Posted on 01/22/2004 3:42:49 PM PST by madprof98
Thirty-one years after Roe vs. Wade, women are finding the courage to cast off the cloak of shame. We’re coming out about having terminated pregnancies — and saying we’re grateful. Here are some of our stories.
A few years ago my mother-in-law fell and broke her leg. In a life filled with many adversities -- fleeing from Latvia during World War II, separated from her family and living as a refugee in DP camps -- this was a small bump in the road. But the incident led her to take an interesting stand. Especially for a lone, frail European woman in her 80s living in a Lutheran stronghold of central Texas. She decided to announce to her doctors that she had had three abortions when she was in her 20s and early 30s when she was a medical student in Vienna, and another, after the war, when she was a resident in a Philadelphia hospital where she met her husband.
"When I broke my leg I had to announce what surgeries I'd had and I wrote them all down. If someone wants to think I'm a sinful bitch, I don't give a damn," she said.
Of course, the public perception of abortion in Europe was and still is very different from the public view of abortion in the United States. At the time my mother-in-law had her abortions in Vienna, they were readily available if you could find a doctor to perform them. "You didn't have to keep it like a deadly secret. It was your private business. It was wartime, for Christ sake."
When she arrived in Philadelphia in the 1950s, she encountered, both as a medical resident and as a woman, a restrictive and punitive approach to reproductive rights.
"There was no talk. It was against the law, and you were persecuted if you had evidence of an illegal abortion."
Fifty years later, abortion may be legal, but it's still the dark, dirty secret no woman wants to talk about -- not even amongst themselves or with their closest family members. While many women may feel sorry to have needed an abortion, but they are not sorry they had one. In fact, many are grateful for that hard-won and ever-threatened reproductive right.
Like my mother-in-law, they're coming out -- in some cases decades after having an abortion. They're telling their stories, powerful stories that just may counter the anti-abortion climate promoted by right-wing conservatives in control of the federal government.
Jennifer Baumgardner, a 33-year-old New York activist and writer, launched a potential new movement after she had a brainstorm. The brainstorm came while she was watching coverage of the 30th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade , the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.
"I always thought it was unpersuasive when there were these heartfelt stories about women and their abortions, but the women never used their real names," Baumgardner notes. "While there was no shortage of [activists] articulating demands, what was missing were the voices of women who openly talked about their abortions."
Baumgardner decided to recast the Roe vs. Wade anniversary as "I'm Not Sorry Day," a campaign that will include "I Had An Abortion" T-shirts and a documentary film of women sharing their abortion stories that will be screened during Women's History Month on the 32nd anniversary of Roe next January. (Baumgardner's writing partner, activist Amy Richards who co-founded Third Wave, the only national organization for young feminists, is pictured on the cover wearing the campaign's T-shirt.)
Through word of mouth, Baumgardner has collected the stories of about 100 women in a matter of weeks. Her longtime friend, Gillian Aldrich, a documentary filmmaker who was the field producer for Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, has already begun filming. Working with such a small budget, Aldrich says she hopes to start with about 15 of those interviews, then expand the film if the campaign gains momentum and more funding. "The whole act of women telling their story and standing up and saying, 'I had an abortion, and I'm not ashamed,' and showing the universality of it is the power of this video," Aldrich says. "There's a shame that covers the whole issue because it's not allowed to be spoken about. So many women pick up this cloak of shame without thinking about it."
Susan Yolen, vice president for public affairs of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, agrees that publicizing these stories is the best inoculation against the shame many women feel about having had abortions.
"Forty three percent of American women will have had an abortion before they exit their reproductive years. It's the most common surgery in the United States," Yolen notes. "If we all stood up and said, 'I had an abortion' it would do a lot to take the fear and shame away."
Finding women to share their abortion stories has taken me on a personal journey I didn't expect. I began by asking my female friends and relatives if they knew of anyone who would talk openly about their experience. I called my mother, who enumerated all the women in her life who had had abortions. "There was your great-grandmother, and possibly your grandmother. But they're dead," she said. "There's your cousin. You might ask her. ..." The list was longer, including aunts, second cousins, in-laws and close family friends, all of whom have shared intimate family stories during holiday get-togethers and family reunions but have always worn this "cloak of shame" regarding their abortions.
I hung up the phone in a mild state of shock. We all had this common experience, but we never felt we could share it even with the people we were closest to. It resonated even more strongly for another reason: I had never told my mother or sister about my own abortion, and here I was setting out to write other people's stories.
Alice Thorpe
My great aunt Alice Thorpe is the exception. She is 101 years old and facing her mortality daily. She unveiled her secret to me completely out of the blue one Thanksgiving a couple of years ago. Even my mother didn't know, and she's almost a daughter to Alice.
It was 1929 and she was 26, teaching English at George Washington High School in the Washington Heights section of New York City. Her husband was a talented writer, but an alcoholic. He was a merchant marine when they met; she was his teacher at night school.
When Alice discovered she was pregnant, she knew she didn't want the child. Her husband pleaded with her to have the baby; in part he saw it as a way to get out of a jam he was in with another woman whom he'd gotten pregnant and who was looking for him to support her and the baby. Alice found help from a sympathetic Jewish doctor who lived in the apartment house next to hers. The doctor guided her to a "civil group" that performed the abortion, which was "very quick, painless." She remembers few details of the actual procedure. "I must have blocked it out of my mind," she says. "It was just something that had to get done." She wasn't interested in having a child with a philandering alcoholic, nor was she going to take a leave of absence from her job when her family was so poor. "I have no regrets," she says. "One of the reasons I was not going to have a child was the memory of my mother, who gave up her very intelligent life to raise three children. I was not willing to give up my life to have children."
When I asked if that made her pro-choice, she said, "You don't ever ask an intelligent person that question, do you?
"Abortion is certainly an important way of freeing the world of an unwanted human being," she added. "To continue to give birth under such bad circumstances is a sin in itself. No one should be born that way, without the love and desire of their parents."
Alice divorced her first husband in 1932. She remarried my great-uncle, John Thorpe, some years later. They never had children.
Margaret Lehr
My mother-in-law was a 22-year-old medical student in Vienna when she had her first of four abortions. It was the mid-1940s, wartime; the diaphragm was the only contraceptive available, and it wasn't readily available. Neither was anesthesia or antibiotics, so her abortions were performed without the benefit of either. These were unwanted pregnancies with casual lovers; she felt no remorse about aborting them. Since she was a medical student, finding a doctor to perform the procedure wasn't difficult. But under the circumstances, it was risky.
One of Margaret's abortions turned septic because the placenta remained inside her uterus. "I bled and bled and bled and bled," she recalls. "I had extremely high fever and bone-wracking chills. The thing is, you get euphoric. I was in bed and I was thinking of the old Romans who would get into the bathtub and open their veins."
After Margaret had a convulsion, her roommate went in search of further medical help. "She got a professor of gynecology, who was my lover too, and she hustled him over -- he was not the father. He induced the placenta, and when I delivered the placenta, the bleeding stopped."
The abortion that bothers her most was the one she had after sleeping with her husband before they got married. It was in Philadelphia in the early 1950s. He was an intern at Taylor Hospital where she was a resident. They planned to get married, she didn't want a "shotgun wedding" or the appearance of one, even though he was prepared to have the child and marry her. He performed the abortion. For some reason it didn't take. She was in a quandary -- whether to let a potentially damaged fetus come to term or try aborting again. She chose the latter course and aborted the fetus, a boy, at four months.
Margaret and Herndon got married and they agreed to wait a couple of years until he finished his residency before starting a family. Her first daughter, little Margaret, was born nine months after the wedding. And there followed in close succession three other children, another girl and two boys, one of whom is now my husband.
As a medical professional, Margaret saw many women with botched abortions admitted to the hospital where she worked. These women would often arrive unconscious. "Police detectives would come and sit by their bed waiting [for them to regain consciousness] to find out the name of the abortionist." Some of the women broke down and told the name. The doctor lost his practice.
Margaret also saw women who suffered horrible emotional problems as a result of botched abortions. These women had electro-shock treatments to erase their short-term memory.
"I didn't consider it sinful," she says matter-of-factly. "It was my body, and I do what I please with my body."
Bonnie Smith
My mother's best friend, Bonnie Smith, had the first legal abortion in the state of New York, a fact my mother wasn't even aware of. It was June 1970. Most people, including Bonnie herself, forget the drama that led to the passage of New York State's abortion bill, which preceded Roe vs. Wade by three years.
Constance Cook, a Republican assemblywoman from upstate New York, was not interested in taking tentative steps to reform the state's abortion law. Cook, who introduced her bill in 1969, wanted to get to the heart of the matter: The state's abortion law didn't need mending, it needed to be repealed. She was fed up with her male colleagues' compromising efforts and their male-oriented view on the subject. Cook's bill was one of the most far-reaching proposals in the United States. It would have died on the Assembly floor had it not been for the courageous act of an assemblyman on the other side of the aisle from Cook. Democrat George Michaels had twice voted against Cook's abortion bill, which was about to lose by a single vote. He was being assailed by his family for it. According to Cynthia Gorney's social history on abortion, Articles of Faith , Michaels stood and called for the floor. "What he said at first was lost to the melee in the chamber, and the sudden scramble of the cameras, but the critical words of Assemblyman George Michaels appeared the next morning in the pages of nearly every newspaper in New York, along with the photograph of his graying head, bent down toward his desk, after he had begun to cry," she writes. "'... My own son called me a whore for voting against this bill,' Michaels said, the people who were present to hear it remember that this was when his voice began to break. 'I realize, Mr. Speaker, that I am terminating my political career,' Michaels said. 'But I cannot in good conscience sit here and allow my vote to be the one that defeats this bill. I ask that my vote be changed from No to Yes.'"
That's how Bonnie got her legal abortion. She conceived in April 1970; she had to wait until June to have the abortion, when the law went into effect. She was 25 and already had an 8-month-old girl at home. Her first pregnancy was planned. The second was a failure of the IUD that she had installed in her uterus after Annie was born. "I was emotional about having the abortion, but I couldn't conceive of having another baby -- I was overloaded."
Bonnie and her husband Al were living in a studio apartment in the Bronx with their new daughter when Bonnie got pregnant again. They both worked full time, he as a nurse's aide, she as a physical therapist. All of Al's income went to support the children he had from a previous marriage. Struggling to live off Bonnie's income, they decided to move to California to be closer to Al's kids. Al left with their daughter for California; Bonnie stayed behind living with friends, waiting for her legal abortion.
Early one morning an ex-boyfriend drove her to Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville, a conservative enclave of Westchester County. "I was treated very badly," she recalls. "The staff and the doctor of the hospital felt very degraded about having to do this abortion.
"As annoyed as the doctor was who performed it, and as cold as the staff was, it was still a safe abortion."
Bonnie admits to moderate regrets. She always imagined that it was a boy who could have been a playmate and companion for her daughter, but, she says, that fantasy is simplistic. "On the other hand, I was so glad I had the opportunity to have the abortion safely and legally. I want that opportunity for my daughter and granddaughter."
During her training as a physical therapist, Bonnie did a pediatric rotation at the Rusk Institute in New York, where she worked with two children who were born with severe impairments due to attempted illegal abortions. "Nobody's pro-abortion," Bonnie said. "But I think the government's way more concerned about a fetal life, and it's not concerned about that life after it's born."
Sally Aldrich
Sally Aldrich lives a few miles away from me in Ridgefield, but she was a stranger until I interviewed her for this story. Sally had her abortion in the early 1960s when she was 23, poised to marry her first husband. She had graduated from an upscale women's college in Connecticut and had gotten her first job at McGraw Hill in Manhattan. Her husband-to-be was her boss, 11 years her senior. He was frustrated with Sally because their sex life "wasn't spontaneous enough." That moment of spontaneity brought her shame and heartache.
Her future husband's first marriage had begun with his young wife being pregnant and ended in their getting divorced. Sally had no intention of repeating the pattern. Through a friend, she found a doctor at Harlem Hospital who performed abortions, illegally, of course. He instructed her that she should not have her husband call him.
"I was very frightened about the whole thing, but not frightened enough not to go through with it," she recounts. It made her think of the existential philosophy she studied in college. "You take the burden of your own existence on your own shoulders -- I was learning that the hard way."
The procedure was performed in the doctor's office under general anesthesia. She remembers waking up and crying with relief that the whole ordeal was over.
But she was wrong. Several weeks later, a woman knocked on her apartment door and asked if she was Sally Aldrich and if she might be looking for a cleaning woman. The visit was bewildering, but Sally didn't make anything of it. Two weeks later, she was handed a subpoena and told to appear in court. Sally wasn't sure what the subpoena was for; she just remembers feeling ashamed and ruined.
That day in court, Sally again saw the woman who had come to her door. "She said, 'Do I look familiar to you?' I said, 'Yes, you asked me if I needed a cleaning woman.'" The woman was an undercover cop who had apparently tailed Sally in an effort to confirm her identity.
Sally, along with about 30 other women who were rounded up in similar fashion, were arrested that day and told: "You have committed a crime. Either you cooperate or we will be very hard on you."
Only one of the women arrested had a lawyer with her, as far as Sally could tell. This was pre-Miranda, so their rights were not read to them. The cops and the prosecutor used intimidation to get the information they wanted. "They wanted to get this doctor, who I felt was doing a real service for women," she says. "This man, in my mind, was a saint."
About a year later, Sally felt the need to talk to someone about her experience. Sally and her mother shared an interest in art and would often meet at a museum to take in an exhibit. One day at the Guggenheim, Sally told her the truth. "I said to her, 'Mother, I've had an abortion.' And she said, 'Well dear, I've had two. Let's go look at the paintings.'"
Three years after her abortion, Sally got pregnant with her son. Three years after that she had a daughter, Gillian, who would grow up to become a documentary filmmaker and make the "I'm Not Sorry Day" film. She divorced her first husband when Gillian was 2, went back to school and supported her children by teaching art for 23 years. Many years later, she remarried.
Karen Erickson
My cousin Karen's story is a familiar one. She was 19, living in New Milford, and had been dating her boyfriend for over a year. They used contraceptives and practiced safe sex -- most of the time.
Her period was two weeks late, but she was in denial about the possibility of pregnancy. One night when her boyfriend was over, she became nauseated and fainted on the floor of the bathroom. Her pregnancy was confirmed by a gynecologist, who tried to talk Karen into having the baby and putting it up for adoption. Karen knew she would get no support from her family if she chose that route. Abortion, she felt, was her only realistic option. "I was so young and so naïve and not experienced in the world at all. I didn't want to bring up a child. I wasn't emotionally ready."
It was 1976, so Karen's abortion was legal. She had it at New Milford Hospital under general anesthesia; the whole procedure cost $300. Her boyfriend paid the bill and then dumped her.
She had her second abortion in Bangor, Maine, in 1986. She'd been living with her boyfriend when she discovered that he was cheating on her. She left him. Shortly after, she found she was pregnant by him. The decision to abort was more traumatic this time because they had been engaged. "It was awful. That baby I wanted to keep. But he didn't want me to have the baby. He talked me out of it. I thought if I had the baby it would keep us together, but I was kidding myself. He told me he wouldn't support me or the baby."
Since then Karen has been married and divorced. She wanted kids with her husband, but she says she wasn't able to get pregnant. She wonders if those two abortions had something to do with it. Kids don't look too likely for my cousin at 47.
Still, she feels grateful. Her life would have turned out vastly different if she'd become a mother at 19. "I probably would have ended up living at home with the baby and not fulfilling any of my dreams or goals," she said. "Or worse, I would have ended up in a homeless shelter. It wouldn't have been fair to me or the child."
My Story
I kept my abortion a secret from my immediate family. Even as I began researching this story, I had not told my mother, father, brother or sister that 25 years ago I visited the Planned Parenthood office in lower Manhattan with my boyfriend of 10 years and terminated a pregnancy.
The only part I can remember clearly was the moment of conception. We made love in a tent pitched behind some dunes near my family's beach house on Fire Island. I was in love. Although I certainly knew better and usually used contraceptives, I abandoned myself to the moment. I was 23 and trying to make it as an actress and dancer in New York City. Those, not motherhood, were my aspirations.
I'd always felt that if I was old enough to have sex, I was old enough to deal with the consequences without involving my parents. My parents are intellectually pro-choice, but most of us navigate the bumpy terrain of abortion rights with our hearts, and perhaps only some assistance from our heads. I couldn't help but feel my parents would have been deeply disturbed by having to be involved in my decision. I was lucky to have had the support from my boyfriend to get me through a sad and lonely experience.
I remember nothing of the procedure itself, except that I was awake for it and the offices were dingy and strange to me. I remember the cab ride back to West 71st Street. The cabbie was doing 80 most of the way and seemed to be aiming for the potholes. When I got back to the apartment, I slept for many hours.
I realized somewhat reluctantly while I was interviewing these women that it was time for me to come out to my family. I was still afraid of their reaction. I called my mother and told her I needed her to know that I had an abortion and that I would be writing about it. I didn't want her to learn about it in the paper.
"You did?" she said, sounding slightly incredulous. After I gave her the who-what-when-where, she said, "I'm glad you told me. And I'm glad you didn't tell me then."
I'm certain my life would have been very different if I hadn't been able to have that abortion at 23. I am indebted to the men and women who sacrificed and fought for my legal right to have it. I am also grateful to have a son by a man who wasn't aborted by his mom.
lgengo@fairfieldweekly.com
Murdering your own child must be its own judgement.
You'd have to live the rest of your life with the knowledge that you have killed your own precious baby.
When he/she reaches what should be his/her 2nd birthday, you wonder what he would look like. Then 6, and starting first grade, 13, 18 and high school graduate, and then college.
But you killed him.
There are many Christians who are counseling women through the grief and pain they go through because of their 'choice.' Doctors told them it was NOT a human being, and they believed them. And there are still evil doctors and abortion advocates who are urging other young women to make the same choice and murder their own precious child.
The choice is to not have sex if you are unmarried, or to have protected sex if you are, but can't support it.
And if you DO become pregnant, you do NOT murder that child you have conceived. You give him to someone else to raise in love..........because abortion is MURDER.
The worst thing for the abortion business has been quality sonograms. Everyone who has seen an early sonogram has seen a young human being, so the tide has been turning against the abortion industry.
They are becoming desperate, especially with this President who believes in the sanctity of life. He has been called "Public Enemy #1" by Planned Parenthood because he is a threat to their income.
This is pure evil, nmh. We need to pray, to fight, and to put our dollars with those who are fighting for the TRUTH to be made known.
As to said women who had abortions, most of them do so with the urging of said men. Look at the faces of the women who come out of abortion clinics. There are no smiles or relief. Just sadness and guilt.
As to the hundreds of pro-abortion letters from women who had abortions. Well hundreds do not even come close to the millions that has been performed.
It is important for women who has had abortions to speak out and let the public know their true feelings.
I wonder how many abortions a man has pushed on to women. That would be an interesting number.....
But I believe in women's rights........the REAL kind. I was a feminist when it meant that women were being encouraged to be strong and capable. Women need to begin standing up against these men, and do what's RIGHT. No excuses.
But you are also right that they are bearing a tremendous amount of guilt for murdering their own child, and these stories need to be told..........more than the hundreds who claim to believe they did the right thing......the thousands, or millions who know they DIDN'T need to speak up.
I agree that women are strong and capable except when they are lead by the nose by men such as the Clinton types, NOW Hags etc. For these women, I feel are an insult to our intelligence and who we are.
If some women only knew the powers given to us by the Almighty by using their feminine side, can handle most men very easily.
The greatest gift the Almighty gave to Females was to experience the creation of a new life growing inside of us. Those wonderful amazing feelings and undying love you feel when you hold your newborn in your arms for the first time. Women are nurturing and are not made to be sexually free with every Tom, Dick and Harry. Look at a women who has numerous sexual partners and you see a woman with dead eyes and a jaded mindset.
The Almighty entrusted us with the task of giving birth, nurturing, and loving his most precious gifts, us.
Amen to all you said!
Knowing that this gift is from the Creator of all life, makes you understand that those women who choose to kill that life will suffer for it.
"I had an abortion" tee shirt...
WTF???
I'm really for choice -- I just don't know how they can get what the baby's choice would be.
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