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It is the fall of 1971. I have just walked into a room in a church basement, where there is a meeting of NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the organization created two years earlier by Betty Friedan. Although abortion had been legal in New York since 1970, it was still illegal in most states.
I’ve moved to Syracuse—the first time I have lived outside the New York metropolitan area. I’m feeling a bit unmoored, not yet at home in my MFA program, and missing the political engagement I had experienced as a college student at Barnard and Columbia.
When I see my fellow attendees, I know, as Dorothy knew that she was not in Kansas, that I’m not in New York City anymore. Only two of the women look like anyone I would have ever had practice speaking to. One must be, like me, a student: She’s wearing jeans and a peasant blouse. The other is a Black woman with a luxuriant Afro, a jade green turtle necklace, a black skirt, and boots. The others seem like strangers. I had not believed that I would ever be in a room with anyone who wore flesh-colored pantyhose, or who wore her hair in what was called a pixie cut, but here I am. Here we all are.
The meeting is called to order by a short, dark, wiry, fast-talking woman. Quickly, we get down to tactics, which involve organizing travel to Albany and to Washington. Despite the legalization of abortion in New York, antiabortionists are tirelessly picketing the state legislature with gruesome pictures of mangled fetuses. We sign up both for counter-protests and to speak to our local legislators in person. Pennsylvania, a close neighbor state, will be another target of our lobbying. And we will be on the alert for actions in DC, targeting the Supreme Court.
So far, so straightforward. But then our leader says, “What we need is to talk about why we’re all here. The problem is no one wants to talk about abortion. But I think it’s important to make things personal.”
She describes growing up in an Italian neighborhood in Buffalo. “You’d hear it whispered among the women, ‘enceinta, enceinta…’ and not in a happy way. I got pregnant when I was 16. An older cousin forced himself on me. He was making more money than anyone in the family, and was looked up to as a success, and he said no one would believe me if I said anything about what was going on. And he said to remember that he was lending my family money so my brother could go to college. I was terrified, and ashamed, but I told my sister, who was older, married, with children. She said everyone in the neighborhood knew about a woman who took care of things. She came with me to this woman’s apartment. We didn’t talk. The woman covered her kitchen table with a white sheet, took some kind of medical instrument out of a pot of boiling water and after an excruciatingly painful time, she showed me into her bedroom, where I rested. My sister handed her money, and we left.”
The next woman to speak is older and the most elegant in the room. She wears a tweed suit; her silver hair is in a French twist, her accent refined, although not off-putting. It reminds me of someone, and then I realize who: Julia Child. “It was 1937. I was 21 and working on a newspaper in Washington. I was having a relationship with a rather aristocratic Englishman, separated from his family overseas. It was a pleasant relationship, but nothing serious. I became pregnant, or ‘fell pregnant,’ in his words. There was no way we were going to marry. He told me not to worry: It had happened to many of his friends in London and there was an easy way of dealing with it. A well-known Harley Street doctor had a nursing home in the country where posh girls who needed abortions could go. It was safe, and not, he assured me, harrowing. We flew to London. It was exactly as he said: clean, pleasant, even a bit bucolic. It would never have happened here, and it would never have happened if he weren’t wealthy and connected.”
The young woman who I assumed was a student speaks next. “I got pregnant and told my best friend. She said she would talk to her father, who was an obstetrician. He was very kind, and said he would help me but we would have to say that I was threatening suicide. I was ashamed, but I knew I was safe.”
“I’m from California,” says a woman who seems to be somewhere in her 30s. She is wearing what I think might be a Laura Ashley dress: small pastel flowers on a pink background. “I married young. My husband was a high school teacher, money was tight, and we had three kids. I was only 30, and we’d agreed that when the youngest went to school, I could go back to college. Then I got pregnant. It wasn’t an easy decision, but we both knew that another child would put horrible burdens on the family…and would be the end of my chances for an education and my dream of work. There was a group in California that connected women with doctors in Mexico who would perform abortions safely. One of the women in the group accompanied you to make sure everything was in order. We used all our savings to make it happen…and of course I was sad, but I’ve never regretted it.”
A very pale woman with a pageboy and bangs says, “I’m from Gary, Indiana. I’m a nurse. There was a wonderful woman doctor, very distinguished, and it was known that she would perform abortions. I volunteered to help her because in the hospital where I worked so many women had experienced botched abortions—the part of the hospital where they were sent was known as ‘the septic tank.’ The doctor I volunteered for was discovered and jailed for a year. She lost her license to practice medicine. She died a year later, shunned by the community, and deprived of her work.”
The one Black woman in the room speaks next. “It was my sister. One night she came home and passed out the minute she walked in the door. She had aborted herself using a knitting needle. We called an ambulance, but ambulances took their time coming to our neighborhood. She bled to death on the bathroom floor.”
“I have two kids,” she continues, “a good husband, but I had a miscarriage between my kids, it was only 10 weeks. I was lying in bed, and I passed something that I thought maybe was a heavy period. I collected what I had passed and took it to the doctor. He said that I had miscarried. And I thought of my sister, and that people were saying that people like her had committed murder, and I knew that whatever it was that had come out of my body was not a child, not a person, and since then I’ve been so furious, I just have to do something.”
Then it is my turn. I have never spoken publicly about my abortion, but I am full of admiration at the dignity of the women who have expressed themselves.
“It was the day after Thanksgiving,” I say, “and I had a date with a friend of a friend to see the movie Camelot. I wept uncontrollably leaving the theater. My date, feeling the need to comfort me, invited me to his apartment. Comfort led to what was then known as heavy petting. We did not have intercourse, and I didn’t know then that intercourse was not, in some rare cases, required for impregnation. I missed my period, but I couldn’t imagine that I was pregnant. I consulted a gynecologist. He told me that in fact I was 10 weeks pregnant. If I could come up with $2,000, he could arrange for a psychiatrist to write a letter asserting that I was mentally unstable and therefore an abortion was required. There was no way I could come up with $2,000. I would literally rather have died at the hands of an illegal abortionist than tell my mother. She was a hyper-devout Catholic, a widow, and I was her only child. The shame that would have fallen on me and my mother was unbearable even to contemplate. Panicked, I asked everyone I knew where I could get an abortion. I got a number from one of my classmates.
“I was told to come alone and stand in front of a movie theater in the Bronx and bring $300 in cash. A car pulled up and the driver told me to sit in the back. He put a blindfold around my eyes and drove in what seemed like circles and then stopped. I was terrified; I felt like the girl who gets kidnapped in a gangster movie. Still blindfolded, I was led by him to the basement of an apartment. I had no idea where I was.
“He removed the blindfold only when I was inside. The room was small and anonymous; a fluorescent light on the ceiling buzzed. Several women were seated on salmon-colored plastic chairs. One by one, they disappeared into a room and after a time walked out, looking white and shaken. I was the last to be called. A man in a white jacket, who spoke no English, offered me a Darvon, a mild painkiller. I got on the table, and the excruciating procedure began.
“Then, the man who’d driven me blindfolded me again, and left me in front of the Bronx theater.”
I know I have to say something that is in the air, but unspoken. “If you had money, you could go to England, or Mexico, or get a doctor to say you were suicidal. If you didn’t, you risked your life.”
Everyone is silent. People hug, and there are tears, but the group leader was right: We are energized for the fight, however long it takes. Talking about it has made what we had gone through seem more normal; we were given strength, knowing that what had happened to us had happened to many, many women—women we admired, loved, mourned.
Two years later, Roe v. Wade was passed, and we believed that we had won the fight. We knew a majority of Americans were with us. We were unprepared for the relentlessness of the antiabortion movement, and for the money behind them. We didn’t expect that evangelicals, who at first were not important to the movement (even Billy Graham refused to join antiabortion activists in their campaign), would align with Catholics in hijacking American religion in the name of a minority belief.
We were unprepared for the weakness of our democracy.
And we were unprepared for the murder of doctors, the bombing of abortion clinics. We were unprepared for a fear that our beliefs could bring danger to us and to the people we loved.
I often think of that small, wiry group leader. She was right that talking about abortion takes it out of the scary dark. It has occurred to me that one reason that gay rights and gay marriage became mainstream was because courageous people came out and spoke about the truth of their lives. You realized that Uncle Jim wasn’t just a confirmed bachelor, that Cousin Sarah’s roommate Bess was more than just a roommate.
As a mother, mother-in-law, godmother, and retired teacher of beloved students, I am enormously distressed to realize that the dangers I had thought were past are still a present fear. And that it is no easier to “come out” about having had an abortion than it was 50 years ago. Harder, perhaps, because America is a more violent country than it was 50 years ago, and many more Americans are armed with ever more dangerous weapons.
One in four American women has had an abortion, and for nearly half a century they have done so safely. Women have always had abortions for very good reasons, and they have often died in the process. The spectacle of thousands of deaths must spur people of goodwill, people who value life to stand together.
And tell our stories. Like the women in the room.