By Kresha Richman Warnock
Clemmie died last year in a car accident, only thirty-five years old. When I read about her death, it made me sad. When I saw how she was remembered, I was also angry.
She had been a student of mine, during the Obama days, glory days for a long-time liberal like me. I was her adviser and teacher at a Midwest University. My students were mostly apolitical, but Clemmie was an active Republican. Her ideology was motivated mostly by her abhorrence of abortion, a belief that any abortion was murder.
It was still a time when you could hold differing views on important subjects and maintain a healthy student-teacher relationship, and we argued about Obamacare and “creeping socialism,” but never about abortion. I thought the issue had been legally resolved, that a woman’s right to choose was part of the American fabric now. I would never have thought that Roe v. Wade would be overturned ten years later. Why rub it in? I thought.
When I heard Clemmie had died, I read her boiler-plate obituary. Since she’d graduated, more than ten years ago, my relationship with her had continued through Facebook, and I owed her the tribute of reviewing those memories. It started with personal messages, back and forth. Clemmie was usually asking for some help. She had trouble holding a job after college and requested recommendation letters. She had issues with a bad boyfriend; my own daughter had just separated from an abuser, and we talked about how to get a restraining order. I sometimes wondered to myself if Clemmie had any other older, caring adults in her life.
After a few years, I heard she’d had a baby and messaged her a note of congratulations.
She wrote back from a maternity home. It wasn’t a Magdalene laundry where Irish “fallen women” were sent, forced to do hard labor, and then have their babies seized from them. This home’s online description emphasizes that women can leave when they want and apparently offers a supportive environment for women who choose to have a baby on their own, including housing and postpartum support. Clemmie had decided months earlier, true to her beliefs,
not to terminate this child, even when his father ducked out as soon as the line on the pregnancy test came up pink.
The tiny boy, Clemmie told me, had been born two months premature and was in the neonatal intensive care unit in a nearby hospital. She was providing him breast milk, until he reached a weight where he could be released. I can imagine her breasts filling up several times a day, pressure building until she pumped out his nourishment and sent the life-giving substance to the hospital. Did he get strong enough to nurse directly from her breasts? She said she was “breast-feeding him,” so I would guess she went into the NICU several times a day, sat down in a rocking chair and helped the tiny child’s mouth surround her naked nipple, suck himself to bliss.
Her parents wanted her to place the baby for adoption, but I don’t understand how she made the decision. Maybe she wasn’t financially stable enough or emotionally stable enough to raise him. I don’t know. Clemmie gave him up to a waiting family. I suppose she was given a shot to dry up her milk. No magic medicine for a broken heart.
In Dobbs v. Jackson, one argument for overturning a woman’s right to choose abortion was that the procedure is no longer needed because of the availability of adoption, foster care, and safe haven laws. The baby has lots of ways to be cared for, it was argued, so if the birth mother can’t do it, the child will be fine. But we women carry that baby nine months in the womb. As our bodies explode, the growing fetus takes all their nourishment from us. Without over-generalizing maternal instinct, most of us are emotionally designed to feed our babies, hold our babies, fiercely love them. It may very well have been the best thing for Clemmie’s little boy to be raised by a healthy, stable family. It still ripped the soul out of her.
Back on Facebook, I move on to reading her recent newsfeed. In her photos, she had gone from a petite, pale, pretty college girl dressed in T-shirts and jeans, to an adult, wearing makeup gracefully, her brown hair highlighted with blond streaks. Her page was different from most of my former students who mostly celebrated the good—new jobs, white lace weddings, growing families. Lots of depression, anger, and self-affirmation memes filled Clemmie’s.
And then there were the posts about her biological son.
The adoption was open so she could, occasionally, post a picture of the child she missed so much. The most recent, the last before she died, is a video: he is singing “Happy Birthday” in his still wispy, little boy soprano voice for her 35th birthday. The caption simply reads: “My heart.”
The public obituary wasn’t the place for her family to say that when Clemmie was twenty-five years old, she made the dreadful decision to give up her living offspring. He is nine years old today because of the choice she made. Honestly, when you put abortion in those terms, it’s hard for us forever-right-to-choice folks not to wince at the complexity of the issue.
The obituary lists those Clemmie left behind, her parents, her siblings, her departed grandparents.
There was no mention of the child, the person who meant the world to her. You wouldn’t have to mention his name. But by denying his existence, the most significant human being in Clemmie’s life was washed away.
Those of us who will die old have time to ponder how we will be remembered. We sometimes write our own obituaries; we decide what songs to sing at our funerals, whether we want our remains cremated and scattered in a sacred space or to be buried in a coffin six feet under. I hope Clemmie’s child’s adoptive parents will somehow keep her alive to him. That, I can only guess, is what she would have asked for.