Hi Patti,
Aunt Patti.
I saw your facebook post about abortion and personal responsibility, and it really upset me. I've been deliberating calling you out online about it, but I want to connect with you personally instead.
Your father made a choice to abandon a pregnancy. He did not assume responsibilities for his actions. I urge you to read Men cause 100% of unwanted pregnancies: https://
A man choosing to walk away from the woman he impregnated is like abortion. He had the opportunity to make a pregnancy go away, and he took it. He received no shaming about it, then nor now. He in fact probably has been held up as a pillar of what fatherly responsibility looks like. From everything you've told me, he's been a respected member of your church, community, etc. Much of that likely would not have happened had he accepted his personal responsibility in impregnating Dorothy Pifer in 1945. Some women in her circumstance (and there were many women impregnated by GIs at the end of WWII) committed suicide. Some sought illegal abortions which were dangerous and also sometimes deadly to the women. They also gave up their babies to adoption and orphanages, to live with other families or in institutions rather than with their mothers and other blood relatives. Families fractured because of the chant of personal responsibility and the denial of the responsibilities of men.
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I'd like to continue to think of your father as a good person. This requires me to recognize that there were complex forces at work on him which caused him to make that choice. I am assuming that those forces/fears are related to rejection from family and church and fear of losing economic, educational and social standing and future opportunities to afford familial responsibilities, to be seen as an adult man. I assume it really was as grim a choice as I imagine it---that he felt like he was between a rock and a hard place (marry this non-LDS woman he hardly knows or walk away from being a father (from what I can tell, he's quite proud of being a father to you and your siblings)) and the best option he saw was to pretend the pregnancy never happened and go home to family support.
Had he followed through on his initial responsibility for that pregnancy, you and your siblings would not have been born. I am glad that he made that difficult choice and that you and your siblings and all your kids and grandkids were able to exist. Aren't you?
So I feel the need to point out to you that it is problematic to celebrate personal responsibility without acknowledging that really hard circumstances put people in impossible positions which lead to people choosing what appears to be cowardly or evil or whatever simplified way people think about how a person could choose to abandon a child they conceived. It's really cruel and intentionally oversimplified. And it lets men off scot free while shaming women, who are the ones demonized about abortion and failing at personal responsibility.
The mantra of personal responsibility that many are chanting these days (we don't need government telling us to wear masks!) is at odds with the ideas of collective responsibility. Collective responsibility involves using tax dollars to solve big problems, whether it's confronting a pandemic or creating economic conditions where a single woman (ie who's impregnator isn't willing or able to support a family) could raise a child. And it's much easier to chant about everyone taking personal responsibility rather than making resources available to actually solve complex problems. It also makes it so men can TALK about personal responsibility related to reproduction without actually having to be personally responsible, or even collectively responsible, via paying taxes for services which help women and children they don't acknowledge being related to.
A feminist pro-life take is that we should work to eliminate the need for abortion, by making sure that every baby conceived (and their caregivers) gets access to healthcare, education, clean water, a liveable planet--the so-called socialist agenda. Shaming women for their failures at personal responsibility allows people like your father to walk away from their failures at personal responsibilities without any consequence. And for their daughter (who I assume many people admire and look up to) to publicly celebrate personal responsibility at the expense of collective responsibility, at the expense of people who are poorer, browner, less ___ than her, signaling that people like my GRANDMOTHER failed to control their biological urges when they should have just been more responsible.
That's what I read when I saw your post.
Many may consider my wish to see my biological grandfather as a good person as too pollyanna. That it was much more likely that a person in his situation wanted to shake off a clingy pregnant girl, that he maybe even laughed about it with his friends. I've been pained to not write anything that might hurt or embarrass your father, or you, about the circumstances which led to my dad's conception and adoption because I really really want to think of Max Gardner as being a good person.
I've been trying to frame this story in different ways in order to not embarrass you. And yet, perhaps the right thing to do is for your father and you to own his story, to *talk about personal responsibility in ways that make sense*, that acknowledge reality: people walk away from responsibilities. Maybe it's shameful. Maybe it caused hardship to others, hardships the person who made the choice to walk away don't see and therefore don't think exist. That doesn't mean that denial is any way to live as an adult.
To me, it would be a courageous act of personal responsibility, for Max Gardner to say, "I don't even rightly remember what happened 75 years ago, but it's come to my attention that I conceived a child with a woman in 1945, and for whatever reason I was not able to support her and the baby. And through some strokes of luck, new technology, and my weird granddaughter's obsessive researching, I got to meet my son for the first time in 2018. I'm so glad that there were social safety nets in place which covered for my inability to support my son. In some ways I am deeply ashamed that I could not do the fundamental thing a good parent does. And in other ways, I forgive myself for having made a difficult decision that some may say is selfish but others would point out made it possible for me to be a good parent to the children I eventually had with my wife."
That's what personal responsibility looks like. It's also inclusive of collective responsibility, getting past the notion that anyone is "self-made", is able to navigate this life without other people loving them and supporting them, without safety nets for when a person cannot fulfill their obligations, for when people find themselves in impossible situations. It's deeply corrosive to advance the idea that personal responsibility is all that is needed when obviously at different times in our lives we find ourselves needing help from others.
As far as I can tell, the Church of Latter Day Saints has historically been very supportive of collective support of each other, the beehive symbolism, etc.
When you reached out a few months ago, Patti, I gave you a terse reply because I really struggle with what kind of relationship I can have with you. I had literally been searching for my grandfather for 25 years. I am 49, so that research spanned more than half of my lifetime. Had I been given the weird choice of finding out the truth about my grandfather versus finishing my doctorate, I think I would have chosen the former over the later (thank goodness I am blessed to have both). It was a decades-long obsession. It's difficult to express how much I wanted to find out the story that haunted my childhood and became a specific project assigned to me when my grandmother before her death asked me to write a book. I'm a good student, Patti. It's very hard to have this overdue assignment hanging over my head.
And when I found him, he wasn't dead as I had been told. I am still trying to figure out how much my grandmother really knew in 1945 when she mailed the letter to that sailor who she thought was going to marry her (or if even that story is true). Other possibilities get ominous--was it consensual? Did he lead her on, telling her that he'd marry her and then got cold feet? Was it just too difficult to communicate because he was transferred away and she didn't have a forwarding address? And if so, he didn't have the personal responsibility to write her a letter from his new duty station? It gets difficult for me to hold him in positive regard when I really will never know these answers.
Part of why I am not particularly interested in connecting more with your father is because he just doesn't give me any information like that. He was happy to show me off as his musically talented granddaughter at the nursing home, but he doesn't really say anything about how it is that this new person is his granddaughter. I'm glad I had the opportunity to meet him--again, for literally decades he was the answer to the question "who is the one person living or dead that you'd most like to meet" for me. Yep, we met. And he is a sphinx. A genial grampa, but no context for how it is that we're just now learning that we are related.
So I am ambivalent about what kind of relationship we can have, and I put you out of my mind until I saw your post this week. I have been trying to put other people I am related to out of my mind too because of their chanting about personal responsibility. And yet the best way forward, in terms of reconciling family differences, political differences, coming to some shared agreements moving forward with regard to say, how to address big collective issues like climate change, requires engaging with family members with whom we don't see eye to eye. And Patti, I *do* think of us as family members; I just didn't want to do the hard work of reaching out and engaging.
That is why I am sending this email. I am trying to do the work of engaging on the difficult topic of abortion with my aunt who sees things differently from me, rather than letting it go. I do not expect any quick reply--perhaps you may never find words for a reply, and I accept that. Know that I have thought of you as family even before I knew the name Max Gardner. I knew some man had to have existed, and he was situated in some sort of family, whatever his circumstances, and that we are all kin. For all I know I might get some email years from now from someone who KEN fathered, which had not come to light previously.
And so again, I choose to give men the benefit of the doubt, the privacy with their decisions, the acknowledgement that there are forces which force choices which some find reprehensible but which nonetheless appeared to be the best option in that unique set of circumstances. I also choose to give women the same benefit of the doubt, privacy about their decisions, and acknowledgement that I don't understand what forces they have to make those decisions within. And that is why I support access to abortion.
So instead of calling you out on your page (I don't know how many of your fb friends knows that your Dad knocked up a Lutheran lady in Wisconsin eight decades ago), I am calling you "in", because I want to create space for us to understand each other, and to me that requires being honest about the limits of the personal responsibility argument.
With love, Karen
