Three ancient tales of unwed pregnancies
[NOTE: Every now and then I may repost something from the past that might seem relevant or interesting. Here’s something I originally wrote in 2008.]
I grew up in an era in which abortion was both difficult to obtain and physically dangerous. Today’s commonplace alternative of raising the child as an unwed single mother was socially unacceptable in the extreme. Effective birth control was nowhere near as easy to find as it is now, either. But the lure of sex was just as great (last time I checked, that hasn’t changed).
My enormous public New York high school had a mostly working class demographic. But the two girls in my acquaintance who became visibly pregnant were from the “better” families. Although it sounds like the script of a movie, one was the captain of the cheerleading squad and one the head of the baton twirlers.
They were not my friends, and so I was not taken into their confidence about their lives. But by strange coincidence, my gym locker was directly across a tiny aisle from that of the first girl (whom I’ll call “Sally”) during our sophomore year, and similarly from that of the second (whom I’ll call “Linda”) when we were both juniors.
In those days we were required to go to gym class every day, and to suit up in hideous little one-piece blue cotton outfits with bloomer shorts. Nobody, but nobody, looked good in those things. But at least the boys never saw us, since gym class was strictly segregated by sex.
Sophomore year I noticed the formerly svelte and very attractive Sally gaining weight. I thought little about it—she had started out so thin that the weight gain still didn’t make her fat. But she also began to keep her gym suit unbelted.
Huge mohair sweaters were in style that year, and so for a while I thought little of it as I saw her changing back into her regular clothes after gym class. But her normally happy face grew sadder and sadder every day, and her native vivaciousness was replaced by a subdued demeanor.
Then one day she simply disappeared. The rumor—correct, it turns out—was that she’d been sent to one of those “homes” to have her baby and give it away. She returned a few months later with her body looking exactly as it had before any of this had happened. But there was a different aura about her, an expression in her eyes that told of dark adult experiences we didn’t share.
Junior year, when I started to observe across the way that Linda was fastening her sheath skirt with a safety pin under her sweater because the button could no longer reach the buttonhole, I was wiser. As the small safety pin was replaced by larger and larger ones, I watched and wondered what Linda would do.
Her disappearance, when it came, was briefer than Sally’s. The rumor (also true) was that her parents were raising the baby. She and her boyfriend continued to date right through college, although birth control presumably came into the picture because they managed to avoid another pregnancy. When they graduated from the university they married and reclaimed their now five-year-old child, and then went on to have several more—and to stay married, when last I heard.
Marilyn was a friend of mine during my junior year of college. Perhaps “friend” is too strong a word; she was one of three girls I shared an apartment with for a single semester. Marilyn was neither popular nor especially attractive, and her affect was what I would now call depressed. But I didn’t bother to give a name to it then.
When Marilyn began to have stomach problems—throwing up several times a day, and feeling nauseated much of the rest of the time—I didn’t suspect pregnancy at first. She was the sort of person who ordinarily was very open about all her troubles, of which she had many, and she never mentioned it as a possibility. She didn’t have a boyfriend and hadn’t been on a date in months, which also seemed to preclude a baby. And she kept asking me questions about nausea: what sort of illness might cause the kind of symptoms she was feeling? I hadn’t a clue.
This went on for a week or two before she told us: she was pregnant, after all. In those days there were no kits to be had in the drugstore or the Walmart (there was no Walmart). But there were doctors to whom one could go, and that’s what Marilyn had done.
If she had been depressed before, she was in anguish now. She couldn’t sleep and she didn’t eat. Her main activity—aside from throwing up, which occupied the bulk of her time—was crying. Her face seemed permanently puffy, her eyes a sickly pink, and so swollen they were almost shut.
The mystery of who the father might be was cleared up when she told us, with great shame, that she’d been visiting a friend at another college a month or so earlier and had gotten drunk one night and had sex with a guy she barely knew. She wasn’t even sure how to reach him, but in any event she had no intention of doing so.
What Marilyn did intend to do was to have an abortion. But nobody knew where to go to obtain one.
Marilyn’s best friend Helen, the girl with whom she shared a bedroom in our two-bedroom-four-girl apartment, asked around. Her boyfriend knew a friend who knew a friend who knew a friend who knew…and thus it was set up. Eight hundred dollars cash was the price, a large sum in those days. The address was in the inner city. The date was next week.
Marilyn didn’t have that kind of money. And her parents were the kind she couldn’t confide in, or so she thought. So people gave a little bit, and asked around for contributions. Somehow the sum was raised, and when the day came Helen went with her in the morning to the assignation.
They returned that evening. Marilyn was still crying nonstop. I’ve forgotten most of the details of the story they told, but it was harrowing. The “office” had been no office at all, just a dirty room in a foul part of town, with a lookout with a gun standing guard in the next room. The “doctor” was probably not a medical man, and he had little to say. There was no anesthetic. It had been terribly painful. At least they had the decency, and the knowledge, to tell her to take her temperature regularly for a week or two and to go immediately for medical help if she developed a fever.
Marilyn spent the next two weeks in the apartment with a thermometer in her mouth. She removed it only to eat and sleep, and to look at it at intervals to see the reading. Her crying began to taper off, as did the bleeding (the nausea was now gone), and slowly things went back to business as usual.
Marilyn had always looked sad. But now there was an extra depth of sorrow in her eyes, although her relief was palpable. I kept in touch with her for only a few years after that, and her life wasn’t going too well. But Marilyn had always had troubles, and I’m not so sure it would have gone a whole lot better even without the pregnancy and abortion.
As time went on abortion became legal. Still, I was always profoundly happy that I managed to avoid an unwanted pregnancy and the attendant terrible decisions that I never wanted to face. But I learned that many of my friends and acquaintances did confront them—a third to a half seem to have had unwanted pregnancies (often through contraceptive failure, particularly IUDs)—and chose to abort. Some of them seemed to breeze through the experience with little anguish, while others feel deeply guilty to this day.
The variety is almost endless, the decisions tough. The possibility of unwanted pregnancy is something every actively heterosexual woman must face, except those who know they are infertile (and they face other sorrows). All of these women did the best they could in difficult circumstances. I leave judgment to others; I prefer to have compassion for them all.
There is little of this a man could understand if he’s not exposed to it directly. My personal conversion to compassion came in seeing the movie 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The story takes place in Ceausescu’s Romania — two female university students, one of whom gets pregnant and manipulates her friend into helping her get an (illegal) abortion. The abortion is shown without clinical detail; yet the chain of events and dialogue made a harrowing impression. Although I remain pro-life I am not so without acknowledging the hell that back-alley abortions must be for women.
A tale that brings up a few memories. In my tiny high school only one girl that I knew of became pregnant. She disappeared for about six months and returned a chastened and sad young woman. There was of course much gossip about who the father was and what became of the baby. The most likely story being that an aunt and uncle had taken custody of the child until the poor young woman could eventually undertake raising the child herself. Considering it was a small, gossipy town, the secrecy surrounding this pregnancy was amazing. Of course I was just in junior high. Many adults may have known the whole story, but withheld it from we younguns.
For me it was a cautionary tale. I wanted to get out of the gossipy small town and my life of gentile poverty. In other words I had ambitions and I knew getting a girl pregnant was going to end those ambitions right quick. Maybe not a very noble reason for restraining my hormonal urges, but it worked. Those were the days when the girl set the limits on a sexual relationship. When she said, “NO!” that was it as far as I was concerned. But on a couple of occasions when the girl didn’t bring a halt when things were too hot and heavy, I managed to step back. A high school girl’s unwanted preganancy had provided me with a reason to remain chaste. Not noble, just practical.
J.J.: I assume you meant “genteel” poverty.
Although there is gentile poverty as well.
I see that we are about in the same generation, although I may be a year or two younger, Neo. I remember the rumors about certain girls in my high school class who ‘vanished’ – visting an aunt in another city for several months at a time, although abortions had been made legal and birth-control somewhat easier to obtain by the time I had finished college.
I will never forget a conversation that I had in the women’s barracks, during my first hitch in the Air Force – which would have been about 1978 or so. There were six of us taking part: IIRC, the youngest was 19 or 20, the oldest nearly 30: five unmarried, the oldest of us divorced twice. And out of us, four had abortions – and the divorced troop had three, for medical reasons – she couldn’t carry a child safely and the military OB-Gyn’s wouldn’t tie her tubes. I was actually rather horrified – four out of six.
Of the two who hadn’t had abortions, one was me, and the other my best friend. My friend got married, then almost immediately divorced – and pregnant. She chose an abortion – the military hospital where we were overseas referred her to a clinic downtown. Ironically, by that time I was raising a child as a single parent. I got pregnant by my then-boyfriend, whom I loved very much, but unfortunately he was not … well, he wasn’t what I had thought he was, even though we had both rather overconfidently assumed we would marry eventually. He vanished in a cloud of dust … leaving me to cope with it all. And there was a lot to cope with, having let my parents down, probably screwed my chances for a commission as an officer, and caused my supervisors to loose a whole lot of confidence in me. Not a fun time in my life – although it did give me my daughter, a gift for whom I remain everlastingly grateful.
When I went in to the clinic to get the final word on the results of the test on the ‘sample’ I had dropped off, I had no idea at all about what I would do, if I turned out to be pregnant. But as soon as the nurse-practitioner said that I was, and that knowing of my situation, they could arrange to send me to the clinic downtown – I said instantly, “Oh,no, I’m going to keep the baby.” I didn’t even know my own mind, until she said the words. I’ve always been grateful for having been able to make the choice.
I do not think abortion is a good thing – I would not want my daughter, or any woman that I cared for to have one. It stops a beating heart, et cetera, et cetera… (although birth control and morning-after pills and all that are perfectly OK and a good thing as far as I am concerned.) But I also would not want abortions to be made illegal again. I know how hard it was for me to raise a child alone, and I had all the advantages of being in good health, in my 20s, with a college education, and a supportive family and friends.It was still hard. Ambivilance? You bet. I’ve been there; I had a free choice; I chose what most people I associate with approved of, as hard as it was.
A woman who is pregnant and doesn’t want to be pregnant, for whatever reason, good or bad, justifiable or not – she has a problem, and a bigger problem than can be solved by bumper-sticker slogans from people outside her situation.
Sgt. Mom: I’m so glad it worked out so well for you and your daughter.
Either way it’s an incredibly hard decision, and it does bother me when people are so glib about it.
Also, I agree that the abortion rate is sky-high. At least, it used to be. I don’t know too much about young people. I’m eternally grateful that I never had to make the decision.
I don’t have much to say about this, except that I was adopted.
I was born in 1958, so there’s a good chance that I was a child of one of those high school girls that “disappeared”.
What bothers me most about the pro-choice voices today is that they try to make abortion seem like no big deal, no matter how late it is done. The phrase safe, legal, and rare in fact doesn’t focus much on how to make it rare. I worked with doctors who supported legal abortion because they had treated, or tried to treat, women that had had backroom abortions that killed or severely them. There were very sincere efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancies by offering contraceptives. This was undoubted helpful to some women, especially those who already had children without fathers to help raise them.
But as I mentioned the other day, there are teens who knowingly want to get pregnant; there are women who hope a child will cement a relationship; and there are many who just forget to take their pills rather than make a conscious decision. I don’t see much success in helping this very vulnerable group avoid pregnancy. Instead it is almost treated as no big deal. We seem to fail by ignoring the responsibilties of motherhood and the importance of building mature relationships. I think the message should be that abortion is not OK and it’s horrible for anyone who feels she must choose it. I’m glad that girls no longer have to disappear for months during high school while the tongues wag, but have we tilted too far toward making these girls into heroines?
In the days before the Committee, many people sufferred needlessly. Now that we know the soul and free will are an illusion, there is no reason to prolong pain. A simple Check can determine if the balance point has been exceeded and if so an easy and painless death relieves the person and community of pain. No one should be forced to endure life (we learned this through Margaret Sanger) and this basic human right, only recently recognized, promises to deliver a better society. It is hard to conceive how any other thinking could prevail, but it did, mostly due to the American constitution, which thanks to the great Ginsburg, was properly subdued and modified to include the understanding that positive rights are superior and enforceable and have resulted in men and women not afraid of death.
But there was a different aura about her, an expression in her eyes that told of dark adult experiences we didn’t share.
Many powerful and absorbing sentences in this piece. Too many and too good to be anything other than creation.
Neo, it was both a gentile and genteel poverty. Thanks for pointing out my error. Good for a laugh. My ancient brain seems to be missing a few more cells every day.
Your ancient brain is a treasure!
Never forget that.
Your ancient brain is a treasure!
Never forget that.
Let’s see, there was something I wasn’t supposed to forget … hmmmmm. Gimme time – it’ll come to me.
Was there no thought of carrying the babies to term and giving them up for adoption? Locally there used to be a home for unwed mothers, and there are many couples waiting to adopt.
Your’s too, OC.
where the hell would we without you?
If the older generation doesn’t hang on and march to war, we’re lost. The young and younger generation, having been confused and led astry by the pied piper, cannot be counted upon. But there is a critical remnant, which you must support and teach, which will make all the difference. Each individual soul, each individual act, each indvidual contribution by the “boomer’ generation, which has activated and come alive, is our salvation.
There’s an atonement brewing.
James Drake: did you not read the essay? That’s exactly what happened in case one, and in case two the girl’s parents raised the child for a few years and then the biological parents married and raised the child. It was only the third girl who had the abortion.
I was in high school when Roe v. Wade was decided. There was a great exhale of relief, even amongst us virgins.
When I was in the 7th grade, a few of the little colored girls, as they were then called, started to disappear: 12 years old. One kid was rumored to have been knocked up by her uncle. It was scary, actually: I had the feeling then that all of my Leave It to Beaver world was just a knife edge away from the nightmare world of those girls who could get impregnated as children by their fathers or uncles. Those days, the schools didn’t allow visibly pregnant girls to attend school: they were a bad influence on the rest of us, it was thought. I remember thinking it sucked that the boys didn’t have to pay a penalty, too. None of those girls ever came back.
I don’t remember any of the white girls being caught in that situation, at least not that young.
In college, almost no one I knew had abortions, though some of us were crazy in the chances we took. Planned Parenthood actually did a service to many of us: they had free or low-cost birth control for students.
But one girl we knew, who seemed completely insouciant about it all, had had Four abortions by age 21. We were appalled by it, and I remember one time we sorta corralled her and asked her what birth control, if any, she was using. She said she was on the pill, but so what? if she got knocked up, she could just get an abortion. My best friend exclaimed, “You can’t just keep doing that! Why don’t you get an IUD or something you won’t forget to take?” but she just laughed and shrugged it off.
She was the only female I ever knew who took it so (apparently) lightly.
“I leave judgment to others; I prefer to have compassion for them all.”
Appearances generated by the way controversies are treated in the press to the contrary, I think the vast majority of “pro-lifers”, among whom I count myself, agree with this. One can recognize that a certain act is objectively wrong while empathizing with the person who does it. That’s certainly the approach of, for instance, the crisis pregnancy center run by my parish.
Anyway, these are moving stories, and I have many of my own. I had a blog post a while back called “Sex is just a problem and that’s all there is to it.” There simply is no good once-and-for-all solution to the problem of the discrepancy between our sexual desires and our willingness and ability to cope with the natural result of normal sexual activity. That’s something Americans have a hard time accepting.
(I put “pro-lifers” in quotes above because I’ve never been happy with it. It invites all those arguments along the lines of “well, being for free health care is pro-life, too!!” People who are anti-war don’t mind putting it that way, and I don’t mind saying I’m anti-abortion.)
A good — and moving — discussion, Neo. I know a handful of women who had abortions, some when they were not yet married, some after several children and reaching the conclusion they (or their husband) did not want more. I haven’t met one who took the decision easily and all suffered some level of regret afterward.
I also know two who married hurriedly when pregnant, only to have the marriage end in bitter divorce.
One of the above was a young woman who turned down my suggestion to have an abortion, married the father, and had a wonderful daughter with whom I am still in contact — and who is a good addition to society. I look at her sometimes and think that if her mother had taken my advice, this young woman would not exist. Not a pretty thought. The irony is that the daughter has had several abortions and seems not to think twice about what she is doing.
For a long time I was comfortably in favor of easily-available abortion. Then I was confronted by a man of strong religious faith who called abortion “murder.” That was a difficult image to get around and I think a lot of Americans do so by pretending the fetus is not a human being. I began to reconsider my own position and have now reached the conclusion that men should not play a large role in the decision unless it is their own child, and even then perhaps not. For the women who are faced with this difficult decision, abortion should not be a back-alley procedure, nor should it leave them wracked with regret afterward.
I wonder if we in America will ever reach accommodation with this difficult question?
One of the core elements of conservatism is recognition that it is not in our power to remove tragedy completely from life, and that often the best we can do is to try to ameliorate its effects.
Mac, words of wisdom there.
And this I wholeheartedly echo: “One can recognize that a certain act is objectively wrong while empathizing with the person who does it.”
I’ve always felt that every abortion has two victims, the child and the child’s mother.
I once asked a friend who was “personally opposed to abortion, but pro-choice”, why he was personally opposed.
He looked at me, started to answer and then stopped. Checkmate.
But it’s not a game.
Either that’s a human life in there or it isn’t.
If it is, protect it. If it is not, do what you will.
Can there be any other question?
Personal trauma cannot justify the taking of a life.
Sure I’m a guy, and I will never have to face that trauma.
But it doesn’t disqualify me from protecting human life.
I was one of “those girls” in high school. Coincidentally, also my junior year. I chose not to abort, not because I had support (I didn’t) or because of my circumstances. I did it because just the year before I had learned, in a basic human biology class, about the development of a fetus. I knew about its DNA, chromosomes, genetics- all that jazz. I knew how it was conceived, I knew how it grew. I knew that the fetus was human and that it was alive. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that if I had an abortion, I’d be killing it.
In the end, the choice WAS about me. I knew I couldn’t kill another human being, no matter how hard that human would make life for me, and no matter how much I was encouraged to do so.
I have no regrets.
I cannot accept that the death of a pre-born baby is ever the correct answer. Several years before I became a Catholic (from being an atheist), I stumbled upon a website of a transgendered lesbian (or something of the sort) libertarian who was pro-life. (S)he had linked to a graphic anti-abortion site which had warnings on it – that some of the pictures could be upsetting.
I blithely went in, knowing that nothing would change my mind.
It changed my mind. I was rabidly pro-choice before that encounter. But after that, no way. I was horrified to be on the same side as icky religious people and set out to find other atheists who were pro-life. I found Nat Henthoff, who although a lefty, had some great thoughts on bio-ethics.
The more I reviewed the arguments on the pro-life side, the more I realized that both sides were arguing based on different assumptions of what was more important, and what the main issue really was. So it was easier to come to grips with my new thoughts. After converting, the religious arguments have been the frosting on the cake, but it really didn’t strengthen my feelings on it.
So that’s one of my big change stories…
With the exception of ‘double effect’ (in which aborting the baby is an unavoidable side effect of a life saving medical treatment), I am 100% anti-abortion. And yes, I consider myself empathetic anyway.
My “Pro Life Heroine” is a girl who graduated high school the year before I did. Her boyfriend got her pregnant, and she refused to get an abortion, so he broke up with her. She stayed in school, pregnant, and when she gave birth, she gave the baby up for adoption. Many years later, I worked with her sister in law. She has since married and has other children, but asked her sister in law to let her know if her first child gets in touch, since she has married and changed her maiden name, and her SIL has that name. I was in awe of her strength when many others took the easy way out. I think of her often, and she never knew how much I admired her.
Powerful essay, neo.
I suspect there are a whole lot of us 60-something women who have changed our minds about elective abortions. I am so grateful that I never had to chose while in school, because I have no doubt what the choice would have been—and how very difficult it would be to live with that choice.
I do support the squish position of “safe, legal, rare” abortions–but I also want them called what they are: baby terminations (if not ‘killing’). Society has every right to limit them to the first three months in this era of dipsticks at the WalMart.
The chief of OB who present the topic to us students in 1977 told us to not get into the argument of whether or not there was a separate life–clearly, it is—that DNA is unique–but to acknowledge that every religion allowed for justifiable homicide.
He too had taken care of the dying mothers of eight, nine , ten who left them orphaned from their back alley abortions.
Many of those men, despite devoting their days and especially nights to bring life safely into the world, were pragmatists who supported legal abortion.
He too had taken care of the dying mothers of eight, nine , ten who left them orphaned from their back alley abortions.
C. Everett Koop pointed out many years ago that there was no year on record where the number of deaths from sepsis associated with illegal abortions exceeded 350. I think there were about 8,000 obstetricians and gynecologists practicing in the US ca. 1945. The probability of you encountering a fatal case in a given year would be just north of 4%. So, over 35 years of practice, you might expect to see about two cases. In that era, about 5% of all households had more than five people resident therein. It would have been quite atypical for an OB-GYN to encounter what you describe even once in the course of decades of practice.
Many of those men, despite devoting their days and especially nights to bring life safely into the world, were pragmatists who supported legal abortion.
That’s not the sort of ‘pragmatism’ from which the world benefits.
Art Deco:
For those statistics on sepsis deaths from illegal abortions to be correct, it would require that all such deaths were correctly logged and identified. I doubt that they were. Sepsis was common and abortion was common, but people didn’t necessarily own up to the latter, or even go to a hospital for treatment.
I don’t think we know the true statistics, which were probably higher than that – although how much higher (a little or a lot) we don’t know.
I do know a woman who aborted herself with the proverbial clothes hanger — and spent a long time in a hospital afterwards recovering. It is hard to imagine being desperate enough to do such a thing, it must have been painful, and it was life threatening. That was just before abortion was becoming legal in some nearby states. I didn’t inquire much about how she felt about aborting her pregnancy, but do know that after she married and had a child she was relieved that everything still worked as it was supposed to. In any case, I am happy that there are less drastic alternatives now. But people boasting of having an abortion strikes me as unseemly, for many it isn’t an easy decision and can lead to regrets. A cavalier attitude towards abortion was one of the reasons I stopped supporting Planned Parenthood, which is sad, because I knew many women of limited means who had benefited from it before it went all political.