Redux - March 29, 1974 - Part I of III

I posted Parts I & II re my reluctant abortion at age 19. Then my dog's health derailed me from Part III. Oh, let's face it - also the difficulty of writing it. Part II reposts tomorrow, Part III Fri.

51 years ago tomorrow. I was 19 and, not knowing what else to do, gave in and got an abortion I didn’t want.

I’d gotten pregnant on purpose. My boyfriend and I had agreed on it. I don’t remember if it was before or after we walked through K-Mart and stopped at the display of cute baby dresses. I picked one up. I remember red. We had some conversation.

It was my idea, an unconsciously desperate attempt on my part to anchor myself. I never knew what made my boyfriend decide to agree. Five years later, when we were no longer together but still were close, I asked him to write about it. I got back thirteen notebook pages I kept in the original envelope that increasingly yellowed over the decades that I didn’t read them. Last year coming up on the 50th anniversary, I pulled them out and unfolded them. I couldn’t tell you now what he said…I might not have been able to remember the very next day; such is my resistance…but I remember it took a deep breath to be able to begin reading.

He was a great guy – one of the best I’ve ever been involved with. So I don’t want the story I tell to reflect poorly on him.

The abortion, the events that led up to it and followed, were life changing for me. I tried writing about it then and in the next few years. The photo above is of only a few documents from those times. The typed, full-sized one in the back is a piece I wrote in 1976 for a seminar with Adrienne Rich. The blue notes at the top of the page and the washed-out blue notes on the card in front are her comments back to me. The red hand-written pages are from a notebook of my essays and poems ranging from 1972 to 1974. The piece shown is my thoughts four days before the abortion. (The appointment was made by then…my third…and I wasn’t sure I would go through with it.) The yellowed page beneath the card is the first of the thirteen my boyfriend wrote.

Elsewhere in that notebook are poems that failed to capture what I felt afterward because I wasn’t capable of articulating it. The next essay in the notebook, written three weeks after the one showing, is oddly a collection of thoughts about Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.

I am a writer. I have been since I wrote my first poem at age 8. For years on end writing went underground, for reasons I whined about plenty but won’t belabor here. My abortion and the surrounding context are my heaviest silence, despite the building up of writing pressure that occurred so many times over the years.

First there was the general message of “shut up”: my mother who said we’d never talk about it again; my best friend who’d had an abortion a couple months earlier and thought it shouldn’t be discussed; my college dormmates who sat fascinated but scandalized as I described what had happened, giving me the message that something was wrong with me for not keeping it a secret. Then a couple years later when I was in the women’s studies program at college, I believed my feelings were “illegitimate for a feminist.” I was ashamed to write about them, not because of the act of having an abortion but because it meant confessing that it was against my will.

Adrienne’s comment at the top of my piece was reassurance that it was indeed an appropriate subject, regardless of my particular experience of it. “Many feminists work in post-abortion counseling precisely because they recognize that abortion is legitimately a source of painful and ambivalent feelings for women…I don’t think any woman’s feelings about anything should be ‘illegitimate’ for feminists.” (A key lasting lesson from my two years with her was that we have a right…a responsibility, even…to write and publish the truth about our lives.)

Her little, once-waterlogged card advises how I might approach breaking my barrier of silence. What I had given her was not a fleshed-out narrative; as I said in the beginning of it, “instead I’ll make notes for next time.” The first page doesn’t even have complete sentences. Her message, which I didn’t actually take in until this week, is to be experimental in what I write and “don’t feel bound by a conventional structure.” I realized that my anxiety about writing it has left me tightly wound when I think about starting. The words have felt clenched and unwilling. Her suggestions may have given me a work-around.

I’ve carried this experience, inadequately articulated, for three-quarters of my life. In more recent years, I’ve hesitated to write it because I’m afraid it will make me sound anti-choice. I absolutely am pro-choice and always was.

Back then, in my immaturity and state of being utterly lost, I wanted to choose one thing but was pressured on all sides to choose something else. It was for the best, but it kind of broke me, and I was left on my own to wander into healing.

It's time for me to write this story so I can finally let it go.

Part II: