Miscarriage of justice

Imagine a future where the punishment for not having your baby is a life sentence of hard labor.

By Robert J. Howe

March 24, 2004 | Spring at the Phyllis Schlafly Correctional Facility in Broward County. I'm here to visit my mother, who will be 58 in a week. This is no kindness to her, or me. It is a state-mandated visit. I am a living reproach.

I have never seen my mother when she was not in one phase of pregnancy or another, and today is no exception. She looks tired and done to death. The lines around her mouth have solidified since my last visit; they are set in the stone of her face. She looks -- she is -- angry. She has been angry ever since I can remember.

"Hello, Bryan," she says. Despite her angry expression, this comes out almost gently.

I have spent a lot of time in therapy, ostensibly coming to terms with the fact that my mother didn't want me. I am still required to check my weapon at the prison's armory, lest I take revenge on her. This is absurd: she could not have had any feelings on the matter one way or another, as she didn't know me then. What she didn't want was to raise any children for whom she couldn't adequately provide. The alpha and omega of her life problems revolve around what she considers adequate.

She has a crooked smile, when she smiles, from where her jaw was broken. The arresting officer stepped on her face to keep her from swallowing evidence. If her deadbolt lock had held three more seconds, we would not be facing each other across the scarred wooden table.

"Hello, Elena," I say.

She eases herself into a chair, unnaturally skinny except where she is unnaturally round. Half a lifetime of bearing rich women's children has left her calcium-depleted and stick fragile, and her pale, sweaty face is made more unattractive by the reflection of the green visiting room walls.

We don't talk much during these visits; it hurts less that way. It is part, too, of my mother's strange Bushido. What we can do, is look into one another's green eyes without flinching. My mother understands, as do I, that between us there can be no feelings of guilt or regret. At least, this is what I like to think. Almost everything I know about my mother, I know from reading the official reports. Prison has a way of making everyone's life into roman à clef.

There are no guards in the room, a strong reminder that every word and gesture is being recorded. This is another reason for our sphinxlike communion. It is harder, though not impossible, to get blood from a stone.

All this notwithstanding, there is something she wants to tell me.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

My mother was almost as old as I am now when she had me; that pregnancy was no childish fling.

"You have got to be kidding," was my father's sole and last comment to my mother. He never came home from work that day. The Legal Aid lawyer told my mother it would cost more money than it was worth to have him skip-traced, so that was the end of that.

Abortion was still legal in a few states then, but Florida wasn't one of them. My mother regretted the necessity of an abortion, both because she had wanted what she thought was her "twilight baby," and because she'd have to have it done illegally; New Jersey, the closest free state, was as financially inaccessible as the moon, what with residency requirements and medical records transfer fees. The day my father walked, money became the big issue. My older sister and brother were just six and seven, respectively, and no one else was going to pay to bring them up. My mother couldn't work pregnant, and they couldn't live on what the anemic AFDC provided.

There was a doctor who would do it at Misericordia, in Pompano, and list it as a dilation and curettage, and her health plan would have even paid the bill. But two days before the operation a couple of suits from the National Reproduction Administration took the doctor away in the middle of the night. It seems she'd established a questionable pattern of performing D&Cs on women with no significant medical history.

That's when my mother started answering the classified ads in the back of women's magazines. She was careful. She was patient. She almost got away with it.

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