MountainMornings

Hey Alabama, do you really know me? My generation didn’t discuss abortion, like we didn’t discuss cancer. It was 1967 and I was a budding feminist; I hated having my skirt length measured in high school, and couldn’t believe we had to wear skirts on the streets of Boston when I went off to college. Boys could always wear what they wanted, go wherever they wanted, and say or do anything. We girls had our reputations to think of, it seemed everyone was thinking about this. So many rules about our bodies.

I couldn’t wait to shed some of those rules – in the words of Henry Higgins, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

When I walked into the UMass hospital with belly pain, I was shocked to find out I was pregnant. The word bereft comes to mind, why couldn’t the young doctor DO something? I almost think he felt sorry for me. So I did what many young girls did in that situation, I thought I’d better get married. After all, abortion was illegal in 1967.

But when I outlined my plan to marry some frat boy from MIT, my big sister had a better idea. She asked me if I really loved him, and that’s when I broke down crying in the stupid phone booth at the bottom of the stairs in my Beacon Street dorm. She told me to come to New York.  I had an abortion.

It’s true we don’t owe the world our abortion stories, because being able to control our bodies is an elemental human right. I was a teenager, a Freshman in college, I couldn’t support myself, let alone a child. I didn’t end up in a cult, or as Mrs. Frat Boy in a cul-de-sac in Colorado. Did I feel shame and guilt? You betcha.

That’s why I married somebody else pretty quickly;  my step-father had just died, I needed an anchor. I married a law student, because I was still bereft and unmoored, and my starter marriage lasted 4 years.

I’m pretty sure if you count all the women of my generation who had abortions, it would look more like 2 in 4, or maybe 3? We went to Puerto Rico, we went to Europe, we went to brownstones in NYC, and we went to back alleys in Boston – depending on our socio-economic status. We had bought into the idea of equality, until it was too late. The wealthy will always be able to get what they want, the poor will always suffer.

If you were the result of an unwanted pregnancy that turned into a wonderful adoption story, good on you. But you probably left a scar that never heals in your birth mother’s womb. If you were the result of an unwanted pregnancy, and you were raised by your teenage mom, and her mom probably, good on you. That was your mom’s choice. Some of you succeeded without a father, and some landed in the foster care program, which is where I landed as a baby in my Year of Living Dangerously.

Even though the Flapper always told me, “You’re the only child I ever planned,” I was born because of a lie. A doctor thought my father had lost the will to live, so he advised the Flapper to have baby number 6, me! I may have been wanted, but that didn’t change  our circumstances. My father was actually losing his brain to a glioblastoma, I was 7 months old when he died.

Women need reliable, comprehensive, reproductive healthcare. We don’t need a bunch of white men in Alabama telling us we could be imprisoned for a miscarriage… it’s no longer 1967. And I’m not sorry I postponed motherhood, it was my choice.