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As we approach the one year anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson, the Supreme Court decision that marked the fall of Roe and the end of federal protections for reproductive rights, Vogue is taking a look at the landscape surrounding reproductive rights. Below, an essay from the novelist Megan Abbott.
In Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story—the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut—a wife confides to her husband an intensely erotic dream involving another man, a stranger. Shaken, the husband attempts to fall back asleep beside her, but he’s aware something’s been changed irrevocably. And so, all night, the couple lays in bed, “as if there were a sword between us…side by side, like mortal enemies.”
There comes such a moment in most long-term relationships. Your partner offers a revelation, large or small, that makes you question whether you really know the person you assumed you knew best. I thought of that Schnitzler passage recently when recalling a conversation I’d had a few years ago, one that has lingered in my mind ever since.
My boyfriend at the time and I were having dinner at a noisy Manhattan restaurant discussing a family member’s efforts to get pregnant. He shared the story of a friend of his who had gone through an arduous but successful IVF journey that resulted in a multiple pregnancy. Perhaps thoughtlessly, I asked him if his friend had considered, given various risks, transferring only one embryo rather than several.
I’ll never forget the ashen look on his face. “Of course not,” he said immediately. It was as if I’d suggested infanticide. For a long moment, I thought I was misunderstanding something or that I had phrased the question wrong. We fumbled a bit, making small talk as plates of pad see ew were set before us. But in my head I was running through all the intricacies of the subject we’d fallen upon, trying to ignore the prickly feeling on the back of my neck. Was it possible that he thought that not implanting all the embryos would be…immoral? Did he think it was…murder? I didn’t dare finish that question in my own head. After all, we voted the same way. We shared the same core beliefs—didn’t we?
Finally, I couldn’t bear the awkward silence anymore, the clatter of our forks and the rising hum of other diners. I asked him why my question had been so shocking to him—after all, we were talking about embryos and he was pro-choice anyway. He replied that, for him, the decision wasn’t political—it was personal. Then—almost parenthetically—he said, “I mean, you’ve never had an abortion, have you?”
When I recall the moment now, it plays like the big jump scare in a scary movie. You know the one: The wife turns over in bed to find her husband transformed into a vampire, a zombie, a pod person, Satan. These movies mine our unconscious fears that our loved ones might betray us, fall out of love, abandon us. But what of smaller revelations, subjects perhaps so taboo we don’t even name them as such? We may feel comfortable articulating an official stance, a political position to each other. But what about the murk of feelings and judgements that lie underneath? Judgements so deeply held that somehow never come up—until they do.
The sword in the bed, as Schnitzler would term it.
You’ve never had an abortion, have you? His question hovered in the air, the cacophony of the busy restaurant seeming to rise and rise as he waited for my reply.
“I’m not answering that,” I said.
“Why not?”
Didn’t he see? In that context the question felt loaded, impossible. This wasn’t pillow talk, it wasn’t a sharing of stories, a swapping of confidences as we pored over our romantic histories together. This was something else entirely.
I can’t remember what I said in lieu of answering. I think I trotted out percentages of the number of women who’ve had abortions. But then I stopped talking because I didn’t want to give him any evidence, one way or the other. I asked for the check. It was time to leave.
You’ve never had an abortion, have you? The framing of the question, the syntax of the sentence tells you the answer he expects. And it tells you the answer he hadn’t been able to fathom until this moment, which revealed everything about the implicit judgment he would make. (Not to mention the uneasy slippage he’d made from embryo to fetus to baby.)
Maybe you’re thinking: Hadn’t this ever come up before? We’d been together at least four years at this point. We’d both entered the relationship feeling battered by recent breakups. The slings and molten arrows of failure and betrayal drove us into each other’s arms with a romantic fervor. “Not this time!” we seemed to be saying, hoisting impossible expectations on each other and our connection. The romantic haze of those first several months made me feel like a teenager, feelings so big they seemed to overwhelm me and certainly overwhelming any pragmatic concerns or any distant ring of warning bells. They drowned out everything else. Nothing felt harder when we were brought down to earth by the same trials that test every relationship: distance, merging lives, lifestyle compatibilities, money. So maybe we wanted to avoid any landmines, any ambushes, or maybe neither of us could manage and more romantic illusions shattered. Isn’t that what Schnitzler’s sword metaphor suggests? We thought we were one but we are in fact violently two.
The entire subway ride home, I played and replayed the moment. We had both assumed we shared the same views. We were both wrong. For him, it was easy to draw a distinction between his political views and personal choices. But what he termed a personal choice was loaded with moral judgment. To me the personal and political were one—because women’s bodies have always been politicized, made into a battleground.
And so my question, his question, my refusal to answer—it became the sword between us. The relationship ended a year or so later. After, I was more wary in relationships when it came to issues such as gender, female bodily autonomy, extending all the way to #MeToo revelations. I had this sneaking fear that, behind many a “progressive” man, there may be a whisper of something else, more deeply embedded views and values. So maybe it was best to choose silence.
But lately, I’ve begun to wonder if today the conversation would be different. In a recent New York Times Magazine piece, Orna Guralnik, the psychotherapist at the center of the Showtime docuseries Couples Therapy, writes about the profound impact that Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other recent high-profile movements have had on her work with couples. Instead of avoiding the hard conversations, the couples dig into them. They run into the fear. In many cases, it has led to breakthroughs, or at least to heightened understanding. “We appear to be coming around to the idea that bigger social forces run through us, animating us and pitting us against one another, whatever our conscious intentions,” Guralnik writes. “To invert a truism, the political is personal.”
Which brings me back to the question I left hanging in the air as we sat before a table of uneaten pad see ew. That dinner took place on the eve of the Trump years (though we did not know it at the time) and long before the catastrophic Supreme Court overturning of Roe vs. Wade last June. Now I think of that time as nearly Edenic, like the romantic fog of our early relationship. And, like that romantic fog, it was in part a fantasy. We were skirting the bigger topics, the taboos. We were assuming we were in harmony rather than risking difference. And it cost us. Progress can be erased in a minute, with an election, with a thoughtless word.
Today, it’s hard to imagine being romantically involved with someone without these big issues of gender, power, and bodily autonomy coming up regularly. And it’s hard to imagine asserting ideological positions without them feeling intensely personal. Because it is personal. And my ex boyfriend’s position, his question, and the way he framed felt suffused with judgment and self-righteousness. And refusing to answer at all felt like the only power I had left.
But, recently, I ran into him. He remembered that fateful conversation as vividly as I did, with regret and confusion. “The minute the question came out of my mouth, I wanted to take it back,” he said. “I heard how it sounded and I felt awful. Like I’d invaded your privacy, made you feel judged. But I didn’t know how to fix it. Everything I said made it worse.”
So maybe now it would be different. Maybe now we’d get under the hood. Maybe, like Guralnik’s patients, we might have had the kinds of uncomfortable discussions that would have made our bond stronger. We might have unpacked all of our implicit biases, our feelings of powerlessness. Maybe, and it only strikes me as I write this, not only did I feel judged by his question, but he’d felt judged by mine. What parent of multiples would want to ponder the idea that, had they made a different decision, they might now have only one of their children and not the others? Were we both too blithe, too careless, oblivious to the ways ideology and the human heart can intersect, collide?
All these questions hover in my head now, as we mark the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling—a shattering event that would have seemed unfathomable as we sat in that restaurant years ago. A devastating wake-up call that most women will never forget. With regard to female bodily autonomy, the political (the legislative, the constitutional) is now more personal than ever, and more urgent, inescapable. Thinking back to that conversation, that sword between us now feels weightier, mightier, deadlier than ever.
And yet, by the end of Dream Story, the husband has had his own nocturnal adventures and shares them all with his wife. It is a moment of crisis. They have both revealed so much. The husband fears for their marriage, but the wife does not. “Now,” she assures him, as if it were true for the first time, “we’re truly awake.”
Megan Abbott is the author of eleven novels, including, most recently, Beware the Woman.