on roe vs. wade // knitting needles
(I wrote this after Amy Coney Barrett was appointed to the Supreme Court. TW that this has some graphic descriptions of abortion.)
I’m knitting a sweater for my boyfriend. I’m slow at knitting, so it’s taking me months, even though I’m using the simplest pattern possible. I chip away at it in the evenings when I’m watching TV or listening to podcasts. Slowly a skein of dark green yarn is transformed, through a series of simple loops, into a warm, wearable object. I think about how in Puritan times, housekeeping and so-called women’s work were progenitors of witchcraft as we know it – how turning milk into butter or a sheep’s fleece into clothing were their own type of alchemy, viewed with suspicion by men.
Knit one row, purl the next. Stockinette stitch, which gives you the classic “sweater” appearance. The “right” side is smooth and flat, composed of neat rows of interlocking “V”s. The “wrong” side is bumpy and knobbly, though somehow cozy and inviting in its own way. The right side is more satisfying to look at, but I’m fonder of the wrong side, the side you wear closest to your skin.
I think about how women used to use knitting needles to perform abortions. Fitting, really, that they took symbols of domesticity and used them to reject motherhood. I can’t stop thinking about it when I’m knitting, when I’m watching the blunt tips of my needles weave in and out of yarn, how it would feel to push them up inside me. The thought is enough to make me nauseous, dizzy. In medical school, I inserted speculums and swabbed cervixes for infections and cancer; I know how soft and vulnerable that tissue is, like a ripe peach. You could plunge a knitting needle in without much resistance. I get cramps on my period, not debilitating, but enough of a dull ache that it makes me cranky and preoccupied. I try to imagine having the will to induce a much deeper and sharper pain than that. My needles click against each other and I wonder how much blood would come out if I were to lie down, spread my legs, and slide one inside me.
I should be used to blood at this point. I’ve seen litres of it by now, hanging in transfusion bags, soaking through bandages, pumping or oozing from various wounds. I’m a surgery resident, which is much less glamorous than it sounds, and I get frustrated by people who try to portray us as heroes. I’ve noticed that writers, with their writerly eye, tend to focus on the most banal features of a hospital, as if these details somehow have meaning in themselves. There’s always mention of an IV dripping, fluorescent lights flickering, a TV playing silently in a waiting room. It’s as though the implied presence of death lends an aura of significance to everything around it. But when you work in a hospital, and illness and death is part of your daily routine, the TV is just a TV.
There is nothing glamorous about death. In books and movies about back-alley abortions, women are portrayed as martyrs, as tragic heroines. Female pain is made into a spectacle; authors and directors focus with lascivious attention on the beading sweat, the grimacing mouth, the back arched in agony. Even in our death throes we cannot escape the male gaze. Male suffering is unnatural and unacceptable, but female suffering is expected, even celebrated. In reality, it’s as brief and inconsequential as flipping a page. There is nothing noble about suffering or dying in pregnancy or childbirth. There is simply a woman, a human being with hopes and thoughts and dreams, who is here one moment, gone the next.
Insert the tip of one needle inside a loop of yarn; wrap another loop on top and slide it from one needle to the other. I dream of violence. I dream of driving by anti-abortion protesters and hurling chicken blood in their faces. I dream of burning down the houses of the wealthy and powerful, who purr with catlike satisfaction as they sentence women, poor women, to suffering and death. I dream of riots, of broken glass and burned-out cars, while I fly a flag with a pair of crossed knitting needles. In the meantime, I pass loops of yarn from one needle to another, and my knitting grows.
prguitarman
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