Katha Pollitt: Pro at RC

Written By: Grace Gardiner '15 and Katya Schwab '17

Published February 2015

Katha Pollit will visit Randolph College on Wednesday, March 4th to discuss
her new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.

Poet, columnist, and keen feminist Katha Pollitt visits Randolph College on March 4^th, 2015 to discuss her book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, an astute and comprehensive work which clarifies the abortion debate and champions abortion as an unquestionable right for women and “positive social good.” Pollitt has contributed work to The Nation as a columnist since 1980 and debuted her “Subject to Debate” column in 1995. In addition to receiving awards such as a Whiting Foundation Writing Award in 1992, the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary in 2003, and an inclusion in the anthology Best American Essays 2003 for her prose, Pollitt has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her poetry. 

On the significance of Pollitt’s visit to campus, Dr. Jennifer Gauthier of the Communications department commented, “I think many people of the younger generation are afraid of the ‘f-word,’ feminism. I want to recuperate that view and see how we can make feminism work for us.” Dr. Mara Amster of the English Department added, “I am thrilled that our students will get exposure to a public intellectual whose work speaks to issues that are relevant to their lives. What is more important to us than our bodies and what we do with them?”

Pollitt’s talk starts at 8 p.m. in Wimberly Recital Hall.

On February 14^th, 2015, The Sundial co-Editor-in-Chief Grace Gardiner spoke with Pollitt concerning her liberal upbringing, her multifaceted writing career, and her insight into the polemical issues facing women today.

Can you remember a particular moment when you were confronted with feminism that made you realize these were the kinds of issues you wanted to explore in your life?

Hm. I don’t know that there was such an “a-ha” moment for me. I think I’ve always, as far back as I can remember in childhood, been conscious of the ways in which girls and women were second class citizens, long before I even knew that there was such a thing as abortion. Probably some piece of it was that my parents had a very traditionally gendered relationship, although my mother always worked and, in fact, made more money than my father. But the balance of power and the balance of attention belonged to him. And I became ever more aware of that as I was growing up.

I was a very good student and I remember telling my parents that I had gotten an A in something—when I was a little girl, this was—and my father said to me, quoting a then famous poem [“A Farewell,” by Charles Kingsley], “Be good sweet maid, and let who will be clever.” I was furious. I was just enraged. I felt so unvalued for my achievements and accomplishments and like I was being told, you know, “Just be a good person; be nice.” And of course we should all be good people, but why contrast being good with being clever? Why can’t you be both? And it would never be, “Be good sweet boy, and let who will be clever.” I grew up in the 50s and 60s and there was a lot of that attitude around, and probably still is.   

I don’t know if it’s a cliché necessarily, but nowadays it seems that there is a trend of young people going to university and experiencing a kind of “eye-opening,” becoming more liberal in their views. Did you have that same experience?

   

Becoming more liberal in college? No. My parents were communists, so I grew up with very radical views. I arrived at college as what many people leave college as.  

When you were at university, did you find yourself instigating movements on campus and pushing forward these feminist concerns that you had?

Well, I went to college at a very different time. The big activism on campus was opposing the war in Vietnam. There was a large student group called Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, and I was part of that, so my political activism on campus was mostly anti-war, rather than feminist, of which there was very little.

Did you always see yourself becoming a writer or was there another career that you had in mind for yourself? 

I didn’t have another career in mind for myself. I wanted to be a writer from a pretty early age, and that’s what I set out to do. For a long time I supported myself as a copy-editor and proofreader, but writing was always the thing that mattered. 

Did you have a genre that you gravitated towards first?

First it was poetry, and the prose was added on later. The first prose I wrote, which I did for a number of years, was book reviews. I wrote quite a lot of book reviews, until I was in my thirties, but gradually, the nonfiction, the journalism and the opinion-writing took over from book reviewing, which I still do occasionally.

Is there any separation between the subject matter that you’ve approached in your poetry and that you’ve come to deal with in your column for The Nation?

They’re pretty different. Maybe if I were a better writer they would be more on the same track. I would bring them together, but most of the prose that I write draws off the news in a pretty direct way. In fact, there are fascinating stories that I don’t write about in my column because they happened two weeks earlier and the whole world is finished talking about them. I have to be pretty topical most of the time in my column. Poetry comes out of a different place. 

While reading your book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, I found myself getting really frustrated with the illogic and inconsistencies of the anti-abortion position. Do you ever find yourself getting frustrated with the anti-abortionists’ arguments and how do you cope with those feelings?
   

Yes, I do find it very frustrating. One thing that disturbs me a lot and frustrates me greatly is that the anti-abortion movement is not operating in a totally honest way. For example, they claim that there is no need for a life-exception to a total abortion ban because no woman ever dies because she can’t get an abortion. This is factually not true. And in fact, right now, anti-abortion people are praising a woman who refused to have an abortion that her doctor told her was necessary to preserve her life. And she died. They give an example of someone who died because she didn’t get an abortion and then say that no one ever dies because they can’t get an abortion. Well, there’s one person. Savita Halappanavar in Ireland is another: she died because Catholic doctors refused to complete her miscarriage for several days because they were waiting for the fetus—the unviable fetus— to die, and she succumbed to blood poisoning. I would respect them more if they said, “Yes, pregnancy is very dangerous. You could die, but abortion is still wrong. Don’t have one.”

I also find it frustrating that the anti-abortion movement constantly claims that if you have a baby, no matter how young you are, how poor you are, how ill-equipped to be a parent you are, and how unready you are, it’s all going to be great: that little baby is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you. I think that there’s a lot of evidence that that statement really isn’t true. Not always, of course—life is big and complicated—but I think for a lot of women it doesn’t work out well. And I would feel better if they would say, “Look, yeah, abortion might solve your problems. You might have a much happier life if you didn’t have a baby right now. But ending the pregnancy is still wrong.”

The anti-abortion movement puts forward a sugary version of life where there’s always help for you—this isn’t true. There are women who have to give up their children to foster care because they can’t afford to keep them. There are women that end up having to stay with battering partners because they can’t afford to leave them. All kinds of terrible things happen. And being able to control your fertility and have children when you’re in a good place is just an undeniable benefit for women, as opposed to having children in a random way, just because you got pregnant. There is no other important decision in life that people are expected to make like that. In every other area of life we really value people being deliberate, people being careful, people thinking about the future. Certainly with marriage that’s true. No one would ever say, “Oh, you slept with that guy. Marry him.” In our society we think of marriage as a pretty careful decision, one that is based on what both partners want. Yet when it comes to having a baby, accidental pregnancy is—according to abortion opponents—the way to go. And when you consider that half the pregnancies in America are unintended, that’s really pretty shocking.

I think the biggest contradiction in the anti-choice movement is that it does not support birth control.  (I’m not talking about individual people who might think abortion is terrible but support birth control—there are plenty of those.) The movement devotes a great deal of energy to making it harder for people to get birth control, even though any person who has studied this matter will tell you that the way to cut down on abortion is to make birth control very accessible. Instead, abortion opponents try to make a case that modern methods of birth control are actually methods of abortion. So with the IUD, for example, you’re potentially having an abortion every month. The birth control pill, too—that’s a “chemical abortion.” Nobody outside the anti-abortion movement believes this, and you’d think that with all the evidence out there that, in fact, the IUD and the birth control pill are not methods of abortion, they would be doing one of two things: they would be saying, “That’s wonderful! We were wrong; bring on birth control.” Or they would be saying, “Well, we still think those methods cause abortions, no matter what the science says, but what we really love are condoms and diaphragms and sex that doesn’t lead to procreation and sterilization for people who’ve had all the kids they want.”

The real bottom line motivation for the anti-abortion movement is that its proponents really don’t like modern sexual mores. They want sex to be for reproduction. I get letters all the time from people, from anti-abortion people, who treat sex as if it’s some kind of contract to have a baby, who say you should only have sex when you’re prepared to become a parent, even for married people. People don’t live like this. They never have. If that were true, people would only have sex about ten times in their whole lives.   

Furthermore, people love to judge women. Our whole society promotes a very judgmental view of women. Look at reality television, that’s all about women: it’s all about tearing women down and watching women tear each other down. And so much of women’s magazines is about women confessing various failings, but you open up Esquire, for example, and nobody is confessing any failings. Women are encouraged to criticize themselves very deeply and to criticize other women very deeply, and, of course, men are very happy to criticize women very deeply. I think that all has a bearing on the way we see women who have abortion: that we never see them as the woman who has three children and she needs to take care of the children that she has; or the woman who has a child with special needs who needs extra care. It’s always the slut or the incredibly selfish woman or the very privileged woman who thinks, by getting an abortion, she can evade the true duty of women, which is to have children. It’s always about some privileged woman who doesn’t want to give up a trip to Europe. And, as I say in Pro, it’s interesting that it’s always a trip to Europe; it’s never camping in the Ozarks or spending time with her mother in Florida. It’s always a mark of privilege, unless it’s a mark of being a teenage or twenty-something slut.  

     

At the beginning of Pro, you give a brief note on your choice of language and discuss why you’re not going to refer to the anti-abortion position as “pro-life” because that term creates a lot of troubling dichotomies that just aren’t really the case. Do you think that same skewing of language plays out in other feminist issues outside of abortion? Have you encountered any?  

Every movement tries to get its propaganda language used by the other side. And these words are chosen very carefully. For example, one of the causes that I support a lot is marriage equality. You know, it used to be “gay marriage,” then it was “same-sex marriage,” now it’s “marriage equality,” which is fine, except if you weren’t part of the discussion, you might not even know what “marriage equality” is. Language is strategic.

“Pro-life” is a genius coinage. Who isn’t for life? But notice the term doesn’t tell you whose life is supported: the fertilized egg, embryo, and fetus. Not the woman. Furthermore, the term “pro-life” lets the anti-abortion movement convey a false idea that it cares about all people. In fact, if the anti-abortion movement cared about all people, it would be in favor of massive support for women and the poor. But it’s not. It is allied with the Republican Party, which is all cut, cut, cut.

    

Do you ever find yourself enjoying different kinds of media—movies, TV shows, musical artists, books—that themselves have problematic archetypes or narratives? If you recognize that these kinds of media are problematic and can interact with them from a conscious perspective, do you feel that interaction is okay?  

I think it’s best to be as broadminded as you can. I love the novels of Philip Roth, even though my views of sex and gender are very different than his. I enjoy Jonathan Franzen, who is anathema to some feminists. I enjoy a lot of sexist writers or writers that other people would call sexist. I think if you limit yourself to art and shows and TV and movies that completely reflect your own values, you’ll spend a lot of nights at home staring into space. I think it’s good to take your critical self to the movies.

Can you share a piece of advice that someone has given you—a mentor, a professor, or an editor even—about how you navigate these thorny political issues that are very polemical and controversial?

Read everything. I think reading is the most important, most basic intellectual activity, and while you’re in college is the time in your life when you have more time to read than you will probably ever have again. So turn off all those screens and read a book. Read difficult books; read the books that you need help from a professor to understand. Your professors are right there! They can hardly wait to help you through old books, difficult books, weird books. This is the time to do it.