21ST. CENTURY
MINE
MINE! My Body, My Will, My Choice (2014)
(corrected and edited, 2015)
university's "They" say --- whoever They are --- that one out of every three women will have an abortion during her lifetime. I think about all the women I know --- scores of friends, many more acquaintances, and the hundreds and maybe thousands of college “girls” I’ve taught --- and I think about what a big number one-third of them would be. Each person who’s had an abortion or who's contemplated it has a story. Out of all my friends, I only know a few who’ve shared those stories; they are most personal. And I, being Southern and “of a certain age” (born in 1947), would never talk openly about my own story. Until now, that is. And even now, it will be hidden among all the others. It isn’t that I’m ashamed of having had an abortion, it’s that I wish more than anything I’d never gotten pregnant when having a baby, a child, was impossible.
The first time I was pregnant was unplanned but NOT unwanted; there is quite a difference. We were young and in love and in college and unprepared to make whatever decisions we needed to make if we were going to start a life together. I’d been tearful for a month or so, crying over everything and nothing, not knowing that hormones were realigning to make room for baby. When I finally saw a doctor, he said that his inspection showed I probably wasn’t pregnant, and that was a huge relief. He called later, after the rabbit died --- so long ago, do people today even know what that means? --- to correct his initial judgment and to offer congratulations.
I went immediately to tell my boyfriend. He was in the ROTC and was in full uniform that day, marching around the quad and stepping over Vietnam War protesters. I’ll always remember the look he gave me as he wheeled around, still unknowing, to greet me with a huge grin. Those “before and after” moments, those statements that change everything: this was one of them, and I knew it. So I told him in those two simple and life-altering words: I’m pregnant. He immediately said, Let’s go make some phone calls. He called my parents first, then his mother. My mom phoned me minutes later, full of concern. It was final exam season and she worried about how I was doing. Fine, it turned out; that semester I made all A’s, my best grade point ever.
We married two weeks later. I wrote notes to all my friends to tell them I was pregnant while inviting them to the wedding. Keep in mind this was 1968 and people --- “good girls” --- didn’t do this! I was blessed with great friends, they all attended the ceremony, and it was a wonderful celebration. I told the minister and prepared him for my wearing "pure" white: a minidress with the coolest hat, and, boy, do I wish I could find a picture! During the short preparation time, back in the Deepest South, my oh-so-proper mother had announced to her women-friends at bridge club that I was having a hurried wedding. “For all I know,” she said, as if she didn’t, “She might be pregnant.” Brilliant.
I CHOSE to have that precious baby ---she's now a grown woman with children of her own --- and I have been pro-choice ever since.
When the Women’s Movement took hold, I was in my early twenties. In reading groups and discussion groups, my consciousness was most definitely raised. Our generation of “girls” learned about our bodies; men had seemed to be more familiar with our parts than we ourselves were. We read The Second Sex, studied Our Bodies, Ourselves, and took control over our own biological destinies. We considered ourselves to be fully human, fully rational, and fully moral --- equal, in other words, to our male counterparts --- and we claimed authority over our own cellular beings. We thought, or thought at the time, that we’d made progress that would last forever.
In the late 1990s, with my college-age daughter, her boyfriend, and a million other people, I went to Washington to march for choice. The cloth banner I brought home proclaimed “We’ll never go back,” but now back is where some people are pointing us. Here we find ourselves, in the 21st century, with loud voices insisting on criminalizing abortion or at least making it as difficult as possible.
In the 1980s I was at lunch with a couple of friends who each mentioned in an ordinary and conversational tone that she’d had an abortion, maybe more than one. The topic didn’t get discussed beyond that, but I was shocked at their unapologetic admission. Southern, I’ve already admitted to it, I wasn’t as forthright with my story, nor would I ever be. (Until now.)
So these two women had experienced abortions. Neither of them was sorry. Both of them, like the others I know who have had abortions, are loving mothers and loving grandmothers. Of them all, none, not one regrets her choice. This is surely “the norm,” although most of us keep quiet about our sexual pasts, their being so private, so personal, so nobody’s business.
Anna (not her name; all are changed for privacy’s sake) was the first person I knew who had an abortion. She’d moved to a big city straight from college. It was 1970 and jobs for women, good jobs, were waiting, so she got one. She started dating a guy, a salesman we’d then have described as “a Yankee” who was as different from our high school friends as anyone, not someone you’d take home to Mother. He wasn’t what she aspired to in a long-term partner, that much was clear. In a case of amazingly bad luck, she became pregnant after her very first sexual experience. So she flew to New York for a legal abortion, done, over, let’s get on with life. Of course she later married and had children and never regretted her decision.
Then there was Beth, a woman with two amazing sons who were my daughter’s playmates. She was the kind of person that made me want to hug her on sight, an Earth-Mother, a terrific person, a terrific parent. Although I never saw any indication of it, she apparently suffered from mental illness. (It was the early 70s and psychiatric definitions weren’t as plentiful or known as now. Manic/depressive? Who knew?) At some point she was hospitalized and, during her treatment, she had an affair with a member of the staff --- to make it worse, across the black/white racial divide of Mississippi --- and became pregnant. She asked me to take her to get an abortion in a small town a few hours away, and I agreed, no questions asked. We drove to and from the clinic in sober and private silence without details, without judgment, but, once the procedure was done, with huge relief.
Carol lived in the small Mexican town I ran away to after my marriage dissolved. It was the late 70s, and life in our back-packers’ village was pretty wild with single folks hanging out, drinking, and copulating in the free-spirited atmosphere of the times. She had a regular boyfriend who traveled a lot, so she was able to enjoy the crazy nightlife while being “spoken for.” I was with her the night she and Miguel, a photographer and everyone's friend, started to flirt. Much alcohol was involved. They kissed on the sidewalk outside the bar, and we all watched and commented on the pair. The next day she and I sat side by side in the town square and she described her night, how she’d gone with Mike to his apartment, how they'd smoked pot, and how he had seemed to demonstrate a different personality: that he’d been physically insistent and, despite her protests, had forcefully attempted anal sex. At this point I shared her horror: it was the 1970s and we were still, no matter how free, quite innocent. She told me she’d convinced him to have "ordinary" sex, vaginal sex, and that she’d thought that she could do that and get out of there. (She did that and got out of there.) Six weeks later she knew was pregnant. She hitched a ride to Texas where she had an abortion, and we never mentioned the subject again.
Donna had won a major contest that required her to travel around the country to promote a noble and highly visible cause when she found out she was pregnant. She and her boyfriend had recently broken up. The organizers of the contest were horrified and insisted she have an abortion. The former boyfriend was threatened into coming up with the huge amount ($200 at the time) for the procedure. It was legal in only a couple of states way back then, so she had to travel pretty far to get a medically safe procedure. She never spoke to the boyfriend about it, ever, and she went on to carry out her official responsibilities, no one the wiser.
Eva told me that, decades before Roe v. Wade, her grandmother, then in her forties, refused to have a sixth child and had an illegal back-alley abortion. She died from it. She left behind five motherless children, and my friend never knew her grandma.
My good friend Fran was supporting her husband through medical school, as was I, by teaching in a high school in the mid-70s. She had a small son who she adored but was very unhappy with her life; she said it was like a long dark tunnel. With other faculty folks of our age, we’d go out to a bar each Wednesday for “Club Miercoles.” We were all young and funny and flirtatious, so I wasn’t at all surprised to learn she’d “done it” with one of our faculty friends. Fran got pregnant and had an abortion.
Gail, another "medical wife," taught middle school while her husband was a medical student. During his residency they separated because he'd fallen in love with another woman. Alone, hurt, angry, and sad, Gail found herself pregnant. She had an abortion.
Helen, a longtime friend, married in her late 30s and had two boys. She phoned me to get advice about a third and unwanted pregnancy when she was in her early 40s. We talked about the realities of motherhood; any advice I might have had was beside the point. She said one of the saddest things I’d ever heard: that she’d always wanted to have more children than she’d had abortions. Her previous history was news to me, but I didn’t ask for particulars. She had an abortion, one more than her tally of children. Her choice.
Then there was Irene, who’d left an early marriage to be with the dynamic love of her (then) life, who endured the scandal of leaving for another man, who was “living in sin” in the Deep South when she became pregnant. She had an abortion. The timing wasn’t right. She soon married her lover and had children and a wonderful family life.
Julia, my daughter's age, had the same experience years later, long after sex, contraception, and abortion had become public topics. The timing was wrong and she wasn't prepared for parenthood. A fundamentalist Christian and stellar mother of several now-teens, she remains thankful for her freedom of choice and suffers no regrets.
One-third of us women can tell our own story. Mine is among those described above. Of all the friends I’ve described, all of them, every last one of them is GRATEFUL that she was able to have her unwanted pregnancy terminated at an early stage and by a medical professional in antiseptic conditions. One of them, Anna, --- the first person that I knew to have had an abortion --- has becoming ardently pro-life, even though she doesn't regret her own abortion. Recently I questioned her about her beliefs, and she began an impossible Q & A about when the soul develops. What do you think? she asked. Who cares what I think? I responded. I hadn't yet learned the "Seven Most Important Words" that I can share with you now: I don't know, and neither do you. I finally asked her about her own long-ago experience: Do you regret it? Are you sorry? Her answer: "Oh, but that guy was horrible..." So the abortion was okay for her, apparently, but taboo for anyone else? The hypocrisy is stunning.
If we knew the stories that women could tell --- rapes, bad judgment, drunken nights, insistent boyfriends and husbands, missed pills and birth-control failures; the list could go on forever --- we might rethink our attitude toward abortion. No one I know would call herself “pro-abortion,” but each of the women that I’ve fictionalized here, myself included --- our sisters and mothers and aunts and grandmothers and daughters and friends --- was able to make a tough and serious decision, the right decision, if they are to be believed --- in the privacy of her life and relationships. To think that this choice is made without deep and profound feeling is an insult to most of us and a terrible simplification of something that is far from easy.
My own abortion (and a few of the other women's described) was performed at Planned Parenthood. I remember sitting in the waiting room looking around at the other women --- most of them "girls" in my eyes, much younger than I --- who had appointments for their pregnancy terminations. They seemed so nonchalant and casual while I felt such horrible sadness; I remember noticing my own prejudice and disapproval. We all watched the required presentations and had meetings with kindly counselors and learned our options. During the procedure, one of the medical assistants noticed my tears and stopped to ask if I were having second (third, fourth, hundredth) thoughts and if I wanted her to stop. No, I said, it’s just sad. Holding my hand, she told me, so kind, so sensitive, the medication sometimes makes one feel weepy. But it’s sad, I said, and of course it always is: the loss of possibility, the fact that some things just aren’t possible. No matter the story, it is a loss. It is sad.
Making abortion illegal won’t stop it; it will only make it a crime, performed by criminals, and therefore unsafe. Women have always had pregnancies they will not sustain. As long as a woman can be impregnated against her will, no matter the circumstances, some will choose to make it go away. It is each person’s personal will that is at stake. Whose will trumps my own? A man’s? The State’s? And if you answer “God’s will,” then I say leave that between me and God. How dare one do anything else?
The first time I was pregnant was unplanned but NOT unwanted; there is quite a difference. We were young and in love and in college and unprepared to make whatever decisions we needed to make if we were going to start a life together. I’d been tearful for a month or so, crying over everything and nothing, not knowing that hormones were realigning to make room for baby. When I finally saw a doctor, he said that his inspection showed I probably wasn’t pregnant, and that was a huge relief. He called later, after the rabbit died --- so long ago, do people today even know what that means? --- to correct his initial judgment and to offer congratulations.
I went immediately to tell my boyfriend. He was in the ROTC and was in full uniform that day, marching around the quad and stepping over Vietnam War protesters. I’ll always remember the look he gave me as he wheeled around, still unknowing, to greet me with a huge grin. Those “before and after” moments, those statements that change everything: this was one of them, and I knew it. So I told him in those two simple and life-altering words: I’m pregnant. He immediately said, Let’s go make some phone calls. He called my parents first, then his mother. My mom phoned me minutes later, full of concern. It was final exam season and she worried about how I was doing. Fine, it turned out; that semester I made all A’s, my best grade point ever.
We married two weeks later. I wrote notes to all my friends to tell them I was pregnant while inviting them to the wedding. Keep in mind this was 1968 and people --- “good girls” --- didn’t do this! I was blessed with great friends, they all attended the ceremony, and it was a wonderful celebration. I told the minister and prepared him for my wearing "pure" white: a minidress with the coolest hat, and, boy, do I wish I could find a picture! During the short preparation time, back in the Deepest South, my oh-so-proper mother had announced to her women-friends at bridge club that I was having a hurried wedding. “For all I know,” she said, as if she didn’t, “She might be pregnant.” Brilliant.
I CHOSE to have that precious baby ---she's now a grown woman with children of her own --- and I have been pro-choice ever since.
When the Women’s Movement took hold, I was in my early twenties. In reading groups and discussion groups, my consciousness was most definitely raised. Our generation of “girls” learned about our bodies; men had seemed to be more familiar with our parts than we ourselves were. We read The Second Sex, studied Our Bodies, Ourselves, and took control over our own biological destinies. We considered ourselves to be fully human, fully rational, and fully moral --- equal, in other words, to our male counterparts --- and we claimed authority over our own cellular beings. We thought, or thought at the time, that we’d made progress that would last forever.
In the late 1990s, with my college-age daughter, her boyfriend, and a million other people, I went to Washington to march for choice. The cloth banner I brought home proclaimed “We’ll never go back,” but now back is where some people are pointing us. Here we find ourselves, in the 21st century, with loud voices insisting on criminalizing abortion or at least making it as difficult as possible.
In the 1980s I was at lunch with a couple of friends who each mentioned in an ordinary and conversational tone that she’d had an abortion, maybe more than one. The topic didn’t get discussed beyond that, but I was shocked at their unapologetic admission. Southern, I’ve already admitted to it, I wasn’t as forthright with my story, nor would I ever be. (Until now.)
So these two women had experienced abortions. Neither of them was sorry. Both of them, like the others I know who have had abortions, are loving mothers and loving grandmothers. Of them all, none, not one regrets her choice. This is surely “the norm,” although most of us keep quiet about our sexual pasts, their being so private, so personal, so nobody’s business.
Anna (not her name; all are changed for privacy’s sake) was the first person I knew who had an abortion. She’d moved to a big city straight from college. It was 1970 and jobs for women, good jobs, were waiting, so she got one. She started dating a guy, a salesman we’d then have described as “a Yankee” who was as different from our high school friends as anyone, not someone you’d take home to Mother. He wasn’t what she aspired to in a long-term partner, that much was clear. In a case of amazingly bad luck, she became pregnant after her very first sexual experience. So she flew to New York for a legal abortion, done, over, let’s get on with life. Of course she later married and had children and never regretted her decision.
Then there was Beth, a woman with two amazing sons who were my daughter’s playmates. She was the kind of person that made me want to hug her on sight, an Earth-Mother, a terrific person, a terrific parent. Although I never saw any indication of it, she apparently suffered from mental illness. (It was the early 70s and psychiatric definitions weren’t as plentiful or known as now. Manic/depressive? Who knew?) At some point she was hospitalized and, during her treatment, she had an affair with a member of the staff --- to make it worse, across the black/white racial divide of Mississippi --- and became pregnant. She asked me to take her to get an abortion in a small town a few hours away, and I agreed, no questions asked. We drove to and from the clinic in sober and private silence without details, without judgment, but, once the procedure was done, with huge relief.
Carol lived in the small Mexican town I ran away to after my marriage dissolved. It was the late 70s, and life in our back-packers’ village was pretty wild with single folks hanging out, drinking, and copulating in the free-spirited atmosphere of the times. She had a regular boyfriend who traveled a lot, so she was able to enjoy the crazy nightlife while being “spoken for.” I was with her the night she and Miguel, a photographer and everyone's friend, started to flirt. Much alcohol was involved. They kissed on the sidewalk outside the bar, and we all watched and commented on the pair. The next day she and I sat side by side in the town square and she described her night, how she’d gone with Mike to his apartment, how they'd smoked pot, and how he had seemed to demonstrate a different personality: that he’d been physically insistent and, despite her protests, had forcefully attempted anal sex. At this point I shared her horror: it was the 1970s and we were still, no matter how free, quite innocent. She told me she’d convinced him to have "ordinary" sex, vaginal sex, and that she’d thought that she could do that and get out of there. (She did that and got out of there.) Six weeks later she knew was pregnant. She hitched a ride to Texas where she had an abortion, and we never mentioned the subject again.
Donna had won a major contest that required her to travel around the country to promote a noble and highly visible cause when she found out she was pregnant. She and her boyfriend had recently broken up. The organizers of the contest were horrified and insisted she have an abortion. The former boyfriend was threatened into coming up with the huge amount ($200 at the time) for the procedure. It was legal in only a couple of states way back then, so she had to travel pretty far to get a medically safe procedure. She never spoke to the boyfriend about it, ever, and she went on to carry out her official responsibilities, no one the wiser.
Eva told me that, decades before Roe v. Wade, her grandmother, then in her forties, refused to have a sixth child and had an illegal back-alley abortion. She died from it. She left behind five motherless children, and my friend never knew her grandma.
My good friend Fran was supporting her husband through medical school, as was I, by teaching in a high school in the mid-70s. She had a small son who she adored but was very unhappy with her life; she said it was like a long dark tunnel. With other faculty folks of our age, we’d go out to a bar each Wednesday for “Club Miercoles.” We were all young and funny and flirtatious, so I wasn’t at all surprised to learn she’d “done it” with one of our faculty friends. Fran got pregnant and had an abortion.
Gail, another "medical wife," taught middle school while her husband was a medical student. During his residency they separated because he'd fallen in love with another woman. Alone, hurt, angry, and sad, Gail found herself pregnant. She had an abortion.
Helen, a longtime friend, married in her late 30s and had two boys. She phoned me to get advice about a third and unwanted pregnancy when she was in her early 40s. We talked about the realities of motherhood; any advice I might have had was beside the point. She said one of the saddest things I’d ever heard: that she’d always wanted to have more children than she’d had abortions. Her previous history was news to me, but I didn’t ask for particulars. She had an abortion, one more than her tally of children. Her choice.
Then there was Irene, who’d left an early marriage to be with the dynamic love of her (then) life, who endured the scandal of leaving for another man, who was “living in sin” in the Deep South when she became pregnant. She had an abortion. The timing wasn’t right. She soon married her lover and had children and a wonderful family life.
Julia, my daughter's age, had the same experience years later, long after sex, contraception, and abortion had become public topics. The timing was wrong and she wasn't prepared for parenthood. A fundamentalist Christian and stellar mother of several now-teens, she remains thankful for her freedom of choice and suffers no regrets.
One-third of us women can tell our own story. Mine is among those described above. Of all the friends I’ve described, all of them, every last one of them is GRATEFUL that she was able to have her unwanted pregnancy terminated at an early stage and by a medical professional in antiseptic conditions. One of them, Anna, --- the first person that I knew to have had an abortion --- has becoming ardently pro-life, even though she doesn't regret her own abortion. Recently I questioned her about her beliefs, and she began an impossible Q & A about when the soul develops. What do you think? she asked. Who cares what I think? I responded. I hadn't yet learned the "Seven Most Important Words" that I can share with you now: I don't know, and neither do you. I finally asked her about her own long-ago experience: Do you regret it? Are you sorry? Her answer: "Oh, but that guy was horrible..." So the abortion was okay for her, apparently, but taboo for anyone else? The hypocrisy is stunning.
If we knew the stories that women could tell --- rapes, bad judgment, drunken nights, insistent boyfriends and husbands, missed pills and birth-control failures; the list could go on forever --- we might rethink our attitude toward abortion. No one I know would call herself “pro-abortion,” but each of the women that I’ve fictionalized here, myself included --- our sisters and mothers and aunts and grandmothers and daughters and friends --- was able to make a tough and serious decision, the right decision, if they are to be believed --- in the privacy of her life and relationships. To think that this choice is made without deep and profound feeling is an insult to most of us and a terrible simplification of something that is far from easy.
My own abortion (and a few of the other women's described) was performed at Planned Parenthood. I remember sitting in the waiting room looking around at the other women --- most of them "girls" in my eyes, much younger than I --- who had appointments for their pregnancy terminations. They seemed so nonchalant and casual while I felt such horrible sadness; I remember noticing my own prejudice and disapproval. We all watched the required presentations and had meetings with kindly counselors and learned our options. During the procedure, one of the medical assistants noticed my tears and stopped to ask if I were having second (third, fourth, hundredth) thoughts and if I wanted her to stop. No, I said, it’s just sad. Holding my hand, she told me, so kind, so sensitive, the medication sometimes makes one feel weepy. But it’s sad, I said, and of course it always is: the loss of possibility, the fact that some things just aren’t possible. No matter the story, it is a loss. It is sad.
Making abortion illegal won’t stop it; it will only make it a crime, performed by criminals, and therefore unsafe. Women have always had pregnancies they will not sustain. As long as a woman can be impregnated against her will, no matter the circumstances, some will choose to make it go away. It is each person’s personal will that is at stake. Whose will trumps my own? A man’s? The State’s? And if you answer “God’s will,” then I say leave that between me and God. How dare one do anything else?