Health & Science

The Abortion Addict

Author Irene Vilar had 15 of them. What does her story mean for the rest of us?

In her new memoir, Impossible Motherhood, Irene Vilar calls herself an “abortion addict.” It’s a self-diagnosis probably not found in any psychiatric textbook. But it serves as a perfectly good description of her peculiar condition. Vilar had 15 abortions over roughly as many years and writes about them with the same combination of agency and passivity that characterizes any addict’s memoir

Vilar obviously plays right into the hands of pro-lifers, who both condemn and pity her. It’s the old argument about how abortion is “a very sad story for women,” as Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, put it. Women use it as a form of birth control and later deeply regret it, the pro-lifers argue. But if you read past the tabloid details, it’s not at all clear what the implications of Vilar’s story are for law or policy or even for any individual woman getting an abortion. It’s jarring and disturbing, but also incredibly specific and rare.

Vilar’s book shows us that for her and a small group of women with disastrous pasts, repeat abortion becomes the focal point for a lifetime of twisted relationships (though feminists and pro-choice advocates tend to resist the connection). When Vilar was 8, her mother killed herself by opening a car door and throwing herself out of the moving vehicle. Vilar, who grew up in Puerto Rico, remembers trying to hold on to her mother when she jumped. When she writes of the death as a suicide years later, she provokes the rage of her grandmother, a renowned Puerto Rican nationalist who was sentenced to 27 years in prison in 1954 for trying to overthrow the federal government, after “she stormed up the steps of the U.S. Capitol with a gun and a national flag in her purse.” (President Carter pardoned her in 1979.)

Vilar was sent to boarding school in New Hampshire at 10 and to Syracuse University at 15. There she got entangled with a Latin American literature professor. She was 16, and he was 50. She doesn’t name him, and so “he” hovers malevolently over the text, a manipulative, evil presence who marries her but takes advantage of her every youthful insecurity, spiriting her away to live for half a year on his sailboat and seating her far from him at dinners given in his honor.

Over the 12 years of their relationship, Vilar has 12 abortions. (She has three more with the man she moves in with after she and her husband divorce. Bad rebound relationship.) She also repeatedly tries to commit suicide. She almost kills her beloved dog—the one creature she’s managed to take care of—by abandoning him for a week. Throughout these traumas in the first 200 of the 222 pages of Impossible Motherhood, I didn’t hold out much hope for Vilar’s powers of self-analysis. Her story unfolds clearly but in a cascade of clichés: “I had lost my bearings.” “I could never undo what I had done.” She tries vaguely to fit the narrative into a second-wave feminist framework: “Women per se are a colonized people,” writes Robin Morgan in her foreword. But this is unconvincing, given the person of relative privilege whom Vilar became—she is now a literary agent and editor, and this is her second published memoir.

At the end of the book, I started to sit up as Vilar finally seriously explained herself. As she gets closer to honesty, her explanation is likely to enrage pro-lifers and feminists alike, for different reasons. She admits to anger toward her mother. She writes of lying about birth control and then skipping days of taking the pill every month as a game of Russian roulette. “Not knowing how a pill or a handful of them would affect my fertility, my days took on a balancing act, and a high of sorts accompanied the days before my period was due. … Each time I discovered I was pregnant, I was aroused and afraid.” It’s a strange phrase to use about an addiction. She continues:

Tags: abortion, irene vilar, multiple abortion, repeat abortion

Emily Bazelon is a founding editor of Double X, and a writer and editor at Slate.

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