Behind the Closet Door
I wasn’t ever ashamed of having an abortion. It was the right choice for me at the time and I’m grateful I had the freedom to make it. Still, it was something I kept private.
The decision to end the pregnancy wasn’t what I was embarrassed about, it was that I had allowed it to happen in the first place. I was filled with careening emotions in the week between the test at the free clinic confirming that, yes, I was six to eight weeks pregnant, and my visit to the women’s hospital where my mother’s Ob/Gyn performed the procedure.
I resented my boyfriend, for pushing me into sex before I was ready, for not using rubbers when he was two years older than me and knew better, for saying he’d give me a ride home afterwards and then not answering when I called from the hospital pay phone. I berated myself for being so weak, so eager to belong, to believe it meant something when he said he loved me, that I did whatever he wanted.
I thanked the stars above for Mom, who asked only one question — “Do you want to have a baby?” — and accepted my one word answer, “No.”
I was embarrassed about being pregnant at 15, and that’s why I didn’t talk about it. My secrecy was never about regretting my decision. I was a high schooler living with my sister and our mother, who was attending graduate school on scholarship across the country from the rest of our family. I knew what my other options were, I simply couldn’t imagine myself in those scenarios, so I made the obvious choice.
After we moved back to California, a girl I knew in Pennsylvania told me everyone there knew about it because my boyfriend told them — one more thing to resent him for — but that was there. Here in California, where I was making my fresh start, nobody had to know. I could leave that secret behind me in Pennsylvania like an old winter coat, forgotten in the closet. I didn’t need it where I was going.
Through my teens and twenties, I only discussed the subject with other girls in the abstract. I graduated high school in 1978, five years after the Roe v Wade Supreme Court case, three years after my personal experience. In California, abortion was decriminalized in 1967, but as the 70s became the 80s there was a shift underway in attitudes on social issues — immigrant rights, gay rights, women’s rights — a swing of the pendulum from liberalism to conservatism was happening nationwide.
At U.C. Berkeley, where I was following in my big sister’s footsteps, bell bottoms and sandals were giving way to polo shirts and sneakers. The scent of patchouli faded out, perfume by Calvin Klein was in.
Celebrity activists at the turn of that decade included Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the organization Stop ERA, largely credited with the downfall of the Equal Rights Amendment. Anita Bryant, a beauty pageant winner turned orange juice spokeswoman, campaigned against a law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In this age of the backlash, a movement emerged to fight for the repeal of the right to choose, and called itself “pro-life.”
When college girls gathered for get-to-know-each-other talks, they’d say “I’m pro-life,” or “I’m pro-choice,” the same way they offered up other identifying details — their hometown, their major, their favorite soft drink or rock band.
They’d ask, “Would you ever?”
They’d say, “I would,” or “I would never.”
I never heard anyone say, “I have,” or “I did.” So I didn’t say it either.
As the 80s became the 90s many people wore these labels on their cars. One popular bumper sticker declared, “It’s a CHILD, not a choice.” I got a sticker for my first new car by making a donation to Planned Parenthood — it said, “Pro-child, Pro-family, Pro-CHOICE.”
In the 90s I went to work at St. Elizabeth’s, a residential program for teen mothers in San Francisco. The agency was operated by an order of nuns and opened in 1930 as a home for unwed mothers. At my job interview the Head Sister’s first question was, “We’re a pro-life organization — would that be a problem for you?” I replied that I was personally pro-choice, I believed all girls needed support for whatever decision they made. If I understood correctly from the brochure, their program was for girls who chose to keep their babies. That wouldn’t be a problem for me, I said.
One of my job duties was to respond to requests for historical records, and in doing so I learned what happened to girls like me, back when. What could have happened to me if the laws had changed a few years later than they did. I could have been sent into hiding at a home like St. E’s, where I’d stay under an assumed name until I gave birth. I could have been made to give the baby up for adoption. I could have been instructed to keep that secret, expected to go on with my life as if none of it had happened.
I heard stories from dozens of women who had been through St. E’s over the years, on the phone and in person. I read dozens more, in between the lines of the forms kept in a row of four-drawer metal filing cabinets, in a locked-off area of the basement they called the cage. Stories of young love, yes, but also tales of abuse and exploitation, adultery and abandonment, racial bigotry, class prejudice, religious indoctrination.
The stories from St. E’s basement ran the gamut, as did the women’s feelings about their pregnancies. Not all of them would have chosen to terminate, even if that had been allowed. Some wanted to have their babies and keep them, but that option wasn’t available to them either. Some said they never got over what happened to them at the home, the trauma of having no choice and then, salt on the wound, having to keep it a secret.
I never got over their stories.
They’d say, “I would have, but it wasn’t legal.”
Or, “I wouldn’t have, but I should have had the right.”
It wasn’t the time or the place for me to say, “I have,” or “I did.” So I didn’t say it, then.
Would there ever be a time and a place? Would there ever be a need? A reason, for me to share that story, about an episode in my life that I’m not ashamed of, but have kept private?
In my lifetime, my country’s laws and attitudes on abortion have swung from one side to the other and all the way back again. In all those years, one group of voices has been missing from the public discussion about a woman’s right to choose — the voices of women who made the choice. A handful of high profile women have shared their stories publicly, some celebrities and legislators have bravely spoken out. But while it’s estimated that one in four women in the US will have an abortion by age 45, the average American woman who’s had an abortion is not open about it.
We haven’t had a hashtag moment, a collective coming out, and for most of us, it feels too scary, too risky, too hard, to open that closet alone. The door is heavy, and the hinges caked with years of rust.
