Stories For Choice: News

"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.

This e-mail came in last week from a friend of a friend - We are looking forward to his full complete story...

It appalls me how easily hard freedom earned is so easily lost.
I'm taking on a tough two-week project tomorrow, but after it, I'll send you a precis of
the abortion I had to help my first girlfriend obtain, and what the back allies of Newark New Jersey
were like to a sophomore in college who gave up all his available cash and possessions to pay $1200
in 1966 dollars. Please remind me if you don't hear from me in three weeks.

Also - There was an upstate New York assemblyman who chose to cast the deciding vote in 1968 or 69 which
kept Roe v Wade in place, or kept up the funding for S. 2108, the enabling legislation permitting the funding
of information and education of family planning services. Go hunt and find it. It is a touching story of how a
daughter changed the course of history. I know The New York Times covered it and anyone in the library of
National Planned Parenthood would know.

I found this online - It is one of the few stories about back alley abortions online - It is our mission is to change that.

Someone gave me the phone number of a person who did abortions and I made the arrangements. I borrowed about $300 from my roommate and went alone to a dirty, run‐down bungalow in a dangerous neighborhood in east Los Angeles. A greasy looking man came to the door and asked for the money as soon as I walked in. He told me to take off all my clothes except my blouse; there was a towel to wrap around myself. I got up on a cold metal kitchen table. He performed a procedure, using something sharp. He didn’t give me anything for the pain ‐‐ he just did it. He said that he had packed me with some gauze, that I should expect some cramping, and that I would be fine. I left.1

‐‐Polly Bergen, discussing the illegal abortion in the 1940s that rendered her infertile and nearly proved fatal.

From: Anonymous

There is a story I know to be true but have never seen it written in print. I would prefer to keep the confidence to which I was pledged. But sufficient years have passed since I worked for the national group which was instrumental in lending assistance.

There is an office of the medical center at Yale University that directly deals with family planning situations. Yale was renown for creating a terrific manual for women on women's health, pregnancy, and birth control...after the following situation occurred. It was a "bible" of the young adult set.

That office, I believe, was the go-between the year Yale admitted women. Here were some of the brightest women in the country, who successfully competed for the rare places at what was an all male elite school. Within three months, either one-third or two-thirds of those 120? [the writer was not sure]women were pregnant. An interesting indicator as to how little was known about effective birth control among 18 and 19 year olds.

Not wanting a scandal, whether it was the university, the health center, or someone representing them, asked
help in creating a Christmas break trip to Scandinavia or Puerto Rico, the only places where abortions then where
legal and safe. My understanding was that no freshman co-ed ever had a child that year.