01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, August 2, 2005

NEW YORK

UNLESS FAIRY TALES have taken the place of history and psychology, the appointment of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court will likely lead to greater restrictions on abortion, if not an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Should Roberts fail to swing a complete ban, George Bush will surely get another crack at further radicalizing the court when the gravely ill William Rehnquist (Roberts's mentor, who cut his political teeth intimidating black voters and advocating "qualified martial law") finally retires.

The Democrats and the "liberal" media, as usual, can be counted on to present symbolic opposition, at best. After all, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is himself radically anti-choice, well to the right of pro-choice Republican Sen. Arlen Spector, who only got to be chairman of the Judiciary Committee by surviving an extreme-right primary challenge and then agreeing, essentially, to shut up about abortion rights. The New York Times, meanwhile, has already annointed Roberts as a "punctilious" and "pragmatic" jurist whose "life is rooted in faith and respect for the law."

So when Feminists For Life (led by Roberts' wife Jane or some other champion of the unborn) brings the lawsuit that sends abortion back to the filthy, price-gouging conditions from which it emerged in 1973, we can anticipate the return of all kinds of unpleasant stories that, until Roe v. Wade, were confined mostly to works of fiction. The rich, of course, will always find competent abortionists for themselves and their unlucky wives, girlfriends and daughters. But the novels I've been reading lately address the unwanted pregnancy problems of the poor, or at least the unrich, and it's in these narratives that I can foresee the consequences of Justice Roberts' future votes affecting the tangled issues of conception and life.

The Roberts couple seem to be very well-educated; I wonder whether in their high-minded socializing with Clarence and Virginia Thomas (at the College of the Holy Cross) and Robert and Mary Ellen Bork (at the lay Catholic John Carroll Society), they find time for informal book chat about, say, the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Dreiser's An American Tragedy would be a good place to start; indeed, it might provide them the cornerstone for a new book club about abortion and its alternatives.

Clyde Griffiths, Dreiser's protaganist, is the son of threadbare Christian street preachers who run The Door of Hope/Bethel Independent Mission in Kansas City. Their down-on-their-luck parishioners "were always testifying as to how God or Christ or Divine Grace had rescued them from this or that predicament -- never how they had rescued any one else. And always his father and mother were saying 'Amen' and 'Glory to God' and singing hymns . . . "

Some how, the preacher-parents' strict moral regimen doesn't penetrate Clyde and his sister, and it's the "sensuous" and "weak" Esta who first falls prey to the siren song of unsanctioned sex. Spirited away by an actor, "one of those vain, handsome, animal personalities," she returns home in disgrace -- abandoned, pregnant, unmarried and flat broke.

"What do you want to cry for?" Clyde inquires when he finally tracks his sister down in a cheap furnished room. "Didn't that man you went away with marry you?"

"She shook her head negatively and sobbed the more. And in that instant there came to Clyde the real psychological as well as sociological and biological import of his sister's condition." Not enough import, though, for things only get worse. Years later a rich and successful Clyde impregnates a poor factory girl who unsuccessfully seeks an abortion and, well, I don't think I should give away the dreadful ending before the Robertses have a chance to read it.

But while An American Tragedy is suitably challenging stuff for a brilliant moralist of Roberts's calibre, I think the future justice needs to delve deeper into literary treatments of abortion. If they can overcome the current anti-French predjudices on the Right, he and his wife might want to take a stab at Sartre's 1945 novel The Age of Reason. Here, the existentially challeged Mathieu unintentionally gets his girlfriend Marcelle pregnant. Sartre charts the couple's voyage through the swamp of ambivalence, fear and cynicism that confronts them when they decide to abort the fetus. Marcelle knows an old woman who does it in her kitchen (the illegal, 400-franc variety), but Mathieu recalls the lousy job she performed on a mutual friend who took six months to recover. There's a genuine gynecologist willing to perform the operation, but he wants an extortionate 4,000 francs.

Mathieu isn't very courageous, though he at least cares enough to inspect the cut-rate abortionist's premises, "dirty and in disorder" with "boxes everywhere and straw on the tiled floor. On a table Mathieu noticed a bottle of rum and a half-filled glass." The old lady has "a man's hands, a stranglers' hands, furrowed, cracked, with broken nails, and black with scars and gashes. On the first joint of the left thumb there were some purple warts and a large black scab."

Now, if this isn't vivid enough for Roberts and the other members of his book club (especially the pornographically inclined Justice Thomas), I recommend Journey to the End of the Night by Celine, who was himself a physician as well as a veteran of World War I. Celine's alter ego, Bardamu, is practicing medicine, not very well, in a suburban slum outside Paris. One night he's called to the apartment of a beautiful 25-year-old prostitute, whose third abortion (illegal, of course) has gone badly.

"I'd like to have examined her, but she was losing so much blood, there was such a gooey mess I couldn't see anything . . . All I could do was put back the big wad of cotton and pull up the blanket." [Editor's note: The full quote is more graphic, but not suitable for publication in this newspaper.] The young woman's mother is so ashamed that she refuses to send her daughter to the hospital, so Bardamu leaves with 20 francs as his patient silently bleeds to death.

Such things happen in real life, outside the stately chambers of judges and the hushed naves of churches, but sometimes they're easier to absorb in a well-told story. I hope that in the post Roe v. Wade world, we can find a new generation of novelists who are up to the task.

John R. MacArthur, a monthly contributor, is the publisher of Harper's Magazine.