Posted on 10/24/2006 10:02:53 PM PDT by Lorianne
Between Sandy Hingston's teen years and her daughter's adolescence, "abortion" became a dirty word. It was time to tell her child a secret from her past.Theoretically Pro-Choice There were 20 little girls in the Brownie troop that I took over from another overstressed mom when my daughter was 7. Twenty girls, fat and thin and pretty and plain and brave and timid, shilling Thin Mints, earning badges, going camping, and saluting the flag. It was on one of our first camping trips that I looked at my co-leader, Jeannette, and said, "Who do you think will be the first one to get pregnant?" She stared at me for a minute, then laughed.
I was only half joking. Girls mate young in this blue-collar town outside of Philadelphia. College isn't much on the radar; kids graduate from high school (or don't) and go to work at Wal-Mart or the supermarket or Jiffy Lube.
The first Brownie got pregnant at 14. "She's due in six months," my daughter, Marcy, told me.
I gasped in spite of myself. "She's having the baby?"
"Well, what else could she do?" she asked matter-of-factly. I looked at her, surprised. "She could have an abortion."
Something flickered in my daughter's eyes. "Nobody I know would ever do that," she said.
It was my first glimpse of the enormous gulf between Marcy and me on the subject, and I was stopped cold. She knew, had known all her life, that her father and I are staunch supporters of a woman's right to choose. She'd even professed her allegiance to the concept. But clearly, it was all theoretical to her, something we believed some imaginary women somewhere ought to have the right to do.
I wanted so much to say more to her. But she was so young: She was only 14. There was plenty of time.
The second Brownie who got pregnant was 15. "She's showing," Marcy said knowingly. "Her mom is giving a baby shower for her." I was dumbfounded.
"I can't believe she's having the baby."
"Like she has a choice." Marcy was curt.
"She has a choice."
"What choice?"
"She could get an abortion."
Marcy's back went straight. "And kill a baby?"
"It's not a baby. It's a fetus. And if she got an abortion, she'd still have a future."
"Nobody gets abortions," Marcy said. Again, that abrupt dismissiveness. My throat was aching with what I longed to tell my daughter. But I couldn't figure out how to couch it. I was suddenly seeing the issue not from my comfy old political perspective, but from a different angle: that of a young, naive, kindhearted girl who wouldn't hurt a kitten, much less an unborn child.
Fetus.
Not to mention, she still believed in happily ever after.
"I think they can make it," Marcy said of the ex-Brownie and her baby's father. "They seem really solid."
"They're 15," I said.
"But they're in love." Speaking Up About My Abortion We are all products of our times. I am 50, and in the time I grew up in, good girls didn't have sex. I was a good girl. For a while. I lost my virginity when I was 16. I would have died before I let my mom and dad find out. Teens who became pregnant when I was growing up never kept their babies. They were discreetly sent off to group homes, or they managed to get themselves abortions. Either way, the pregnancy didn't permanently alter -- at least outwardly -- the arc of their lives. Now, girls my daughter's age were having babies and showing off their bulging tummies like Britney Spears on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. What had happened to shame in those 30 years?
Don't get me wrong. I'm no particular fan of shame. I didn't want my former Brownies branded with scarlet letters. But I did want some sort of -- what? Acknowledgment that their choices hadn't been wise? Warning to those coming up after them that this wasn't the way to maximize your potential? Sure, there's a Planned Parenthood outpost in this town -- but there are three places with heartwarming names like Golden Cradle, eager to reassure reluctant moms-to-be that, as long as they stay pregnant, everything will be all right. Marcy sees the cute onesies at the showers. She sees the babies toted to football games and fawned over. Nobody is telling her the other side.
So I do it. I tell her that I had an abortion. It takes a long while. I start the conversation a dozen times without finishing it. I'm terrified that I'll stop being Mom and become Mom-who-killed-a-baby. I explain that I was 19 and in college at the time. I tell her how frightened I was to go into the city to the clinic, but that I was even more frightened my parents would learn I'd had sex. I tell her I've never regretted my decision. We are driving in the car, at night. I can feel her beside me taking in what I'm saying, feel it altering her perception of me, just as I'd feared, like a kaleidoscope that shows one pattern, spins and blurs, then clicks into another pattern.
"Wow," she says, a little breathlessly. "I didn't think anybody really did that ... I mean, anybody I knew --"
And that, of course, is why I had to tell her. Who else was going to speak up, to witness to her? Movie stars? They were all trying desperately to get pregnant or adopting babies in Africa. Female musicians? Athletes? Politicians? Ha! There's no shame at all in Katie Holmes bearing Tom Cruise's child out of wedlock. But when's the last time you saw a headline saying "Star Aborts"?
"Did you ever feel guilty?" Marcy asks me.
"No," I tell her, honestly. "I was too worried that Pop-Pop and Nana would find out." She takes that in too. Then she says, "I guess I won't be afraid to tell you."
I wrote a magazine article about our conversation and got dozens of e-mails in response. Some said I was a murderer, a selfish monster. I printed those e-mails out and showed them to Marcy. "You're brave," she said, knowing perfectly well that I'm not, really. The rest were from women who'd had abortions. They told their stories, different stories with a single theme: I had a choice, and my life is better because I did. A lot of them said, "I've never told this to anyone before." The writers spoke of secrecy and shame.
I showed Marcy those e-mails, too.
The third Brownie to become pregnant was Marcy's age -- 16. When the news reached Marcy's lunch table, she spoke up loud and clear: "She could have an abortion." Her friends didn't argue politics with her. They weren't aghast. They just blinked and stared, she said, "as if they'd never thought of that."
Sandy Hingston is a senior editor and parenting columnist at Philadelphia Magazine. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their teenage son and daughter.
Originally published in MORE magazine, October 2006.
Something doesn't ring true here. Brownies are not 14 and 15 are they? They weren't when I was one.
She starts out talking about a Brownie troop when the kids were seven. She doesn't transition them to "former" Brownies when she next discusses the group as teenagers.
Ahh. I didn't care to read her ramblings......but that makes sense. Thanks.
Another thought (if this author was telling the truth): she's taught her daughter that the planned trajectory of her life comes first, and that anything that interferes, including a baby in your womb, can be crushed and discarded.
A few years down the road: Mom is older, ill, and becoming more disabled. Daughter is busy living her successful life, having crushed anybody who got in her way. Mom needs daughter's help...
Oh, I can't finish this one.
Can somebody instead imagine a future in which the daughter is redeemed, and the mother as well? I'll pray, but it's always good for me if I can envision as well...
It took the propaganda coming from her mother to make abortion OK. Up 'til then her daughter had it right...abortion kills a baby. Her daughter did explain that these other girls had supportive parents. What an opportunity this mom missed when she could have told her daughter how she would be there for her with whatever decision she made.
I can't believe she writes a parenting column. What if a discussion about abortion had come up on a Girl Scout camping trip instead of just one leader commenting to another? We do need to be careful about who our children look up to and make sure they come to us parents first.
Believe it or not, The Cosby Show put it best. Cliff and Claire sat down with the kids and told them if they were ever in trouble they should come to them. Of course the kids started to chuckle nervously and didn't think they could do that. Their parents quickly reminded them that NO ONE would ever love them as much as they did, or want what was best for them the way that all parents do.
Sounds like their parents need to get slapped around a bit.
Yes, it is sad. What a hypocrite this Sandy Hingston is. ANYTHING is O.K., so long as the parents don't know. In her world, people can do anything in secret that they'd be ashamed of in public. Pre-marital sex? Have at it! The consequences? Hush it up at all costs.
Someday an inexorable, incomprehensible (to her) light will bare her soul. Pathetic thing it is, her soul.
I agree with you. Wanting them to complete their pregnancies is not - and should not be - the same as celebrating them for having gotten pregnant in the first place.
I'm calling BS on this mother and her so-called "blue collar" area.
....the suburbs OF Philadephia--fast fingers, poor typing skills.
I sincerely doubt that young girls today don't understand that abortion is an option. That is a ridiculous theme throughout this article.
When girls are more ashamed to kill their own babies than they are to tell their parents they had sex...that is a good thing.
The author's distinction between a "fetus" and a "baby" is lost on me.
"Fetus" is latin for "little one". It does not refer to the humanity of the being, but the stage of development.
We don't say things like "that isn't a person, it's a toddler" or "that isn't a person, it's a teenagaer"
This author lost her conscience a long time ago and doesn't know how to handle it when she sees young girls make a different choice than she did.
Then you are either a LIAR or an immorral sociopath... either way, thank God you aren't my mother.
Wow! A "parenting" editor who kills babies. Who would have "thunk" it?
There it is in a nutshell. This is why many in my generation had abortions. It was shameful to get pregnant at a young age, unmarried. Today it is celebrated.
Make no mistake. There are monsters among us. They don't have claws or fangs or horns or a tail. But they're monsters all the same. They just look like the rest of us.
Someday when her daughter grows up, marries and has a baby, she will likely have a strong anger towards her mom for killing her sibling.
She will likely never leave her child alone with Grandma the baby-killer.
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