Without exception, p.1
Without Exception, page 1
PRAISE FOR WITHOUT EXCEPTION
“A story told with unflinching honesty. I thank Pam Houston for this timely and timeless book.”
—CAMILLE T. DUNGY, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
“Without Exception is a lasting book about the empire’s project of ensuring women find themselves ‘without resources and too overwhelmed to fight.’ Houston has written this book with a demotic unpretentiousness and an irreducible clarity that can only come with having walked the walk, spending years doing the kind of quiet behind-the-scenes lifework that matures the spirit. Houston says ugly true things she doesn’t need to say, things no one would fault her for leaving out, because she knows there’s a reader somewhere who will find the world more hospitable for having read them. To me, that’s rigor. That’s love.”
—KAVEH AKBAR, Martyr!
“Tender and ferocious, Houston weaves a deeply human story about what it means and what it takes—for women, for all of us—to be free.”
—NINA SIMON, Mother Daughter Murder Night
“A full-throated, unapologetic anthem bringing reproductive rights into galactic song. This is a body story from the inside out told with eloquence, immediacy, rage, and courage. Houston’s writing is vivid and clear and filled with wisdom.”
—LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, Thrust
“One of the most urgent texts of our time, Without Exception is not only for fertile people in the United States but for everyone who understands that full humanity is inextricable from bodily autonomy. Houston cuts through political doublespeak that upholds patriarchy and white supremacy, forging connections between abuses against vulnerable bodies and the annihilation of our planet, yet somehow never fails to leave room for the radical, wild joy of what is possible when we refuse to be silenced.”
—GINA FRANGELLO, Blow Your House Down
“Houston writes about difficult and beautiful things with a kind of precision and lyricism that few writers can achieve. She has written an important book, a powerful book, one that challenges the way we think about choices, compassion, and resilience.”
—BRANDON HOBSON, The Removed
“Deeply personal, taboo-busting, Without Exception argues that abortion is a basic health right, motherhood is a choice, and we need to fight like hell for the freedom to make these decisions.”
—JULIE BUCKLES, Honest Dog Books
“A miracle, a revelation, a revolution on the page. Houston tells the stories that every woman, and girl, and citizen of the earth, needs to hear. A ruthless, tender, urgent dispatch that travels to the heart of our struggle as a species. It will leave you transformed, inspired, braver than you were before.”
—STEVE ALMOND, All the Secrets of the World
“Without Exception arrived precisely at the moment when we needed to hear the message that Houston has dedicated her brave life to crafting.”
—FENTON JOHNSON, Keeping Faith
WITHOUT
EXCEPTION
RECLAIMING ABORTION,
PERSONHOOD, AND FREEDOM
PAM HOUSTON
First Torrey House Press Edition, September 2024
Copyright © 2024 by Pam Houston
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.
NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
Published by Torrey House Press
Salt Lake City, Utah
www.torreyhouse.org
International Standard Book Number: 979-8-89092-000-3
E-book ISBN: 979-8-89092-001-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023952526
Cover art by Favianna Rodriguez
Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf
Interior design by Gray Buck-Cockayne
Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
Torrey House Press offices in Salt Lake City sit on the homelands of Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations. Offices in Torrey are on the homelands of Southern Paiute, Ute, and Navajo nations.
For Dr. Andrew Loizeaux, my one true therapist, who taught me the radical act of self-forgiveness, who helped me to be free.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Books are always harder to write than I expect them to be. You’d think I would have learned that by now.
A book’s first purpose is to lead its writer into a place much more emotionally complicated, much more fraught, more entangled, more layered, more confusing than she had expected. It should always end with far more questions than answers. That’s how she knows she is doing it right.
A difficulty particular to this book is that we are living in an abortion landscape that is changing at lightning speed. New articles fell into my email account every day, sometimes every hour, and as the political landscape shifted, the book had to accommodate those shifts. In order for the book to come out on schedule, I have to stop writing today, but news will keep coming and the landscape will continue to change. I console myself with the knowledge that no matter the headlines on any particular day, the freedom to control what happens to one’s own body is not only the foundation for gender equality, it is the foundation upon which all other human rights are built. Regardless of future Supreme Court decisions, whatever ballot initiatives are approved or rejected from state to state, somewhere in this country, right now, someone is being forced into motherhood and marriage before their fifteenth birthday, someone seeking contraception is being told she needs to get her husband’s consent, someone is forcing his wife to have sex in a state where marital rape is not illegal, someone is being denied gender affirming surgery, and someone is being punished for trying to be who they actually are. Therefore, bodily autonomy is always a thing worth talking about.
So, here is a book of facts and impressions in and around the subject of abortion. There are sixty mini-chapters, one for each completed year of my life. I went places here I did not anticipate going. And wound up somewhere I had not expected to get.
1. LIFESPAN OF A HUMAN RIGHT
For forty-nine years, five months, and two days, the United States Supreme Court protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. In other words, it protected a woman’s right to determine what happens inside her own body, and in the long winding road of her future, and in the shape of her one precious life, in the case of unwanted pregnancy. It protected this right whether she was twelve years old and had been raped by her father or another male relative, whether she was twenty-two and date raped after she’d had her cocktail drugged in a bar the first time she spent a summer interning at a non-profit in a big city, whether she was forty-two and happily married and already had four children and the family budget was stretched beyond manageability, whether she was dedicatedly single and entirely career focused and had thrilling unprotected sex with strangers every chance she got.
Those forty-nine years, five months, and two days happen to correspond almost exactly to the span of my reproductive life. I got my first period at eleven years old in January of 1973, the same month Jane Roe took her case against the state of Texas to the Supreme Court. As of last year, I am now, and only just now, fully in menopause, after what seemed like the longest perimenopausal decade in the history of the universe—a decade of joint aches, night sweats, and flashes of rage so intense it was like one minute I was a woman and the next minute I was a cheetah. It was also a decade of coming to terms with myself.
For my entire reproductive life, the government of the country of which I am a citizen, supported by the highest court in the land, protected my body sovereignty, which is more than they did for my mother. And which is more than they would do for my daughter, if I had one, which I do not, nor a son, because I did not want children, I never wanted children, and I was free to have an abortion. More than one. I was free to have the three abortions I needed over the course of my reproductive life, and did so: one in my twenties, one in my thirties, one at forty-one.
2. ROE V. WADE
In 1973, the last year before 2022 when it was a crime in Texas to get an abortion or to attempt one, Jane Roe, an unmarried pregnant woman, filed suit on behalf of herself and others to challenge Texas abortion laws on the grounds of her right to privacy. She was joined in her fight by a doctor who had been arrested for violating those laws and who believed the law, which stipulated that an exception could be made to save the mother’s life, was too vague for doctors to reasonably follow. The state of Texas believed the rights of the not-yet-a-child trumped the rights of the living, breathing mother. This included the right to survive.
The Constitution does not provide the definition of a person, stating only that its protections cover those who are born or naturalized in the United States. By deciding in favor of Jane Roe, the Court made it clear it was skeptical of Texas’s argument that constitutional protections begin at conception, concluding that “the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense.”
In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decided the US Constitution provides a fundamental “right to privacy” that protects a person’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. The Court further determined it was not up to the states to decide when life beg
The Court’s decision divided pregnancy into three twelve-week trimesters, ruling that in the first trimester, a state could not regulate abortion beyond requiring the procedure be performed by a medical doctor in safe conditions. During the second trimester, a state could regulate abortion as long as those regulations took into account the health of the pregnant person. During the third trimester, the state’s interest in protecting the potential human life outweighed the right to privacy, so the state could prohibit abortions unless an abortion was necessary to save the life or health of the pregnant person.
Now that Roe has been overturned, there are many states in which the following horrors are currently taking place: a pre-teen girl who has been raped by her step-father can be sent home to carry her pregnancy to term by a medical professional who is afraid of being sentenced to prison. A woman who is diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy can be delayed treatment until she is septic and in grave danger of death, and even then is sometimes directed to cross a state line for better care. A good Samaritan who has agreed to drive a woman (even one who has a life-threatening condition such as an ectopic pregnancy) across a state line to receive better medical care can be sentenced to up to ninety-nine years in prison.
All of these outcomes make the conclusions reached by the court who decided Roe v. Wade sound almost laughably sane, fair, reasonable, and sustainable. It feels almost quaint to remember back to a time when the life of the mother, and by that I mean not only her quality of life but her literal survival, was important to policy makers, when her survival actually mattered to the body that has been appointed by presidents to protect our most fundamental human rights.
3. ME AND THE WILD WORLD
I love the wild world with all of my being. I love the teacup-blue color of the largest Great Lake, Superior, also known by its original name, Anishinaabewi-Gichigami, as it curls and bubbles against the orange cliffs of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
I love galloping a quarter horse up the damp bed of Medano Creek in September, just after the aquifer has sucked the water back down into itself, creating perfect footing for the horse, a flea-bitten gray draft cross/warm blood named Big Lil’. I love the seven-hundred-foot blonde dunes that rise on my left as we move along, the gray granite Sangre de Christos rising on my right, the willows in the creek bed, just on the verge of changing from green to gold, and the sky a sort of stupefying blue that seems to grow deepest twice a year, once now and again in January.
I love when it rains on the homestead I have lived on for thirty years, soaking the ground parched from this twenty-year-and-counting drought we continue to endure, love the smell of wet blue sage, love how the birds sing so happily when the rain passes, how it quenches the thirst of every plant and animal for miles. Even my parched, aging skin, lips, and hair soak up a little of the moisture.
I love the Sandhills of Nebraska, with their never-ending sunflowers and blue stem and gamma grasses, every farm road beckoning me to go deeper and deeper into the meadows exploring, never getting to wherever I am supposed to be on the other side of the state.
I love the twisted red rock canyons of Escalante in Utah, every color of the sunset, and the paintbrush and globe mallow that burst from between the sandstone’s cracks. I love hiking into Calf Creek Falls early on a winter morning, arriving just at the moment the low sun hits the waterfall, turning the beauty up one more notch into sublime, into fairytale, into a place where no matter how many times I see it, I can’t quite believe it is real.
I love soaking in a hot pool at the very end of the last road on Hornstrandir, the northernmost fjord of the Westfjords in Iceland, staring out over the blue-on-silver-on-blue tapestry before me where the Greenland Sea meets the Arctic sky.
I love hiking on the Grand Balcon in Chamonix, France, from the Mer de Glace to the Aiguille du Midi just above the tree line, watching the north face of Mont Blanc get closer and closer, knowing when I get to the refuge at the foot of the Aiguille I am going to have a salad of endive and avocado and cantaloupe and salmon, the salade du refuge, my favorite lunch in all of France.
I love stand-up paddling the coast of Maine near Brooksville as the extreme tide rushes in like a river, knowing the consequences of falling into that clear, cold water but secretly hoping it happens anyway, because I know that plunge will reinvigorate all of my organs, make my cells feel better for the rest of the day.
I love opening my arms to the sky in Namibia, trying to collect all that color and light and dust and strife and resilience into my own body. Listening so hard as a woman named Angelica tries to teach me a song in her Khoisan language of Damara/Nama, her laughter as I try and fail again and again at the clicks. I love watching the awkward lunge of a giraffe as it gallops across the sand dunes, seeing a herd of ibex grazing in the pink light of dawn.
All of these places, with the exception of Namibia, I get to visit each year because my working life takes me there, the working life I chose over a life of raising children. All of these places are also currently threatened, by climate collapse, by oil extraction and fracking, by water bottling plants and overuse by four wheelers and side-by-sides, by politicians who are on the payroll of the extractive industries, by second- and third- and seventh-home ownership, by corruption and land grabs and greed.
Here is a thing I have always understood. The same machine that wants wolf puppies to be shot in their dens and rivers to be dammed at their sources and pipelines to be constructed across land that has been sacred to humans for twenty thousand years and methane regulations to be loosened and Brazil to be entirely deforested in our lifetime and coal plants to continue making our air unbreathable and mining companies responsible for toxic spills that poison the soil of the Navajo Nation for generations to come to suffer no consequences, that is the same machine that wants control over women’s bodies, the same machine that wants women pregnant and without resources and too overwhelmed to fight for a world in which we all can thrive.
4. HERE SHE IS AGAIN
(Every time I begin a new book, I swear to myself that this time, my mother won’t make an appearance. But here she is again.)
My mother ran away to Broadway at the age of thirteen to find her fortune, fleeing the oppression and anger of her aunt and uncle’s home in Spiceland, Indiana, the home in which she was raised. My mother’s mother died due to complications of childbirth with my mother, and it wasn’t long before my mother’s father fled the scene. That was the end of that, until sixty some years later when he was on his deathbed and my mother got a call from her estranged older sister, saying their father wanted to shake her hand. She took a plane to Florida, shook his hand, and came back in twenty-four hours, and that was the end of that for real.
My mother was a wild child, far wilder than I ever was, and I have grown to respect that about her. She had ongoing problems with alcohol and violent men, even before she met my violent father.
By her own account—bad men and booze aside—my mother loved the life she had before she married. For nearly three decades she was a singing, dancing acrobat: flying and cartwheeling all over Europe with Bob Hope and a team of talented women, coming back to New York in between wars, and sharing the stage with the likes of Nancy Walker, Walter Pidgeon, and Hermione Gingold. Stills from those performances covered the walls of my childhood home.
My mother told me she had more than one back-alley abortion in her pre-Roe v. Wade showgirl and USO days. She did not tell me whether that number was two or twenty-one. While she had many talents, she would be the first to admit, should she return from the dead and be questioned, that mothering was not one of them. She knew it and I knew it and we spoke about it often. Even before I was old enough for us to have those conversations, I turned to the Earth for my mothering.
