Stories For Choice: Home

"Writing about my abortion, perhaps for the first time, is my opportunity to
think about it from the perspective of distance, both in years and emotions.

The year was 1966, and my baby was six months old. I was 24 years old and
had planned to have my second child in about three years. This unexpected
second pregnancy was due to lack of proper post-pregnancy/delivery
information from my gyn/ob physician and subsequent birth-control
measures.

I had clear and strong feelings that I did not want another child at this
time, and spoke to a Family Physician my husband worked for who offered to
contact the abortion doctor in Pennsylvania to make the necessary
arrangements. I discussed my emotional and psychological state with this
physician as well.

I don't have a clear memory of the details that preceded the actual
abortion.

We left our baby with my sister-in-law, telling no one else, and drove to
Baltimore, Maryland. (Though the cost (?) was probably the same, we didn't
have to go to Puerto Rico, more of a vacation site.:~} )

I suppose we checked into the motel before heading to the diner where I was
to be picked up and taken to the place where the abortion would be
performed. I can't remember how we arranged all of that, but I do recall
getting into a car....don't remember if the other women ("girls") were in
the car already or if we picked up others on the drive to the Garden
Apartment where the abortion(s) were performed.

I was the last in the group to be aborted because I was the only one who had
given birth and therefore was perceived to be more "comfortable" than the
others to be placed on a table and have a procedure performed.

Though the room was clean, and all seemed professional, it was an apartment,
it was surreptitious, and it was quick. I remember strongly objecting to
being forced to get up and out while still feeling the effects of the
medications.

I remember arriving at the motel.

It was only years and years later that I thought about the "what could have
beens".
Though we were assured of the competency of the doctor and the medical care,
and indeed I remember a nurse being present, there could have been
complications. But mostly, I later realized that my husband did not know
where I was being taken.

I was lucky. I know the stories about those who weren't as fortunate to have
the care and concern and help that we had. I have marched in Washington D.C.
before and would do so again if needed.

I don't remember when I first began telling anyone about my abortion. I do
know that the same gynocologist/obstretrician who hadn't given me the
medical information that would have prevented the unwanted pregnancy also
told me, when I informed him about my abortion and requested different birth
control measures, that as a result of my abortion I might have difficulty
getting pregnant the next time! (It did take a few months and I remembered
those unnecessary and inappropriate words!)


I do remember when finally, years later, told my mother about my abortion.
She sat there calmly and told me about the abortion that she had before I
was born. Our reasons and the circumstances surrounding our abortions were
completely different.

My parents came to New York City from Vienna, Austria, escaping from Hitler.
.My mother did not know what her mother and brother's fates...and didn't
know where they were until years later that they were killed in Auschwitz.
This is relevant because my mother had had an ovary removed as a young woman
and both she and her mother thought that she would not be able to have a
child. Yet, when my mother became pregnant at age 34 soon after arriving in
NY, she felt economically unprepared to raise a child and had an abortion in
what she called the Abortion Hospital on the East Side of Manhattan.

I didn't go to "a back alley" and no hangers were used for my abortion. I
was surrounded by caring and supportive people and the money to pay for the
abortion and the motel.
However, the memories of the experience will exist forever. Roe v.Wade must
be upheld so that women in the future need not endure any negative
experiences dealing with their own bodies."

I was the person who, though I never had one myself, was always brought along with the friend who needed an illegal abortion in the days before Roe.

Everyone, that is, except my mother.

When she found she was pregnant in her early fifties, with three grown children, my mother went to a hospital and told them she would kill herself if she had another child. The doctor there said that she could have a legal abortion when three doctors signed off on it. However, one of the doctors who had to sign the permission was in another country, and in the pre-cell phone, pre-email world, could not be reached for at least a month. That would certainly be too late for my mom.

In sorting out her alternatives, my mother didn’t ask me about the local doctor with his knotty pine office a few blocks from her house, the man who looked like a nervous drug addict when he performed an abortion on a terrified out-of-state young person. Nor did she ask me about the clean and peaceful Puerto Rican clinic to which I accompanied a friend. She didn’t know that there was a Dr. Spencer who, in the rural part of Pennsylvania where we lived, my generation of women knew as an abortion saint.

What she did instead was call her brother the radiologist who said that while he couldn’t perform a traditional abortion, he could achieve the same result with radiation.

Years later she died of uterian cancer.

1960, NYC – Carole S. was fresh out of graduate school and running a theatre company that specialized in Children’s productions. One of her young actresses (a woman in her early 20’s) came to her in tears saying she was pregnant and unsure of what to do. She was unmarried and was not ready to become a mother. She wanted to have an abortion.

Carole as her employer picked up the phone and started calling everyone she knew – lawyer and friends. She finally found someone who gave her a phone number in Pennsylvania. The abortion would cost $300 and she was given instructions on how to get there.

She put the young actress on a Greyhound bus headed out of the city. The woman returned the next day and went to rehearsal. During rehearsal she began bleeding and Carole rushed her to an emergency room. The young woman had been cut so badly it took an operation to repair the damage that had been done.

This young woman was told she would never be able to have children again. She, like many other young women before Roe vs. Wade, was badly bungled and was a victim of a law that invaded her privacy and life.