January 24, 2002
I was a 17-year old Catholic schoolgirl when I had an illegal abortion in 1971. I found a doctor with the help of a congressman's nephew.
Not to bore you with the sad romantic details, I had dated "John" since June of my Freshman year, and got pregnant in September of my Senior Year. John had said "Trust me." After Christmas he was still dragging his feet. He must have needed a way to tell me he was not going to do right, and force me to decide what he'd been hoping I'd decide while he dragged his feet, so he said he'd joined the Marines.
Mind you, John knew my father had a violent temper and I was terrified to tell him I was pregnant. He said he'd taken a deferred enlistment so he could take me to my Senior Prom. (I could go to a Prom at 7 months?!) Then he'd "send for me after basic training," which would be four months AFTER the baby was born! "Send for me" was no promise of marriage, and where was I to live in the meantime — with my angry father? How was I to get to the doctor, when I had no driver's license? How could I pay a hospital bill, a schoolgirl with no job? "I can get $400," he said.
His desertion so traumatized me that I have little memory of anything else until I saw the world's worst horror in a white enamel bucket—the dismembered body parts of a 16-week baby boy after a saline abortion. Can you picture skin that is unnaturally whitish and bluish, delicate fingernails, half-opened eyes and distinct genitalia?
No one had ever heard of post-traumatic stress disorder in 1971, but I exhibited every symptom. I knew something was wrong — thinking to myself, "Normal people don't do things like this. They don't drink and do dope to excess. They don't sleep around indiscriminately, never thinking about who might hurt them by malice or disease. I never did any of these things until recently. Why am I doing them now?"
The whole experience was so traumatic, I repressed most of the memory. It resurfaced, violently, when the girlfriend who'd held my hand through it all said to me several years later, "Are you really sorry that you aren't married to that creep? Are you really sorry that you have a college education and a future without encumbrances?" My mind flashed back to the white enamel bucket for the first time that day. I saw it with shocking clarity. And I sank into a 2-year depression so deep I can't recall now who I was hanging out with at the time. I wouldn't even remember where I'd been working, if I didn't have my Social Security statement.
I came out of it, eventually. It was only 23 years later, with extensive therapy by a shrink hired by a local problem pregnancy group, that I put all the pieces of my past together in a coherent pattern in my mind.
I am not willing to say that abortion is always and everywhere wrong for everyone. Not even my Church says that, and it is the most restrictive of belief systems I know of. What I would like women considering abortion to know is two things, and this can happen to any woman thinking about abortion, not just sheltered Catholic schoogirls:
1) People lied to me; people I trusted, people who should have known (a biology teacher, a doctor, a nurse) told me "This is not a baby. An abortion is just a way to straighten things out, so you won't be pregnant anymore." GET information before you do it.
2) The guilt that can be felt in knowing you murdered your own child is like nothing you can even imagine, until it happens to you. I could live with the knowledge I'd murdered my parents or my husband more easily than that.
By the way, about 12 years ago, John admitted to me that at the time he'd told me he'd joined the Marines, he really hadn't. He didn't, until the week after I'd gone through with the abortion. The son of a bitch.
