—
It isn’t enough.
All it takes is one suspicious nurse to flag Olivia’s paperwork. Why didn’t they make an appointment when her rabbit test came up positive? Why didn’t they go to the E.R. at the first sight of blood?
Grace’s background is scrutinized, her location data inspected for mysterious gaps, witnesses contacted in regards to her character. And then, evidence where she didn’t even know to destroy it: a drug test performed on their household wastewater line.
She is arrested for murder, but the public defender tells her they can get it knocked down to voluntary manslaughter if she attests that she was out of her mind, in a heat of passion triggered by the memory of her own thwarted abortion and the lack of a man’s support. Grace doesn’t want to be cast as a madwoman who shoved pills down her daughter’s throat in a fit of old-fashioned hysteria, but it takes the sentence down from twenty years without parole to twelve.
She’ll go away, and Olivia will be remanded into the custody of Grace’s own mother.
And all Grace can think of as she’s led out of the courtroom is: I had five years of my own. I had five years.
It is 1993, and she wants this baby so much, they have been trying and trying; there’s a heartbeat, she can hear it, but there isn’t a brain. Her body won’t let it go, and the doctor says I am very sorry, but I will have to remove it myself.
It is 2015, and she has to sneak in on a Tuesday because her youth group is protesting the clinic on Saturday, and she needs a couple of days to recover or they’ll wonder why she isn’t there. She’ll weep in the recovery room and call the nurse a murderer.
It is 1965, and she has to convince a hospital review board that she’s suicidal, clutching letters from two separate psychiatrists, all for the privilege of spending two nights in a psych ward and having all her bits shaved for no clear reason, but it works, it’s humiliating but it works, and she knows she’s one of the lucky ones for finding a way.
It is 1150, and Hildegard von Bingen, the Sybil of the Rhine, is settling into life as the abbess of a monastery built in her honor. She is preparing to write the medical tomes Physica and Causae et Curae, in which, among many other remedies, she will list her most tried-and-true abortifacients. Officially, the Church considers the practice a sin, but it is not murder until the quickening, that moment four or five months along when the soul enters the body, and so a nun providing this care to her community is not remarkable, but merely practical.
The Romans have their silphium and the Chinese have achyranthes root. The Shoshone have stoneseed, the Lakota have sagewort, the Hawaiians have elixirs of hau, noni, ‘awa, and young kī leaves. The Victorians have their tansy tea and savin, their ergot of rye, their black draught and mallow and motherwort. Millennials have got mifepristone and misoprostol, and the climate generation has gestational blocks and yellow pills droned straight to the bathroom chute.
It is 1750—seventeen fucking fifty—and Mary is consulting a dog-eared copy of The American Instructor, the greatly popular household textbook. It is not an arithmetic lesson that occupies her today—though math will come in useful—but an entry in the medical section at the back.
Mary is reading instructions on how to cure that most common of complaints among unmarry’d Women: the SUPPRESSION of the COURSES. Mary’s courses are suppressed, all right, have been for weeks, and as a widow of certain means and a disinclination to marry again, it isn’t the first time she’s had to consult this home remedy. To cure her Misfortune, she’s got to purge with Belly-ach Root and then drink Pennyroyal Water with Spirits of Harts-horn twice a day for nine days, then take three days rest, then go on again for nine more days. It’s a pain, but better than the alternative.
(It is 1750, and across the vast tracts of North America there are dozens of Indigenous tribes with more than a hundred alternatives, but Mary has just got this book.)
She emits a light, “Fah,” at the warnings and preventative measures listed at the end of the passage, as she always does. They conclude with a prim exhortation not to long for pretty Fellows, or any other Trash whatsoever. Her current fellow is not trash—he is really rather respectable—but Mary has no desire to shackle her person or her estate to another master, no matter how pretty. She watched her mother die on the birthing bed at age 42. She watched her sisters fade to shadows under the demands of overfull houses.
The death of her first husband has given Mary the freedom to move about as she wishes; to run her own household and control her own fate.
She isn’t going to give that up lightly.
It is 2119, and Grace hasn’t given up, but the years have been painful and slow.
Today, she is getting out of prison.
She’s not the same woman she was. She’s angrier. She’s hurting. She has a permanent cough from the last virus to run rampant through the prison population. But after twelve years, she’s just as scared of reentering the world outside as she is of never seeing it again.
Olivia is waiting in the parking lot. They stare at each other for a moment that burns like a California wildfire and then they fall into one another’s arms.
There’s a child in the backseat of Olivia’s car, four years old and squashed nose-first against the glass. He’s named Raley, after the activist who made the marriage of his mothers possible after so many decades in which it was not. The tide is turning on bodily autonomy again. One generation’s fight to choose their partners is fueling the fight to choose the size of their families—a reversal of the historic civil rights progression that will inspire dissertation topics for years to come.
“I missed you,” Olivia says.
“I missed everything.” Grace has held herself together for so long, she refuses to break down in the parking lot ten feet from the damn gate—but she comes close.
And then Olivia says, “I’m speaking at the decision next week. Will you come?”
Grace flinches. It’s too much, too soon. Her world has been reduced to a handful of walls and familiar faces for years, and now Olivia is asking her to stand up in front of one hundred thousand people?
“Please,” Olivia says.
Grace shuts her eyes.
The world continued to burn while she was gone. The last decade has seen ever more flooding and fire, hurricanes and heat waves, collapsing coastlines and viruses named for every letter of the alphabet. Some of these disasters hit the prison, in the form of power outages and spoiled food and illness and neglect, but others were only items in the news, dire glimpses of the life waiting for them outside. Grace has missed riots and assassinations. She’s missed a national strike and no small number of election day bombings. But there are strides being made, small victories being won, and Olivia truly believes that a big one is coming next week.
It’s happening. The final vote. Congress is on the verge of overturning the ban and returning some measure of bodily autonomy to more than half the population. There isn’t a supply chain in place for abortion medication anymore; there aren’t many doctors trained in the scant emergency procedures they are occasionally allowed to perform, and they certainly won’t be welcoming any black-market midwives into their fold to make up the deficit. But they have a president waiting to sign. They have businesses eager to flood the market. They have a multi-million-dollar video campaign ready to roll out, complete with celebrity cameos.
