Jacqueline Hudak’s column Family Stories appears the first Monday of the month. Here’s Jacqueline! -Deborah

As a feminist family therapist, my work is filled with stories.

I’ve wanted to add my voice to the conversation about Sarah Palin, and was reminded of this particular story from my practice, which I heard several years ago. I finally knew what I needed to say to Sarah Palin.

My patient was a 70-year old mother. I was working both with her and with her grown children, all in their forties at the time. The oldest daughter, who I’ll call Cathy, had been a client of mine, so I was familiar with her particular family story. On this day, only Cathy and her mother were able to attend the session; looking back, it was bit of divine providence.

Early in the session, the white-haired, frail mother looked at Cathy and said, “I’ve been thinking about telling you something. I haven’t spoken about it since it happened forty years ago, and always thought I would take this to my grave.”

The mother asked Cathy if she remembered a time when she was about 5 years old, and was left with her younger brother at her mother’s friend’s house. I knew for certain Cathy did remember. In fact, those days were vivid in her otherwise cloudy memory. The time her mother left her was part of a narrative she constructed about being abandoned as a young child to care for her younger sibling until her mother returned days later without explanation.

“Well, at that time I was dating, and trying to finalize the divorce from your father,” her mother now explained. “I got pregnant, and I knew we couldn’t manage another child. The year was 1964. Abortions were illegal. But I learned about an underground connection to someone who would perform one. I was so scared, and this was against everything I had believed in. Still, I felt it was the only option I had at the time.”

Cathy stared at her mother. Her mother went on.

“Something went terribly wrong, and I started to hemorrhage. I had to be rushed to the hospital. It was obvious that I was having complications from an illegal abortion. The police were called, and they began to interrogate me about who did the abortion, and where.”

Cathy’s mother described how the police shone a light in her eyes and shouted at her that if she did not report the person who performed the abortion, her other children would be taken away. “I was pleading with them to leave you and your brother alone. Begging to just let me go home,” she said.
Cathy and I sat in stunned silence.

It was surreal to gaze across the room and see this conservative-looking 70-year old woman talk about being the victim of such a brutal police interrogation. I pictured her as that terrified young mother in 1964. This storytelling between mother and daughter shifted a narrative that had existed for forty years, and indelibly altered the fabric of their relationship going forward.

I was reminded of the abortion rights march I attended in Washington DC in the late 1980’s. Thousands of women, marching with scraps of paper pinned to their shirts that read “Illegal abortion, 1959” or “Sister died from illegal abortion, 1960.” All of those stories, once silenced, pouring forth and demanding to be reckoned with.

Which stories are told and which are silenced?
What are the consequences for women of all that goes unspoken?
Can we even begin to imagine the relational impact of the silences that mothers bear alone?

That day, so unexpectedly, we were dealing with the consequences of illegal abortion, not just for that individual woman, but also for her web of intimate relationships. She had been compelled to withhold the truth from her daughter, out of fear, out of shame – the result of a policy that denied a sense of mastery over her own body.

While checking out feministing.com the other day, I saw the following in the margin: “If good doctors are not there for women, who will be?” It led me to this amazing site, which I urge you to check out: www.howmuchtime.org. One of the issues highlighted is that most women who have abortions are mothers.

So Sarah Palin, listen up! I must tell you that if you enact your anti-choice, anti- women policies, women, children and families will suffer, more, again, for generations to come. Come, sit and talk with me, Sarah. I have far more stories to tell.

–Jacqueline Hudak