Silent Generations
When I was 15 years old, I had an abortion. I had the support of my family, and I was treated with kindness and respect by health professionals. I was grateful. I was relieved. It would be years before I realized I was also lucky, to have the freedom I did then. It was 1975, two years after the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v Wade that Americans had the right to choose, a right I took for granted.
Memory is a funny thing…
It’s the phone calls I got that I still remember all these years later. It was my first job at a nonprofit — admin assistant to the executive director at St. Elizabeth’s, an old three-story brick building in San Francisco. It was a change from the corporate jobs I’d had all through my twenties working in the financial district, and that’s why I liked it.
When I worked there, in the 90s, St. E’s was a residential program and a school for pregnant and parenting teens, but when it opened in 1930, it was called St. Elizabeth’s Home for Unwed Mothers.
Girls who came to St. E’s in those days were assigned “house names” so nobody would know their real identities. They would live at the home — basically, in hiding — until they gave birth, then the babies would be adopted, and the girls would go back to their lives. That’s how it was explained to me, when I was given the task to respond to requests for records.
I had my own office at that job, with a door that closed and everything, because of the need for privacy for conversations like the phone calls I got from birth mothers and adoptees seeking their records. The callers were sometimes emotional, even intense. I couldn’t give them any info over the phone, all I could do in that first conversation was explain the process.
They’d have to put their request in writing, and then I’d send copies of the documents in the file, with any identifying information redacted. This was before scanners and magic erasers — it was done with old school secretarial techniques. First, I’d use the copier machine to copy the original forms. Then I’d pull out the little black and white bottle of “liquid paper” and paint over any names and addresses. I’d wait for the white-out to dry, then make a copy of the copy, and that’s what I’d send to the person. I would include the address of the adoption agency — they’d have to write to them to find out about contact. If the adoption agency received consent to contact from both the birth mother and the adoptee, they would connect them. If not… Either way, that part of the process was out of my hands.
One day I got a call from a woman in her 70s who was distraught. She had seen one of those daytime TV talk shows that were popular then — Phil Donahue, Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer. Those shows specialized in juicy family dramas, secret pasts exposed… Adoptees finding and meeting their birth mothers. This woman who called me was in tears. “I never told anyone I was there,” she said. “I have a husband, children, grandchildren — nobody knows. I did what they told us to do, I kept it secret. I can’t have someone just show up at my door now.”
That woman didn’t want her records, she wanted reassurance that her privacy would be protected, and I promised her it would be. But most callers did want their records, so when I got their request in the mail I’d grab my keys, walk down the checkerboard tile hallway from my office to the elevator, go to the basement, and unlock the cage.
That’s what they called the part of the basement where the old files were kept — the cage. One end of the room was closed off behind chain link fencing with a padlocked gate. Inside the cage was a row of four-drawer metal filing cabinets full of files — full of stories — dating from 1930 when St. Elizabeth’s opened, to the early 1970s when other options became available.
Before I worked at St. E’s, I never really thought about what it was like to have an unwanted pregnancy in the time before Roe v Wade. I had heard about women getting illegal abortions, but I hadn’t heard about those who gave birth to babies who were adopted.
Of course, I knew that people who couldn’t have children would sometimes adopt them, but nobody talked about where those babies came from. I didn’t know about places like St. Elizabeth’s. I never connected those dots, until I had that job, and talked to those women — until I looked up their files, and learned their stories.
I learned that they didn’t all want to give birth. They didn’t all want abortions — some told me they wouldn’t have wanted that even if it was legal, but they thought it should have been legal. They didn’t all want to consent to adoption — some told me they wanted to keep their babies — but they didn’t feel they had a choice.
Each one of those women was an individual, with her own unique set of circumstances, her own hopes and dreams, but they didn’t have options. Can you call it consent when there’s only one choice everyone approves of? When, if you choose something else, you might lose everything — your job, your place to live, the support of your family?
Memory is a funny thing…
I don’t remember telling my boyfriend I was pregnant, I don’t remember that conversation at all. I do remember telling my mom. I remember everything about that conversation. Mom didn’t tell me what to do — she asked me what I wanted. And then she helped me — she took me to her doctor, who scheduled me for a therapeutic abortion. That’s what was written in my records.
I did not have to walk through a gauntlet of sign-waving protesters to get into the health care facility. I wasn’t subjected to unnecessary delays or invasive exams. I wasn’t given false or shaming information to persuade me to change my mind. I was treated with courtesy and professionalism by health care providers. I experienced no complications. I went on with my life.
It wasn’t until I was working at St. E’s that I realized how lucky I was in 1975. Just a few years earlier, and I could have been sent to a home for unwed mothers. Forced give birth to a baby I wouldn’t be allowed to keep. Told to keep it a secret, act as if it never happened.
I came to appreciate how lucky I was to have the right to decide what was best for me, through the conversations I had with women who didn’t get to decide. I came to understand how naive it was, to believe all those women freely consented to give birth, and for their babies to be adopted. How wrong it was, to believe there’s one right thing to do, for everyone.
When I sorted the mail at St. E’s I’d find these pro-life magazines that said, women who had abortions would be scarred for life, psychologically and physically, and haunted with regret. Those magazines said nothing about the negative impacts on those who were denied access to abortion. No mention of trauma or regret felt by those forced to give birth for adoption.
One thing we have in common — women and girls who got pregnant when we didn’t want to, or weren’t supposed to — those of us who had babies that were adopted, and those of us who had abortions — we keep it secret.
There is so much stigma around abortion that, even though it’s a common health care service, hardly any of us talk about it openly. Whether we had to make clandestine arrangements for an illegal abortion prior to Roe v Wade, or whether we had easy access to a legal abortion after Roe, we keep that story to ourselves.
I decided to come out with my story because for years I did all the things — voting, volunteering, donating — but it no longer feels like enough. I’ve tried to fight the stigma by sharing my story on social media, and whenever I post I get at least one private message from someone who thanks me and says, I have a story too, but I can’t share it.
I share my story because the only regret I have about getting an abortion when I was a teenager, is that I wasn’t more open about it all along. There must be so many people like me, who have stories about how important it was to have the right to make their own decision about their life and future.
I’m a “Boomer” — one of the people born during the Baby Boom — and my generation gets its share of blame for society’s problems, problems we’ve created, or made worse in our lifetimes. Climate crisis. Homelessness. Gun violence. Now, we can add reproductive justice to the list, because young people today don’t have the freedom we did. Young people now have less access to the sexual and reproductive health care they need, than we did. This is on us. This should be unacceptable to us.
I believe people like me — who benefited from having the right to make our own decisions, who had that freedom — we owe it to younger generations to talk about that. We owe it to them, to share our stories about how it helped us to have access to abortion. I believe I owe it to all the women I talked with when I worked at St. Elizabeth’s, to all the women who can’t share their stories, to share mine.
