Public Comment

I think I love August with city council on vacation. This coming week looks wonderfully light. 

DO NOT MISS Love Letters to the Park This is the absolutely lovely book that is just as the title states a love of a park and the public response to the Berkeley Marina Area Specific Plan (BMASP) from April to July 2022 compiled and edited by Martin Nicolaus. You can read the pdf with this link https://chavezpark.org/new-book-love-letters-to-the-park/ 

After you read it, sign the Petition for saving Cesar Chavez Park https://chavezpark.org/petition-to-save-chavez-park-from-bmasp/ and send off an email to city council at Council@cityofberkeley.info Council needs to hear from you.  

After we skate over the news, I’ll get to the main topic of this Diary. 

As I start this Diary the country is in a whirl over the FBI descending on Mar-a-Lago, the Espionage Act listed on the search warrant and Trump taking the 5th over 440 times in the Manhattan District Attorney investigation of the Trump business. I confess nothing would make me happier as an end to Trump’s lifetime of criminology (the book Criminology on Trump should drop on my doorstep any day) than to see him in an orange jumpsuit without the hairspray for the combover. 

Here in Berkeley it is blessedly quiet now that we have a stay at Peoples Park. It is thanks to the Peoples Park Historic District Advocacy Group that we have the attorney Tom Lippe representing the group and the stay to stop construction. You can bet UCB won’t give up and there are court battles ahead. Everything you need to know to donate to the cause to save Peoples Park is in this link: http://www.peoplesparkhxdist.org/donate-now/ For full disclosure, I dug out those paper checks I rarely use and dropped off my donation. 

Nothing of consequence happened at the city meeting I did attend. Two house additions were approved at the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) with the promise of full schedules for the two meetings in September. For those who are finding six and eight story buildings as their new neighbor attending the DRC meeting this coming Thursday would be a very beneficial introduction to the process. All the details are in the Activist’s Calendar. 

I lost focus on the rambling Civic Arts Commission Grants Subcommittee meeting Friday morning and exited early. 

WETA (Water Emergency Transportation Authority) is meeting on Wednesday at 10 am for planning and 1 pm for the board meeting. Seems the WETA Chair and staff took a trip to Sweden and Norway to check out zero emission ferries. That report should be interesting. I wonder if they did any sightseeing while they were there, like ferry rides to interesting places. 

Going through the financials, fares covered only 16.7% of the FY 2022 operating costs. Without Federal COVID-19 rescue funds, WETA would have been deeply underwater. Those funds covered 44.1% of total operating expenses. For June, the last month of the fiscal year 2022 when WETA reached 80% of pre-pandemic ridership, fares covered 19% of the operating cost and federal assistance made of 67%. It is unclear how Berkeley expects WETA to pick of the cost of a Berkeley pier and ferry and contribute to bailing out the Marina fund. It looks more like WETA is looking to Berkeley for the bailing out. 

I deviated from my reading plan for the week and picked up This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wicklund with co-author Alan Kesselheim. The title really describes the book; Dr. Wicklund’s personal journey, patient experiences and the threats and harassment that physicians and their families face to provide this critical piece of reproductive health care. Wicklund writes about security escorts, being armed, colleagues who are murdered, the constant danger from anti-abortion extremists and support for her chosen career. 

With the Supreme Court ending Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion is on the ballot nationwide either directly with ballot initiatives or indirectly through who is elected. While national survey after national survey places 60% of the population supporting access to abortion, that is not the case for the Republicans who dominate legislatures in 26 states. They are banning abortions where they have the power to do so. If Republicans take over the House and the Senate, they are promising a nationwide abortion ban. 

Despite an overwhelming vote in conservative red Kansas by 59% on August 2 to maintain access to abortion, just days later, in Indiana, the state that allowed a pregnant 10-year old from Ohio access to an abortion, Governor Eric Holcomb signed into law a sweeping ban on abortion starting at conception with exceptions only for rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality or when necessary to prevent severe health risks or death. 

This November we will be voting on California Proposition 1, the Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment. 

A “yes” vote supports amending the state constitution to prohibit the state from interfering with or denying an individual’s reproductive freedom, which is defined to include a right to an abortion and a right to contraceptives. 

A “no” vote opposes this amendment providing a right to reproductive freedom in the state constitution. 

The East Bay Times editorial board started their August 14 editorial with this, “In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, it’s essential that California voters amend the state Constitution to ensure reproductive choice.” 

No matter how we vote in November, even with an expected overwhelming “yes” to protect reproductive freedom in California, Federal law overrules states. What happens nationally matters. 

In all the discussions, books, shows for or against abortion, one thing that is rarely mentioned is the number 39. Thirty-nine is the average number of years between the onset of menstruation and menopause. Later life pregnancies are not that common, but the possibility of pregnancy hovers over all of those years. 

Nearly four decades is a long time and there are bound to be birth control, family planning failures. If the desired family size is two children the chart in The Turnaway Study gives the expected number of additional pregnancies which might be anywhere from 0 to 7. The zero is with the Implants and nine would be needed. Withdrawal is the least reliable. If abortion is used as birth control the estimate is 30 early medication abortions or 25 second trimester abortions.  

That 39 year time may even be longer in the future. Though the average age is twelve, the onset of menarche (first period) is slowly moving earlier and may start when a child is as young as 8 years old. Some of those most rabidly anti-abortion oppose terminating a pregnancy in a child’s little immature body. 

The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion by Diana Greene Foster is the only book that really brings fertility, abortion, pregnancy and the impact on women’s lives into the full frame. I picked up the audiobook first from the library, but there is so much information I purchased the book to keep as a reference. 

I continually marvel at how access to birth control and access to abortion really changed women’s lives. Women these days have so many opportunities and there are still doors to open, but with the loss of abortion all the gains made since Roe v. Wade in 1973 are slipping away for millions of women in this country. 

The Turnaway Study chronicles the differences between women who had or were denied an abortion. Women denied abortion were poorer, stayed in abusive relationships longer, had to give up career and education plans. Their children were also impacted, especially with the higher incidence of poverty. Surprisingly women who continued their pregnancy and gave up the baby for adoption had the poorest emotional outcome. Pregnancy is not without risk. Two women in the study died of complications and this was even when the study deliberately excluded women with life threatening pregnancies. 

Managing the national juried art exhibition “Choice” for Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art (NCWCA) in 2013 was really a turning point for me. That is when I learned to start the conversation on reproductive rights, abortion at every opportunity, really anywhere and everywhere I happened to be next to another person long enough to strike up a conversation. The conversations spilled over to friends and I opened up about my own abortions. 

I didn’t have a wrenching personal story to tell. I never risked my life for an illegal abortion. I was never conflicted in my decision for any one of my three abortions. I was and am just so grateful abortion was legal when I needed it. It was always the stories from other women that were far more interesting or the stories they wouldn’t tell that I knew about.  

I think of one friend who shared she had multiple miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy before her daughter was born. I wonder what kind of care would she get if all this was happening right now if she lived in one of these draconian states that bans abortions. Would she get the medical care she needed or would the doctors be so afraid of losing their license and being sent to prison that they would withhold intervening until her life hung by a thread? 

Would those miscarriages be misinterpreted as a self-induced abortion? Would she be in a legal battle instead of a grandmother with a daughter and two grandchildren? These aren’t far-fetched questions to ponder anymore. Even without these post Roe questions according to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women 1300 women were arrested or charged in the U.S. from 2006 to 2020 for their actions during pregnancy. 

There is the friend from my childhood who had an illegal abortion when we were about twenty. I wouldn’t have known about it if it hadn’t gone so badly, she nearly died. Her mother told my mother and my mother told me. I had this text exchange with my friend some weeks ago, after a lunch where two of us talked endlessly about the end of Roe and our support for access to abortion while my friend sat silent. 

Me: Have you ever talked openly about your own abortion. I was waiting for you to say something when I said I had three. 

Friend: No, not going to. Haven’t talked about mother’s either 

Me: At one of my public speaking engagements I spoke about all three of you. 

I don’t know why she won’t talk about it, maybe it was too traumatic, maybe she has regrets or maybe she is afraid of the repercussions if it got out in her closeknit circle of friends or at her church. After all her mother confessed on her deathbed that she was condemned by her pastor when she revealed to him that she had had an abortion at the onset of WWII. 

The “three” in this text message is her younger sister who is also a close friend. One night several years ago when I started a discussion on abortion, my own and her sister’s brush with death from an illegal abortion It never occurred to me that she didn’t know. Oops! These two sisters are incredibly close and shared everything or so I thought. As the evening wore on, we talked about how we are shamed into silence over what is so common for so many of us. We spoke of her mother’s deathbed confession and then she talked with me about her own abortion. 

I knew the two sisters spent a week together after the fall of Roe. I called the younger sister and asked if during that week with the end of Roe on the news day and night, did they ever talk about their own abortions or access to abortion. The answer was no. 

The question that keeps coming up for me is how is it that three women, a mother and her two daughters, two sisters, all three who love each other very much and are incredibly close couldn’t share and talk with each other about this one thing, abortion and the abortions that each one of them had? We are all in our 70s now and still holding back. Where does that leave us if women who have had abortions and that is around one in three to one in four of us continue to wall ourselves into silence? 

We are in the majority and yet, because we have been led to believe that all we need to do is send off another donation and we can or should hide in the closet of silence and abortion shame, we have been outflanked by Concerned Women of America (CWA) the well-organized, evangelical activist group of over 3 million promoting biblical values through advocacy and all the other anti-abortion organizations. It is long past time to learn from the CWA strategies, 98% of them vote, 93% have signed a petition, 77% have boycotted a company, 74% have contacted a public official and nearly half have written a letter to the editor. That is a lot of activism. 

How many of us does it take to come out of the closet to talk to family, friends, neighbors, strangers to solidly secure reproductive freedom? How many of us does it take to outdo the activism of CWA and like groups? Certainly, thus far it is not enough of us or we wouldn’t be in this downward, backwards spiral. 

Dr. Wicklund writes in her book that she always gives her patients the option of seeing the tissue removed if they want to. She describes one exchange with a young woman, who wanted an abortion and whose extended family was trying to stop her, 

“’That’s all?’ She says when I show it to her. She escapes into her own thoughts for a minute and looks at me with hesitation. ‘What is it you’re thinking I prod.’ ‘How can it be that my uncle believes I am less important than that tiny bit of tissue you just took out of me?’” 

Abortion was my choice when my method of birth control failed, but choice is not just about having access to abortion. It encompasses all choices, if and when to be a parent, method of contraception and termination of pregnancy. It is about celebrating a wanted pregnancy and weeping over a pregnancy not fulfilled. It is terminating a pregnancy without regret or feeling conflicted with loss wishing circumstances were different. Choice is all of these things. Choice is what each of us must be free to decide for ourselves. 

To have that choice we need doctors nurses, midwifes, doulas, pharmacists who are on our side and if things go wrong, complications arise, they must be free to intervene and not hamstrung by abortion bans. 

It is up to us where we go from here. And, how we vote is critical