Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 29, 1994 TAG: 9403290031
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LORAINE O'CONNELL ORLANDO (FLA.) SENTINEL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For almost 12 years the Winter Park, Fla., therapist has seen that tragic dimension played out in her office by women who never came to grips with their feelings about their abortions.
Many had abortions as young girls and "ended up internalizing what the culture says about abortion," Bercov says. "I've seen women carry this guilt for years, and it ends up sabotaging their lives."
Moved by the torment of these women, Bercov, 47, has joined the growing chorus of feminist voices calling for a new perspective on abortion.
Through her self-published book, "The Good Mother: An Abortion Parable," Bercov says that women troubled by their abortions may be helped by acknowledging their relationship to the fetus and by seeing themselves as good mothers in the sense of having exercised maternal responsibility.
Let's be upfront about it, Bercov says in an interview: Abortion is more than just a legal right. For many women who choose abortion, it's the taking of "life at some stage of development."
Abortions "are sacrifices we make for our own selves." Women have a right to look out for their own welfare, as well as an obligation to make sure they are ready emotionally and financially to rear a child, she says.
Despite 20 years of legalized abortion, however, society still gives women negative messages about it, Bercov says.
Feminists for years have tacitly - and sometimes not so tacitly - told women abortion is merely a medical procedure, Bercov says. No muss, no fuss. Get it over with and forget it.
The feminist position on abortion has been "if we go out and acknowledge that this is a difficult thing, we'll hurt our cause," Bercov says. "But a lot of women are being hurt by the silence."
Ellen Hone, a senior adviser to the Orlando chapter of the National Organization for Women, agrees with that assessment.
"From being involved in the movement, I'd say there has been at least a self-imposed reluctance to talk about" the emotional pain experienced by some women because abortion opponents would use it to support their position.
Meanwhile, groups that oppose abortion continue to tell women who abort that they're callous, sinful and - worst of all - killers.
Thus, women have been discouraged by both pro-choicers and anti-abortionists from discussing their experience of abortion, culminating in what Bercov calls a "culture of silence."
In "Fire With Fire," feminist theorist Naomi Wolf ruminates on this silence that continues to surround the 1.5 million abortions performed annually in the United States.
"If feminism does not give women room to talk about the event in terms that are right for them - including the language of loss, of death and mourning - without being called traitors to the movement, we lose our greatest moral legitimacy, which is our claim to reflect women's real experience."
Hone says the perspective of Bercov and Wolf is valid, and that most feminists will be ready to hear it now that the legality of abortion isn't in as much peril as it was during the Reagan and Bush administrations.
"We can't let radical anti-feminists keep us from doing the work we need to be doing to help women," Hone says. "To have a public dialogue will be very good."
One woman who has experienced the silence around abortion is a 36-year-old Orange County, Fla., housewife who requested anonymity.
A client of Bercov's, this woman had two abortions in her 20s and says she "wasn't able to tell anybody outside my mother and one girlfriend until I talked with Kris."
During her counseling, the woman decided that "in order to accept myself about this, I had to find out who my real friends were.
"If my friends were going to abandon me because I'd had two abortions, then they weren't really my friends to begin with."
What she discovered was that "the more women I talked to about it, the more women said, `I went through it, too' - and they couldn't talk about it either."
"The Good Mother" tells the story of a fictional woman struggling with conflicting emotions preceding and immediately after her abortion.
The woman's friend, Jane, comforts her and asks, "What's the hardest part of all this?"
The woman's reply: "That I feel like a murderer . . . a bad mother."
Still, the woman says, she wants to "find a way out of the shame eating away at me that doesn't mean taking back what I've worked so hard for: my right to be the only one to say what goes into or comes out of my body."
It is then that Jane suggests a previously unthinkable notion to the woman:
"What if you really weren't a bad mother? What if you were a good mother, after all? A good mother, a woman who makes a responsible decision - for herself and her child."
A ludicrous notion, say abortion foes.
"Women have the experience for so long of being treated as chattel themselves, that to turn around and treat our children as property is counterintuitive," says Carla Walsh, acting executive director of Feminists for Life in Washington.
"Instinctively, women recognize that, and this is one reason why abortion causes them so much pain.
"The whole necessity of reframing the question to enable you to live with having an abortion demonstrates that we cannot look at what abortion is and live with it," she says.
But many women don't see abortion in Walsh's terms. For them, it isn't taking a life. And they don't care for Bercov's contention that they were mothers - however briefly.
Indeed, that assumption is appalling to one 24-year-old woman who requested anonymity.
"I never considered myself a mother," she says. "I consider myself a mother to my cat much more than to my pregnancies."
Pregnant twice as a teen-ager, this Winter Park, Fla., health professional had no qualms about aborting both times.
"It wasn't a fetus," she says. "It was like a cancer. It was, `OK, get this out of me and let's get on with my life."'
Bercov concedes that many women feel no sense of loss.
"Not every woman has to feel that way," she says, "but I'm writing for the women who have those feelings and no place to deal with them."
In fact, clinic owners say that only about 10 percent of women suffer great anguish over their abortions; another 10 percent sail through with no emotional baggage.
But 80 percent "have some stuff to work through," says Charlotte Taft, director of the Routh Street Women's Clinic in Dallas and a leader in the move toward holistic treatment for abortion clients.
"It could be some sadness, a feeling of loss or failure," Taft says. "They could be angry at themselves."
Bercov says that a good place to begin the healing process for women who choose abortion is on the front lines - in the abortion clinics.
It is there, she says, that abortion can take on a different perspective if the clinic staff is "open to finding ways to attend to the spiritual, emotional and psychological experience of abortion rather than just the physical."
Slowly, clinic owners across the country are taking tentative steps toward this holistic approach - but not without difficulty.
"We have two problems," says Patricia Baird Windle, owner of the Aware Woman Center for Choice in Melbourne, Fla.
First, the anti-abortion activists "keep us so busy" fending off protesters that clinics don't have time to do the therapeutic work they would like to do with clients, she says.
Then there's the question of cost.
Typically, abortions cost between $275 and $350 nationwide, Windle says.
"In keeping the fee low enough to meet the needs of poor women, we've done ourselves out of having any surplus to apply to other things."
Nevertheless, efforts are under way to help women come to terms with their decision both before and after the abortion takes place.
For example, in Windle's clinic, "we provide an opportunity for women to look at the fetus if they'd like to effect closure, but we don't push it on them," she says.
Bercov advocates some type of ceremony for women grieving over an abortion.
In "The Good Mother," the woman undergoing the abortion names the fetus and conducts a farewell ritual - an idea proposed earlier by feminist theorist Ginette Paris.
Paris, author of "The Sacrament of Abortion," writes, "A ritual that is well-adapted to the circumstance can help them (women) feel the love, the sadness, and the regret associated with an interruption of pregnancy."
Says Bercov:
"Women are good, we love our children - even sometimes the ones we abort."
The Good Mother: An Abortion Parable is available by sending $5, plus $1 for shipping and handling, to: Kris Bercov, P.O. Box 141434, Orlando, Fla. 32814
by CNB