Abortion: It's Personal

Too often I read about important issues that are presented dispassionately, as though the effected weren't our families, friends and neighbors. Yes, there are reasons to take a mile-high analytical look at issues. But sometimes we also have to drive home the personal.

Today I'd like to share family history on a critical social issue, abortion.

I read sometimes of a sharp increase of abortions because they're now legal. There's really no way to know whether there are more today since they were secret before. What we can know is that they are safer today -- by a long shot. Here's what I know about when they weren't. (And understand that with the shame of such things, I'm sure I only know a fraction of those that happened just in my family.)

1912: A married relative in Chicago had two children and discovered she was pregnant again. The
family could barely support the children they had and poverty and despair drove her to try to abort the baby. There were no easy ways to do that in 1912, so she heard she could abort by riding one of those new-fangled roller coasters. She did and it tossed her (she was tiny) this way and that but did not end her pregnancy.

1936: In the heart of the Depression, another Chicago relative had three young children and virtually no income. They had lost their business and struggled to put food on the table and make rent payments on their small flat. She knew they could not afford another child and sought to end her pregnancy. First she acquired a concoction from her brother-in-law's pharmacy that was rumored to cause an abortion. When it didn't work, she fretted that she had taken this dangerous medicine and that the child inside her could be damaged by it. After many days of crushing worry, she sought an illegal abortion and was subjected to a humiliating, filthy, unsafe back alley procedure. She lived through it fortunately but too many did not. In another two years, she gave birth to her fourth child.

1943: Another married relative in California had nearly died in her first pregnancy, having suffered appendicitis while pregnant and rushed to life-threatening surgery. She was slowly recovering after the birth of that first child when she discovered she was already pregnant again. She and her soldier husband believed another pregnancy might kill her. They desperately sought a way to terminate the pregnancy and ended up traveling to San Francisco, searching shamefully for someone who could do the procedure. Finally, she was ushered into a dark, dirty apartment where she endured a very humiliating and dangerous procedure. She survived fortunately and lived to have other children. It was not until 74 years later that she told anyone.

1967: A teen-aged relative became pregnant and knew she was unprepared to carry a baby to term and raise a child. The child was successfully (though illegally) aborted.

1972 (pre-Roe v. Wade): A married relative became violently ill and was doubled over in pain. She was away from home and just hoped it would pass. It did not, and she was rushed to the emergency room in a strange town. She had an embryo growing inside her ovary and the pregnancy was terminated. To do so, the procedure was listed as something else.

These are just five examples of women in my family trying to take charge of their own bodies and lives in the days before it was legal to do so. I'm sure there are many more, even in my family. But these five have been shared with me.

I shared these anonymous stories with friends on Facebook and was surprised by the outpouring of friends' stories, stories I'd never heard before.

I have an almost identical story about my grandmother. She died in San Francisco from a botched abortion and left my mother without a mother. This was in 1912. She had traveled to SF by train with an aunt - she lived in Denver. When the train came back to Denver, my grandmother was on it - but not alive. It wasn't until my mother was 50 that she learned the truth.

This friend grew up without knowing her grandmother and her mother was motherless at the age of three.

I agree We cannot go back. My Mother and my sister-in-law both almost died due to “illegal“ abortions. One in Salt Lake the other sought help in Mexico. No going back.

This friend is a conservative Republican.

My father's mother was told by her Doctor that she should not have the baby and aborted her. She died in the Doctor's office.

Another friend who never met her grandmother and whose father grew up without a mother because of archaic abortion laws.

We cannot turn back to the days when a woman's choice meant she could bleed to death from a coat hanger or some other dangerous back alley procedure. Pro-life seems to mean that more women should die from unsafe, illegal abortions. Abortion is personal. What's your story?