What would Vivian do?
Vivian Zwick was a pillar of the pro-choice and the Jewish community of St. Louis. She was the first woman elected as the president of the Jewish Light Board of Trusteess in 1975 (Jewish Light Aug. 10, 2022). I met her at several Planned Parenthood events, and I was inspired by her long history of reproductive activism. She died the day after her 106th birthday in April 2022, and until the end of her life she cautioned that the end of the protection of rights guaranteed by Roe vs. Wade, would represent a return to the perils of illegal abortion and dangerous conditions for reproductive healthcare that she had seen before.
There were many other St. Louisans —doctors, nurses and individuals with no specific medical training, whose work began long before Roe, through an “underground” of sorts that fought for reproductive choice.
They knew firsthand about women who died from unsafe abortions. They knew families who could not afford to feed, clothe and care adequately for their children. They knew that safe reproductive choice was essential for the welfare of our communities.
As I’ve followed the fallout from Missouri’s abortion ban and the effort to overturn it at the ballot box, I’ve been reflecting on the secrecy around sex and pregnancy that I experienced growing up in the pre-Roe days.
What I learned as a child and adolescent about sex and reproduction came from my older sister and brother or from eavesdropping on conversations among the adults talking about their health, family history and the sometimes salacious details of gossip. I didn’t know where to turn to ask questions or to evaluate the information I received from these purloined and fragmented conversations.
I understood that pregnancy outside of marriage was a sin or at least a source of family embarrassment and community shame. These babies were “illegitimate.” My mother seemed to be more focused that I did not get pregnant in my teens than if I would go to college.
By my college years, the momentum for change was growing and a new information environment made it more possible to avoid unintended pregnancy, but it took the Supreme Court’s recognition in Roe that a person had a right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term to truly give us autonomy over our lives and bodies.
Roe diminished the market for what had been at least three decades of profitable sales of white infants and the practice of coerced adoptions in this country. For the last 50 years — from 1973 to 2022, the right to choose, to plan a family, or to have an abortion for medical or other reasons was protected by law and guaranteed to individuals. Doctors were trained and hospitals equipped to provide safe, legal abortions and other care for difficult pregnancies.
No longer. Now family-planning and individual choice have been seriously curtailed across this country; the threat in Missouri is ever-widening. After the Dobbs decision terminating Roe v. Wade as federal law in June 2022, reproductive choice and reproductive health care were thrust backwards, exposing women, men and their families to choices that lay outside their private, family considerations.
Women and men are being asked to surrender our most intimate health and family decisions to others. We are being asked to allow political decisions to override our physicians’ knowledge and our own religious and moral teachings and to empower others to make choices about what’s best for our family or child.
Reproductive choice matters. Choice provides accurate, nonjudgmental sex education. Choice offers facts and sources of information about the needs of children, their families and the community resources that support them for the long-term. Choice is a part of how we care for other people’s children, for families that may look different than our own families of origin and how we build resilient, supportive communities. Reproductive choice should not be confused with morality or immorality.
Choice is not only a reference to the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy through abortion. Family-planning choices, by whatever means and according to one’s religious and ethical beliefs, are the foundation of family health and community stability.
Recently, news coverage has reported cases where the lives of mothers and babies were endangered because medical practitioners in states with restrictive practices — like Missouri — fear lawsuits and loss of medical licenses.
When Dobbs ended constitutional protection for reproductive health care two years ago, Missouri legislators and officials immediately chose to go back to the days before Roe. This year, as Missouri voters, we expect to have a choice at the ballot box in November. A proposed state constitutional amendment — if approved by voters — will restore reproductive choice. Your vote counts, and the choice is yours. Me, I’ll do what Vivian would have done.
