Voice in the Wind: Julia’s Very Modern Abortion

Voice in the Wind, pp. 286-302

There was much discussion in last week’s comments sections of how Phoebe knew Julia was pregnant, when Julia didn’t know that herself. I initially thought, in reading through the passage, that Phoebe made a lucky guess based on Julia’s frayed nerves. In other words, Phoebe didn’t know Caius had become physically (and emotionally) abusive toward Julia, and assumed that the only pregnancy hormones could explain her actions. But, on a closer look, there’s also the reference to Phoebe putting her arm around Julia and sensing “significant” change. But if Julia was that far along, one would definitely think she would know that—and Caius as well.

I’m as lost as you all on this one.

Regardless, Julia is pregnant. Rivers doesn’t let us see Phoebe’s conversation with Julia about it, instead bringing us in later, when Julia goes to Calabah distraught because she doesn’t want this pregnancy, and because Caius won’t touch her. Julia lets drop that Octavia came by and told her of Caius’ infidelity, adding to her pain. Julia begins ranting about Octavia—their friendship has never been all that healthy, and it hasn’t gotten better over time.

Part of the reason that Julia is upset with Octavia is that Octavia has been going to the ludus and seeing Atretes every day. Julia feels that Atretes should be hers, because she saw him first on the road near Capua, and is angry that Octavia goes to see him while she herself is “locked away in this house like a prisoner.” She doesn’t explain that statement, though—who is locking her up? Caius?

Calabah rose from her couch, wanting to shake Julia. She had seen the gladiator Julia mentioned. All brawn, beauty, and passion. Completely barbarian. How could Julia be attracted to him? It was beneath her. It was unthinkable.

I wish Rivers would explain this a bit further. What is Calabah’s problem with gladiators, exactly? Is it that time spent on gladiators detracts from time spent managing relationships with men with actual power, wielding influence from behind the scenes? Or is it that she wants Julia for herself and doesn’t want to think of her with Atretes?

“What do you care what Octavia says, Julia? Or who she sees. She’s nothing but a stupid, shallow little whore who’s jealous of you. Haven’t you realized that?”

Lovely.

“Do you want this child?”

Julia jerked her hand away and stood again. “What it? I hate it. It’s ruined my life. I’m sick in the morning. I’ve dark circles under my eyes because I can’t sleep for worrying about what Caius is doing when he’s not with me. And I’m getting disgustingly fat.”

“You’re not fat,” Calabah said, glad Atretes was so quickly forgotten. She smother the fine wool of her red-rimmed toga and watched Julia surreptitiously. She was so lovely, so graceful in her movements, like a work of art. She could sit and gaze at her all day. The thought of a baby distorting her was repugnant.

I’m going to take that as confirmation that Rivers is intending a lesbian plot line but unwilling to go to far with it, for fear with disturbing sensibilities. I’m pretty sure Calabah wants to do more than sit and gaze at Julia.

Anyway, Julia says she’s three or four months along, she thinks, and Calabah says if she doesn’t want this pregnancy she should end it. Julia is bewildered.

“But how?”

“You really are ridiculously innocent, Julia, I don’t know why I waste my time with you. Have you never heard of abortion?”

Julia paled and stared at her into alarm. “Are you saying I should kill my own baby?”

Calabah uttered a soft gasp and stood, insulted and angry. “Do you think so little of me as that? Of course, I would never suggest such a thing. Right now, in the early stages of your pregnancy, what’s inside you is merely a symbol of human life, not actual life. It doesn’t possess any humanness whatsoever and it won’t for another few months.”

Say what? Look, just because Rivers believes it’s a baby doesn’t mean Julia would have. I don’t have the expertise to get into a detailed conversation about Roman views of pregnancy and abortion, but, come on. This was a time when disabled infants were killed at birth. This wide-eyed shock does not read as realistic.

“Don’t you see the trap, Julia? Don’t you understand? By denying you your right to choose, they deny you the right to protect your physical, mental, and emotional health. They take away your humanness for the sake of a mere symbol.”

Nope. Still doesn’t feel realistic.

After much back and forth, Calabah talks Julia into having an abortion. Julia is scared and filled with self-doubt, and bursts out sobbing as soon as Calabah leaves. Oh, and before she leaves, there’s this:

Calabah bent and kissed her lightly on the lips. “I won’t betray you like the others. I’m not your father or Caius.” She straightened and smiled down at her.

Yep. We got passion and heavy petting with Caius, but actually describing lesbian passion would be far to risque, so we get this.

This next section initially just felt like filler, but the more I thought about it the more important it seemed. During her conversation with Calabah, Julia glanced into the garden at one point and glimpsed Hadassah. In that moment, she wished she could talk to Hadassah about what she’s going through, and ask her advice. But now, when Julia goes to find Hadassah after a good cry, she finds the conversation—and Hadassah’s words—less helpful than she’d hoped.

We’ve talked about characters escaping from their authors. Here, we see a character with flaws her creator doesn’t seem to even realize she has. Hadassah can’t help Julia. She can’t help because she’s shows herself incapable of putting herself in Julia’s shows or doing, well, anything other than repeat evangelical talking points.

Their interaction begins with Julia asking Hadassah to sing to her. Hadassah picks up the small harp Rivers tells us she carries with her 24/7, by means of a leather strap. But Julia is too distracted even to listen to music.

“What distresses you so?”

“This … this pregnancy.”

“Are you afraid? Please don’t be, my lady,” she said. “It’s the most natural thing in the world. The Lord has smiled on you. Having a child is the greatest blessing God can give a woman.”

“A blessing?” Julia said bitterly.

“You’re nurturing new life…”

Julia pulled her hands away. “What do you know about it?” She stood and moved away from her.

And it doesn’t end there.

“You can’t understand what I’m going through, Hadassah. You don’t know what it’s like being sick, feeling tired all the time, having your husband discard you. What can you know about loving a man the way I love Caius?”

Hadassah stood slowly. She searched her face, wondering at the desperation she saw. “You carry his child.”

“A child he doesn’t want, a child that’s driven us apart. Don’t talk to me of this being a blessing form the gods,” Julia said angrily.

“Give yourself time, my lady.” Why couldn’t Julia have the eyes to see and ears to hear the Lord and realize she was blessed?

Nothing in Rivers’ writing suggests that she thinks this is Hadassah’s bad. Julia is still wracked with doubt, and spends some serious time second guessing herself, but nothing Hadassah said actually helped. Hadassah is less perceptive than we’ve been given to believe if she actually thought the only thing bothering Julia was fear of childbirth. And even if it were that, declaring childbirth “the most natural thing in the world” when you live in Ancient Rome where everyone knows someone who has died in childbirth isn’t helpful.

I can’t get over how pithy everything Hadassah says here is. You can’t fix problems like the one Julia is facing by talking about pregnancy being a blessing. This is something we see in the modern anti-abortion movement too—“your baby is a blessing” was a common refrain for picketers at the Planned Parenthood where I volunteered a few years ago. That is not helpful when a pregnancy does not feel like a blessing. Saying it does not make it so.

Hadassah may be suddenly oblivious to all that is going on in Julia’s life, but Rivers isn’t. Rivers knows Caius has become physically abusive. Rivers knows Caius is angry that Julia is pregnant—in fact, according to Rivers, when Caius found out Julia was pregnant, he yelled “How could you be so stupid!” at her. Rivers also knows that Caius has been openly cheating on Julia—and that Julia knows this. And yet, Rivers does not treat Hadassah as at all in the wrong when she tells Julia repeatedly how blessed she is.

Rivers doesn’t seem to grasp the central problem here.

[Julia] wanted Hadassah to understand what she was going through. She wanted her to say everything would be fine, that her decision to have an abortion was rational. She wanted her to say that what she was about to do was the only thing she could do to make things as they used to be between her and Claus. But when she looked into her little Jewess’s eyes, she couldn’t utter a word. What Calabah saw only as a symbol, she knew Hadassah saw as a life.

Julia tries to talk herself out of caring about what Hadassah thinks by telling herself that Hadassah is only a slave.

“You say it’s a blessing because someone told you it was a blessing,” Julia said, in angry defense. “You’re just repeating what you’ve heard. Everything you sing, everything you say is just a repeat of someone else’s words and thoughts. … You haven’t a thought of your own. How could you understand what I have to endure, the choices I have to make?”

Rivers tells us that “[s]peaking harshly to Hadassah” gave Julia “no relief,” but for all her harshness there’s some underlying truth to Julia’s words. I’m not sure Rivers realizes this. In fact, I’m sure she doesn’t.

Hadassah holds her piece and sweetly offers to bring her mulled wine. But then, she doesn’t know what Julia is about to do.

The next morning, Calabah brings “a small Roman woman in a pristine white toga trimmed with gold” to Julia’s house. Her name is Asellina, and she’s so highly regarded in this area of medicine that she “wrote about abortion techniques for the medical community last year” and “her work on the subject is widely circulated.” Um what. Roman women didn’t wear togas, and I’m pretty sure Roman women didn’t write medical treatises.

Asellina had Julia drink a goblet of wine with “an aftertaste as bitter as gall.” Next Asellina had Julia undress, and then inserted “something inside her” and left it there. She told Julia that she was further along than she’d said, and that she’d soon feel some cramping; then Calabah paid her with Julia’s pearls, and she left. Julia begins to writhe in pain.

As the pain increases, Julia calls for Hadassah. At a few words from Calabah, Hadassah realizes what Julia has done.

The blood drained from Hadassah’s face. She uttered a soft cry, the basin slipping from her hands and shattering on the floor. Calabah glanced at her sharply and Hadassah stared back at her in horror.

Once it’s over, Calabah tells Hadassah to “take what’s on the floor and dispose of it.”

Unable to look at Julia, Hadassah knelt and carefully took the small bloody bundle from the floor. She rose and left the room silently. … Her throat closed as she pressed the tiny bundle against her heart. … Blinded by tears, she stumbled to the garden.

Earlier, Rivers emphasized how much Hadassah loves Julia—Hadassah is the only one who loves her unconditionally, Julia muses at one point. But here, all of that flies out of Hadassah’s mind. Her focus is on “the small bloody bundle” she’s sent to dispose of.

I’m going to power through the rest of this chapter rather than breaking it up, as it all has to do with Julia’s abortion.

There’s a scene change, and Marcus comes to visit. It’s the same day, but sometime later. Julia tells Marcus she lost the baby, and he immediately guesses that she’s had an abortion. Rivers, of course, is busy playing into every line in the anti-abortion playbook.

She couldn’t rid herself of the terrible sensation of emptiness and loss, as though more had been taken out of her than tissue.

Women respond to abortion in many different ways. That said, I’d note that Julia didn’t want a child. She didn’t want to be pregnant. The thought of being pregnant—of the reality that she was pregnant—made her shudder. But really, isn’t this so like Rivers, to put Julia in a situation where she’s damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t? Julia can’t catch a break.

And Julia has committed evangelicals’ mortal sin.

“It’s all right, isn’t it, Marcus? There’s nothing wrong with what I did, is there?”

He knew she wanted him to say he agreed with her decision to abort the child, but eh couldn’t. He had always avoided the subject when it arose because it left him feeling uncomfortable.

Oh FFS. I mean, really? For all his supposed sewing of wild oats, Marcus is in many ways just as much a proto-christian as Phoebe is. the difference, I suppose, is that he didn’t chew Julia out. He just danced around the subject. He tells Julia to get some sleep, and she sends him to go find Hadassah and tell her to come sing to her.

Uh oh.

Marcus found Hadassah in the garden. He tells her to pull herself together and that “it wasn’t really a child” and Hadassah begins quoting Psalm 139, and then she switches to Hebrew, all the while speaking “like one of the temple oracles,” and Marcus gets creeped out and tries to shake her, but she won’t stop.

“Are you Romans so foolish you have no fear? God knows when a sparrow falls on earth. Do you think God doesn’t know what you do? Do you care so much for shallow pleasures that you would kill your own children to have them? … Have you no fear?”

Hadassah goes on like this, on and on and on, until Marcus grabs her, puts a hand over her mouth, and shakes her.

“You will listen to reason! What power but Rome, Hadassah? What other power is there on earth that can compare? You think this almighty god of yours is so powerful? Where was he when you needed him? … There’s no power on earth but that of the emperor and that of Rome.”

When Marcus lets Hadassah go he realizes he’s made marks on her. I told you—their every interaction involves violence or intimidation on his part. Of course, Hadassah goes right back to talking about empires rising and falling and not being able to imprison God on a mountaintop, and Marcus realizes there is nothing he can say to get through to her, and sends her off to sing to Julia.

While Hadassah has argued with Marcus before, this time feels different. As Rivers introduced her, her main flaw was being too afraid to witness to her Romans owners. Which. Yeah. And again I ask—why isn’t she witnessing to her fellow slaves? Anyway, Hadassah’s arguments with Marcus haven’t typically been over religion. They’ve been over things like whether to break up the slaves in Claudius’ household, or whether it was a good idea for her to serve Julia in Caius’ villa. This argument, though, is about religion.

Before I finish, I want to note two things.

First, most abortions in ancient Rome revolved around ingesting various substances, not the sort of proto-surgical abortion described here. Unless I am misreading it, Asellina inserted something into Julia’s cervix. That likely would have been a very risky procedure at the time.

I did find this very creepy blog post quoting the second century Christian writer Tertullian on tools used for abortions, but I’m having trouble believing that these tools were actually used for anything other than saving women during difficult births—and the images accompanying the piece are unsourced, which makes me skeptical.

Second, Jewish and Christian beliefs about abortion weren’t as straightforward as Hadassah’s reaction suggests. Second century Christian writers did condemn abortion as murder. However, Jewish views were somewhat different; most rabbis saw the fetus as potential life and differentiated between abortion and murder (though both were typically considered crimes).

We don’t have any first century Christian writings on abortion, so it is difficult to tell whether Hadassah’s understanding of abortion would have been closer to the view commonly held where she grew up, or to Christian writers fifty years or more in the future. Paul, who was far closer to being a contemporary of Hadassah, does not mention abortion.

Given how Decimus reacted on seeing gay lovers in a park, I’m not sure how much of sections like these involve research, and how much they involve simply mapping modern evangelical reactions onto people living in Rome in the the 70s C.E. Given that Paul didn’t mention abortion but Julia’s abortion makes Hadassah freak out, I’m going with the latter.