Flashback 1998: ROE V. WADE; The debate no court can settle

     Someday we're going to look back on abortion as one of those issues that captivated our nation's attention when we should have been focused on actual problems. 

     I've certainly been writing about it for a long time. Two dozen years ago, for the 25th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, I found two women on opposite sides of the fence, and dug up some background on the ruling itself. Alas, this could run in the paper tomorrow with very little alteration. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     Both women wept at the news.
     When the historic Roe vs. Wade decision on abortion was announced 25 years ago this week, both Mary Anne Hackett, at home with her five children, and Sue Purrington, at her job, were overcome with emotion. Both vowed to change their lives but, in keeping with one of the most controversial Supreme Court rulings of the century, those vows were at cross-purposes.
     "I cried because I was very happy," said Purrington, who went on to work for abortion-rights groups. "I made a pledge in my life that what I was going to do was make sure Roe would stay legal."
     "I remember reading it and crying," said Hackett, president of Illinois Right to Life. "I couldn't believe the land of the free and the home of the brave would allow mothers to kill their children. I became very actively involved on that day."
     Roe vs. Wade, which upheld a woman's right to have an abortion, at least in the first two trimesters, was a landmark, and 30 million legal abortions have taken place since then.
     All because of a case that started with a 22-year-old Texas street person named Norma McCorvey, who had two children and, pregnant again, wanted an abortion, which was illegal in Texas in 1970. Calling a lawyer she thought would find her an abortionist, she was drawn into a group of activist lawyers searching for a pregnant woman to use in a lawsuit to overturn the state ban.
     McCorvey was first called "Jane Doe," but that reminded her of the tag put on a woman who had died giving herself an abortion; it was changed to "Jane Roe." Few realize that McCorvey, unable to get an abortion, had the child.

     She later changed her position, and now she is strongly anti-abortion.
     The "Wade" was Henry Wade, the Dallas district attorney, who lost the case and appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court.
     Abortion was not entirely banned in the United States before Roe. Instead, each state decided individually the circumstances under which women could have an abortion.
     A few states permitted abortion; others banned abortion altogether or, as in Illinois, permitted it only when the life of the mother was at stake. About 500,000 legal abortions were performed nationwide in 1972.
     The number of illegal abortions is harder to determine. Women with money went to Mexico or to states with open abortion laws.
     Poor women were in a tougher situation. Desperate for abortions, they went to great and sometimes fatal lengths to end their pregnancies. They douched with bleach or peroxide. They used paint brushes and cocktail stirrers and pencils and knitting needles. And yes, they used wire hangers.
     "Of course they did," said Dr. Quentin Young, who worked at Cook County Hospital in the 1970s, when as many as 90 women at a time were in the hospital's septic abortion ward, suffering from their own attempts or from the bungling of back alley butchers. "They hurt themselves, perforated their uteruses, they came in bleeding, with difficult-to-treat infections."
     Anti-abortion activists contend that whatever barbarities were inflicted on women in those pre-Roe times have been dwarfed by the plight of the unborn caused by easy access to abortion.
     "Abortion has destroyed America," Hackett said, adding that women who have abortions universally regret it, leading sad and lonely lives spent missing their dead children. "It has destroyed respect for human life and had a brutalizing and sad effect on women, pretending that they can kill their children and just walk away as if nothing happened. Millions of women are suffering from it."
     Purrington, who had an illegal abortion as a teenager in 1960, still recalls the fear and humiliation she suffered.
     "The result of Roe is it institutionalized the right of a woman to feel safe and was a significant step in women having control over their own lives," Purrington said. "Roe meant that most women did not have to die in back alleys, or fear for their lives."
     Robert Bennett, a law professor at Northwestern University, finds two surprises from a perspective of 25 years:
     "First, how little closure, societally, the court was able to bring to the abortion issue by rendering the decision. And then, how much staying power the decision has had. It didn't seem to end conflict out there in society. But it has held."
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 20, 1998

What did you expect?

     The U.S. Supreme Court being poised to eliminate American women’s legal right to have an abortion was not on my totalitarian bingo card for this week.
     It shouldn’t be a surprise, because we’ve been headed in that direction for decades. Such a development, if true, would be in perfect harmony with our repressive times, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine abroad, while at home free elections are curtailed, teachers muzzled and books banned.
     What’s the common thread? Authoritarianism strikes at weakness. That’s why it imposes such a topsy-turvy kind of morality: attacking gays but not adulterers, undocumented immigrants but not those who cheat on their taxes. The bully doesn’t pick on someone stronger.
     Hence women. It might be news to you that women occupy a degraded, second-tier position, still, in 2022 America. But they do, obviously, and overturning Roe would be ample proof. Here, honey, we’ll decide that for you ...
     Otherwise, this push would be off-brand for libertarians. The same people who collapsed writhing and crying over the intrusion, the oppression, the tyranny of the state demanding they wear a cotton mask during a deadly pandemic manage to jump up, revivified, and rush into your gynecologist’s office, plop themselves onto a low rolling stool, and invite you into the stirrups.
     That the news leaked, a draft Supreme Court judgment shared by Politico Monday night, is significant. While Washington beltway types, of course, bemoan the departure from standard legal practice, it is a reminder that when zealots are allowed to steer law away from the will of the people — 59% of Americans think abortion should be legal — the first casualty is the law.

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The judge or the horse.

Judge Isadore Himes, far right, at Harrison Street court in 1911 (Chicago History Museum).

     When is something interesting, and when is it merely trivia?
     I suppose it depends on who you are.
     Right now, I'm a guy methodically picking through the galley of his upcoming book, in the last weeks before it is pried out of his hands forever, checking every proper noun, if I can, bumping into more mistakes along the way than I'd like to be finding at this point. Though generally confirming facts and fleshing out the occasional vagueness. 
     For instance, for an entry about an arrest in 1912, a defendant appears before Judge Himes at Maxwell Street court. At the time, judges were often referred to in the newspaper by only their last names, and one task is to fill in the full name, if possible. Plus double check "Himes"—an odd name. Could it be a typo for "Hines?"
     A quick plug into Google turned up an interesting mix of hits: some about Judge Himes, the Chicago jurist, a former prosecutor. And others about Judge Himes, the thoroughbred horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1903.
     My immediate, fleeting thought is that it was some nom de plume, a forgotten journalistic trick—maybe they called all criminal judges in newspaper stories after that horse, a kind of disguise, the way the Tribune's movie reviewer in the 1950s was called Mae Tinee.  

Judge Himes, after winning the Kentucky Derby

    

     But I found the full name of the human judge, Isadore H. Himes, quickly enough, and the American Classic Pedigrees web site cleared up the mystery of the connection, explaining that the judge was a friend of owner Charles R. Ellison, who named the horse after him.
    Which led to another question. What did the judge make of the horse? I checked the Tribune and the Daily News for 1903, and while there was plenty reportage about the horse, no one seems to have circled back to sound out the judge, even after his namesake won at Churchill Downs. Given the aggression of reporters at the time, you'd think someone would. Or was the dignity of judges such that nobody would bring up that topic for a story?
     Then there's the question of how the horse came to be named for the judge. Here I found a 2012 edition of Chicago Jewish History, a publication of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society that, citing a descendant of Himes saying the horse owner found himself in front of the judge, was pleased with the ruling, and named the horse after him in gratitude, which does make sense.
    Mere trivia? Well, the Kentucky Derby is running this weekend, so that makes it relevant, sort of. I suppose I could dig deeper, and try to flesh the story out more. But honestly, I have a book to proofread, and given the number of flubs I'm fixing, I'd better get back to it.

Why does peanut butter taste so good?

 

    This morning I had my usual breakfast: a whole grapefruit and a Bays cinnamon and raisin English muffin with a tablespoon of Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter.
     I really like Smucker’s peanut butter. It tastes great, far better than the natural peanut butter I remember from the 1970s, a bland beige paste found at places like the Sherwyn’s health food shop on Diversey.
     And I wondered: is this a trick of memory? Could natural peanut butter have gotten better? And if so, how? They don’t add anything. Just peanuts.
     One way to find out.
     “I love this stuff.” I wrote to Smucker’s, asking to talk to a brand manager. “We would discuss, first, why the product is so delicious.”
     That was Monday, Dec. 6.
     The response: nothing.
     I tried again the following Monday.
     “It seems to me, that if Smucker’s can’t respond to this, what is it you respond to?” I asked.
     And the next Monday.
     “It’s been two weeks now. I’m beginning to lose hope.”
     On the one month anniversary, I wrote to company CEO Mark Smucker, explaining what I had in mind.
     He put me in touch with what seemed like a crisis PR firm in New York. We had some lovely conversations, but the question remained unanswered. They were working on it.
     As January went by, I reached out to my alma mater. Why is Smucker’s so bad at this? Is this a common corporate problem, or perhaps the result of red state anti-media paranoia? The company is based in Ohio.
     “Without knowing anything about Smucker’s, that surprises me,” said Jonathan Kopulsky, a senior lecturer on business marketing strategy at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “The marketers’ job is to tell the story of their brand. You’d think, this may be an opportunity. You’d think, ‘Hey, a reporter from a major daily—why wouldn’t we want to use that to tell our story?’ That surprise me. I can’t think of a possible explanation why they wouldn’t use that.”
     The best we could imagine was reflexive secretiveness.
     “In a hypercompetitive world, what you regard as mundane operational things may be viewed as tipping their hand to competitors,” suggested Kopulsky.
     I had another theory: could it be that newspapers are so diminished that we aren’t worth the time to communicate with?
     “The relevance of newspapers as an advertising medium is dramatically down,” said Gerry Chiaro, who teaches brand communications at Medill. “I can build up my social media following to hundreds of thousands, even millions. Sometimes it can go viral. I’d rather spend my time on that, if I can find influencers to speak to my community.”

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Whole Paycheck

     Whole Foods was never a good fit for Englewood. Too expensive, too pretentious, though credit to them for trying to bring Italian lemonade and bulk grains to a low income urban food desert. But Whole Foods closing down there after six year years, announced this week, was foreordained.
     I live in whatever the opposite of a food desert is—a food cornucopia, I suppose. Sunset and Jewel—several Jewels—and Mariano's and Aldi and Costco and even Fresh Farms, that great Russian emporium in Wheeling, with fantastic slavic bread and Eastern European cookies, everything immaculate and wonderful. I'm sure I'm leaving a few out. 
     The one place I never go to is Whole Foods because, well, I explained it in 2005:

SAVE THE EARTH

     Too bad there aren't more hungry, homeless people in the northwest suburbs, because they could graze themselves full on 12-grain and seed bread, cider-roasted salmon with fruit chutney and other exotic free tastes at the Whole Foods in Deerfield. When I stopped by I had just had lunch and wasn't even hungry, yet still found myself nibbling cubes of Fratelli Pinna Brigante cheese and chunks of gourmet brownies. A far cry from the sizzling slices of kielbasa that smock-wrapped, beehive-hairdoed ladies used to prepare in electric fry pans and hand out stuck on fuzzy toothpicks at the A & P.

     I couldn't read descriptions in Whole Foods of the coddled apples and happy chickens fed only natural grains without thinking of the Romans, and their candied lark's tongues. Organic food is decadent, even worse than the excesses of the past because it is disguised as virtue. The whole world is eating beans grown in the sludge of old bauxite mines and gnawing meat that has hung on hooks in the market for three days, while we're paying $10 a pound for maple mustard roasted turkey from birds raised on Mozart.
     We're not paying for the food, really, we're paying for the packaging, and its implication that our lettuce was grown by pueblos and delivered by ox cart. I stood in gaping wonder at "American Flatbread," an "all-natural pizza baked in a primitive wood-fired earthen oven." At first I focused on "earthen" as the marvel. "I tried pizza from metal ovens but it tasted so . . . technological."
     But then I came to savor "primitive." Not any old earthen oven, mind you, not one of those fancy Southwestern stucco domes with a door and everything. No, our oven is a rough mound of dirt and we shove the pizzas in a hole and they sit serenely baking amongst the burning yew wood, wood specially grown for us in renewable Brazilian forests by our own joyful peons. And we, we are not charmless suburbanites yapping on our cell phones as we roar up to Whole Foods in monstrous vehicles that burn more money in gas each month than most people in the world earn in a year. No, we are gentle, rainforest folk, crouching under the lush green canopies of our self-regard, using our fingers to eat organic groats from wide bowls, groats gently washed with spring water, a bargain at $7.99 a pound.

                  —published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 28, 2005

Wilmette Notes: Best Worst

From "Spring Awakening" on stage at the Porchlight Theater until June 2.

 

    One cost of COVID's hidden costs is all the theater we've missed. A loss I barely considered until I read today's report from Wilmette Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey:

By Caren Jeskey

     Germany, 1890. The usual societal dilemma, feed the rich or feed the poor, was at hand. Chancellor Leo von Caprivi was not popular with the elite, as he sought to also address laborers' rights. A sheltered girl, a student of a cruelly authoritarian institution of higher learning, had just turned 14. She begged her mother to tell her the truth about where babies come from. Her sister had just had a second child. The girl, Wendla, could wait no longer. Her mother relented and sat down in a sturdy high backed wooden chair. Wendla hurried to sit on the floor at her mother’s feet, laid her head in her mother’s lap and looked off into the distance, waiting. Mother’s face was panic stricken. She had no idea what to say. She finally covered the girl’s face with her apron — oh the shame of it! — and launched in.
     “For a woman to bear a child, she must… in her own personal way, she must… love her husband. Love him, as she can love only him. Only him… she must love— with her whole… heart. There. Now you know everything.”  

     And that’s all she got.
     I watched this scene unfold in a front row seat on opening night at the Porchlight Theatre this past Thursday. I was the fortunate recipient of a +1 ticket from a dear friend who's more important than I. When Wendla stood up and sang to us, desperately trying to figure out what the heck her mother had just said, time stood still in that way that only live theater can do. Being in close proximity to humans emoting strongly, rather than looking at pixelated actors on a screen, is an intimate affair. More so now. I felt exposed and awkward about eye contact, seeing as we were so close. I felt vulnerable and did not stifle sobs when a young character committed suicide. It was all so tragically relevant.
     Some of you know that I am describing "Spring Awakening," Frank Wedekind’s first major play, that he wrote in Germany with a backdrop of social unrest and mores based on repression, control and delusion, rather than any semblance of the realities of human behavior and sexuality. Welcome to 2022 America.
     Now that Wendla understood she was to love a man in her own special way, and her budding curiosity and hormones longed to know more, she soon thereafter had her first tryst with a young man from her school (that was of course segregated by assumed gender). She had no idea what was about to happen, but his kisses and expert cajoling led her to become more and more relaxed, and then submit. Earlier we heard him speak to a friend about the art of charming a woman from the point of saying no to saying yes. You can call that what you will.
     When repression reigns supreme, terrible things happen.
     Wendla did not know that what she and the boy had done is how babies are made, since no one ever told her. She was forced to have an abortion, and died. As we creep back to the dark ages around the right to choose, the play was apropos. Humans have always, and apparently will always, fail at nurturing others on an epically large level.
     The good news today is that on a much smaller level, we can find ourselves at a quality performance with expert musicianship and a well trained and talented cast on a cool Spring night. You and I will likely not be forced to an untimely death with a dangerous medical procedure to avoid shame. I feel ever so grateful to have been born with opportunity.
     I delightfully found myself sitting next to an actor and Jeff Awards judge who pointed out that the room was full of writers. So this is where the cool kids hang out. I like it and I will be back for more.

     “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” — Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

     It is, has always been, and perhaps will always be.

‘I don’t give up’

     Most graduates from the City Colleges of Chicago don’t participate in the traditional cap-and-gown ceremony. Only 1,424 students from the seven colleges — Harold Washington, Harry S. Truman, Kennedy-King, Olive-Harvey, Malcolm X, Richard J. Daley and Wilbur Wright — will walk across the stage at Wintrust Arena this Sunday for a handshake and a diploma cover. More than 2,000 graduates will pass on the opportunity.
     Why?
     Jobs. Family obligations. Too busy.
     But Maria G. Delgado will be there.
     “It’s important for me to go to the ceremony because it brings closure,” she said. “Closing a chapter but beginning a new one. Closing a cycle.”

Maria Delgado

     A long cycle: 28 years. Delgado started taking classes at Wright College in 1994 when she was 19.
     Now she is 47.
     “I grew up in Wicker Park, then moved to Humboldt Park,” she said. “It was a very bad area back then, lots of shooting, lots of people dying. I’m surprised that we made it out.”
     She was born in Mexico’s most violent city, Zamora, Michoacán. Her mother was 14. Her parents, Trinidad and Virginia Montejano, fled to the United States when Delgado was a child. They stressed the importance of education, and are another reason she is going to commencement on Sunday.
     “It honors my parents,” she said. “A way to thank them for everything they did, a way of paying them back.”
     Which some might say she’s already done. After Delgado began college, her parents grew ill. She tried taking classes while being their caregiver, but it became too much. Her mom needed a pacemaker; her dad, a liver transplant. Delgado started having panic attacks.
     “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “Once they told me she had three- to six-month life expectancy, I couldn’t retain anything. I withdrew from my classes.”
     Her mother died in 2008; her father died in 2015. But by then Delgado had her own difficulties. She struggled with mental illness.

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