While activists on both sides of the abortion debate have expressed outrage over Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict and its author’s confession of fifteen abortions in as many years, Irene Vilar is right to tell her story despite its difficult truths and the backlash that has come with it. The story is not one of choice but addiction and suffering and ultimately Vilar’s journey to overcome them. It is a story of being defined by one’s history, of seeking out self-destruction, and of finding a way to survive, even if on shaky terms.
In discussing the book, it is important to know a little bit about the women in Vilar’s family. Vilar’s grandmother is Lolita Lebrón, the Puerto Rican nationalist imprisoned for 27 years after she “stormed the steps of the U.S. Capitol with a gun and a national flag in her purse,” a story Vilar chronicles in The Ladies Gallery. (This first book makes no mention of the abortions, glossing over the reality of what Vilar was going through, something she seeks to remedy with her second memoir.) Her mother, Lebrón’s daughter, used a controversial birth-control pill that the U.S. was testing on poor Puerto Rican women, and at age thirty-three she underwent a hysterectomy but received no hormone treatment. Vilar writes of her mother: “Between the uncle who violated her, the rich father she didn’t know, the mother who had abandoned her, and the town that just watched, she was the fight arranged even before she knew it, the almost cliché casualty of colonialism. She was the sacrifice.” When Vilar was eight, her mother committed suicide, jumping from the family’s moving car as Vilar tried to hold her back.
It was with this history that Vilar (who now has two daughters) left Puerto Rico to attend Syracuse University. She fell into an obsessive relationship with literature professor Pedro Cuperman—she was sixteen; he was fifty. More than not wanting children, he believed a family, a house, any actual responsibilities encroached on his freedom. Vilar writes, “He loved to move, to travel, and to dip his feet in seawater. … He loved to lie down and warm his belly on the hot sand. Above all, he loved to do this in the company of a woman. Except something troubled him about this: he might have to pay for the company with his freedom.” He demanded perfection from Vilar, setting out to shape her while she was still young. He tells her how “women’s desire for children killed each one of his love stories, how each of his companions couldn’t endure the high price it takes to live life in freedom.” Vilar strove to please him; he was her addiction even before the pregnancies and abortions, which seem to have been a rebellion against his hold over her.
Indeed, the lives of her mother and grandmother were rebellions against their own—and their nation’s—powerlessness. Both her mother’s suicide and grandmother’s effacement of the individual (she proclaims that she is the Puerto Rican nationalist movement) are a fight against what holds them hostage, and Vilar acts out her own powerlessness through multiple abortions. All three women are extreme in the ways they attempt to overcome their helplessness. This isn’t about abortion as much as it is about Vilar’s relationships—from the past and the present and with herself. This is about finding out who she is and how can she gain any kind of control. It is about a woman who needed help she did not get and could not give herself.
In this sense, the critics of Impossible Motherhood are not asking the right questions. It took fifty-one tries to find a publisher (Other Press) willing to let this story out into the world. What some pro- and anti-choicers alike seem to miss is that this is an individual story, one that does not make a case on either side of the debate about a woman’s right to choose. It is rare for a woman to have as many abortions as Vilar had, which Emily Bazelon points out in her Double X column discussing the book. In her introduction, Vilar admits her abuse of the procedure, her abuse of the right women have fought for in order to have control over their own bodies, but it is a larger question of feminism and selfhood that is really at stake with this memoir.
And while much finger-pointing can be done, much blame laid at Vilar’s feet, (and much has been with death threats, hate mail, and demands that Vilar be put behind bars) the real question is, what is going on here? How did this happen? Why is the need for self-destruction so great that it results in a cycle of pregnancies and abortion—of filling and emptying, of seeking a greater wholeness only to destroy it?
How can feminists condone a hard look at the truth and the questions Vilar raises about women’s empowerment in relation to the men in their lives? In relation to themselves? About what it means to be an overachiever as a way of coping with your mother’s suicide? To be an intelligent, driven young woman and be caught up in the controlling ideas of the man you have lost all rationality for? To find refuge in an abusive relationship? To take care of everyone but yourself?
In writing about her marriage, Vilar never names her husband, using instead “he,” “him,” and “my master.” That’s right. Vilar (and any other woman for that matter) wasn’t alone in getting pregnant. The criticism I’ve seen sounds as if Vilar is solely to blame, but he left her alone in it. In many ways, her pregnancies, subsequent abortions, and more than one suicide attempt were cries for help. He wanted an idealized freedom which meant never being responsible toward anything, including his wife. The abortions, though not the underlying problems, could have been prevented had he simply used condoms.
Which brings me to the book’s main problem. So much is missing. We never see an actual confrontation between husband and wife about the problem of birth control. Very few in-scene reactions allow us in. So much of this is brave to tell, but we are lacking too many scenes that would illuminate the particular horror of Vilar’s story. Instead of the actual details of finding out she is pregnant and what it was like right in that moment, we instead get lines like, “When summer 1995 came around, we were still in Syracuse and I was pregnant again. I didn’t tell him this time.” But how did it happen AGAIN? And what did he say the times she actually told him? I especially would have liked a very clear picture of Vilar “forgetting” to take her birth-control pills. How much reflection and processing happened in those moments? It is only near the end in a much-needed section that we get some clues to what was going on in her mind: “Feelings of inadequacy, helplessness, and disorder faded in the face of the possibilities of my reproductive body. An excitement, hyperarousal, almost euphoria surrounded my maternal desire. The craving gave structure to the confusing morass of events that made up my life.”
An important detail about this book: as much as anything else, this book is about writing and how Vilar became a writer. It is because of “him.” When he found out about her family history, he told her she had stories to tell and that she must write them. So she did. When they were on the sailboat and he demanded his writing time, she wrote as well. That’s how her first book emerged. But in Impossible Motherhood, Vilar regrets the way his ideas invaded her own, that she actually described her mother’s death “as my redemption instead of my doom.” But when she is writing, she doesn’t become pregnant; she “remembers” to take her birth-control pills—which raises the questions of self-worth and the way something creative and productive is able to fill certain voids.
Another striking picture the book offers is of Vilar’s strength and how it grows. First we see the nervous student, the frantic young wife afraid to do anything to upset her husband, terrified of not being perfect—by the end of the book the tables have turned. Her aging husband displays weakness and lets Vilar control the ship during a storm; eventually she overcomes his hold. She becomes the skilled sailor. She becomes the noteworthy writer. But it is he who taught her, he who shaped her, he who led to this second book where she finally escapes, though not without scars and his mark upon her. As despicable as he is, he has taught her to sail, to write. By making her, however, he ultimately loses his power over her. And when she is successful, he is threatened; she has gone beyond the realm of his control.
Parts of this book are sickening. They should be. That is the reality of an addiction and the need for self-destruction and that is what we should be examining—not whether this individual story speaks against a woman’s right to choose. This memoir raises important questions that need discussing and is an effort toward a greater understanding of our ideas about addiction and women’s helplessness as well as empowerment. For further reading, see this interview Vilar gave to the Los Angeles Times.
--C.
(Image courtesy of Amazon.com)
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