There are stories we tell, and there are stories we don’t. The story of my abortion is a story I rarely tell aloud. It’s been my business—and no one else’s---for 50 years. But the Supreme Court’s imminent decision about the fate of Roe v. Wade has brought my chosen privacy to an end. If I don’t speak my story aloud and very loud, then I am a coward. If I don’t bear witness to the Republicans’ hypocritical intention to turn the clocks back to the 1955, then I am a fool and a coward. If I don’t push back against men who behave as if their every drop of ejaculate should be bottled and worshipped like the shroud of Turin, then I am not a responsible citizen.
I discovered I was pregnant just as I was turning 19 in 1971. I was a sophomore at Stony Brook University, a Jewish kid from lower middle-class Queens, and the first girl in the family to attend college. My own mother had returned to work in the early 1960’s so my parents could afford to send my brother to college. That I ended up in college rather than a typing pool was thanks to the NYC Department of Ed teachers and counselors who explicitly informed my parents that girls go to college as well as boys.
My boyfriend, Bill, was my first true love. Bill was a Methodist from a poor family in upstate NY, and I adored him. Think of every way there is to adore a lover—from the taste of his mouth, to the scent of his skin, to the color of his eyes. And as much as I loved him, my parents detested him. They hated Bill with the bone-deep aversion born of a thousand years of Polish and Russian pogroms, and with the fear of diluting and losing that essential kernel of Jewish identity through interfaith marriage. This was a doomed love for two penniless youngsters.
I missed one menstrual cycle in late March, and made a bee-line to the Infirmary for a pregnancy test. The test came back negative, and the nurse suggested that… maybe my cycle was irregular? But I knew my cycle was as predictable as the sunrise, or the timing of the tides. It was impossibly, comically predictable: I woke up to it every 28 days, or four calendar weeks. Once a year or so, it would move by a day, and a new 28-day cycle was established for another year as if my body made minute adjustments to account for some cosmic leap year. When my period failed to occur in April, I went for another pregnancy test. This time it was positive. I must have been about eight weeks pregnant. I had no signs of pregnancy—no nausea, no weight gain, no breast swelling. So unless I had been told with medical certainty, I wouldn’t have known that I was pregnant.
As the nurse talked, the alarm bells of panic were going off in my head. She put a slip of paper into my hand with the name, address and phone number of Manhattan gynecologist who did abortions. I still remember—50 years later---the feeling of that paper on the palm of my hand as I walked back to the dorm. Bill asked me what I wanted to do. He was prepared to accept whatever decision I made—be it marriage, adoption, or abortion. We had no financial resources, unfinished educations, and no life experience that would help us wend our way through a forest of disapproving parents, the emotional trials and aftermath of a shotgun wedding, and menial jobs while we got our legs under us and a baby. I was still a kid, and I was faced with the first true adult decision of my life. I was not ready to be a mother, and he wasn’t ready to be a father. I knew what I needed to do.
The abortion was arranged quickly and easily. I was in the doctor’s office in less than a week---May 5th. Bill drove me into the Manhattan, and sat in the car waiting while the procedure was done. It cost $100. I was 9 weeks pregnant. And then, the crisis was over. Life could go on.
This was not a happy choice. I loved that boy so much. Under controlled circumstances, I would have welcomed a child—Bill’s child. But our dearest wishes rarely come true in the form we choose. And in the given circumstances, this was the right choice.
My parents went to their graves never knowing about the abortion. They knew that Bill and I had a tumultuous relationship that ultimately ended with my heart broken. And that was all they ever knew. I never told my mother because…because she would have lectured me about good girls and bad girls? We’d had at least two women in the family who overcame loud parental objections to the boyfriend-in-question by preemptively announcing they were pregnant. Check, and checkmate. I wasn’t about to let an accidental pregnancy make the decision for me.
I made this choice for myself and for the boy I loved. But I also had the benefits of legal access and geographic proximity to abortion services, the financial wherewithal to take the necessary action, and the dignity of privacy in making the choice. I was lucky then—and I am grateful now—for those benefits. These same benefits should be available to all women, and so I choose to make my private history public.
Note: An edited version of this article first appeared in the Albany Times Union on July 9, 2022.
