It is the fall of 1971. I have just walked into a room in a church basement, where there is a meeting of NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the organization created two years earlier by Betty Friedan. Although abortion had been legal in New York since 1970, it was still illegal in most states.
I’ve moved to Syracuse—the first time I have lived outside the New York metropolitan area. I’m feeling a bit unmoored, not yet at home in my MFA program, and missing the political engagement I had experienced as a college student at Barnard and Columbia.
When I see my fellow attendees, I know, as Dorothy knew that she was not in Kansas, that I’m not in New York City anymore. Only two of the women look like anyone I would have ever had practice speaking to. One must be, like me, a student: She’s wearing jeans and a peasant blouse. The other is a Black woman with a luxuriant Afro, a jade green turtle necklace, a black skirt, and boots. The others seem like strangers. I had not believed that I would ever be in a room with anyone who wore flesh-colored pantyhose, or who wore her hair in what was called a pixie cut, but here I am. Here we all are.
The meeting is called to order by a short, dark, wiry, fast-talking woman. Quickly, we get down to tactics, which involve organizing travel to Albany and to Washington. Despite the legalization of abortion in New York, antiabortionists are tirelessly picketing the state legislature with gruesome pictures of mangled fetuses. We sign up both for counter-protests and to speak to our local legislators in person. Pennsylvania, a close neighbor state, will be another target of our lobbying. And we will be on the alert for actions in DC, targeting the Supreme Court.
So far, so straightforward. But then our leader says, “What we need is to talk about why we’re all here. The problem is no one wants to talk about abortion. But I think it’s important to make things personal.”
She describes growing up in an Italian neighborhood in Buffalo. “You’d hear it whispered among the women, ‘enceinta, enceinta…’ and not in a happy way. I got pregnant when I was 16. An older cousin forced himself on me. He was making more money than anyone in the family, and was looked up to as a success, and he said no one would believe me if I said anything about what was going on. And he said to remember that he was lending my family money so my brother could go to college. I was terrified, and ashamed, but I told my sister, who was older, married, with children. She said everyone in the neighborhood knew about a woman who took care of things. She came with me to this woman’s apartment. We didn’t talk. The woman covered her kitchen table with a white sheet, took some kind of medical instrument out of a pot of boiling water and after an excruciatingly painful time, she showed me into her bedroom, where I rested. My sister handed her money, and we left.”
The next woman to speak is older and the most elegant in the room. She wears a tweed suit; her silver hair is in a French twist, her accent refined, although not off-putting. It reminds me of someone, and then I realize who: Julia Child. “It was 1937. I was 21 and working on a newspaper in Washington. I was having a relationship with a rather aristocratic Englishman, separated from his family overseas. It was a pleasant relationship, but nothing serious. I became pregnant, or ‘fell pregnant,’ in his words. There was no way we were going to marry. He told me not to worry: It had happened to many of his friends in London and there was an easy way of dealing with it. A well-known Harley Street doctor had a nursing home in the country where posh girls who needed abortions could go. It was safe, and not, he assured me, harrowing. We flew to London. It was exactly as he said: clean, pleasant, even a bit bucolic. It would never have happened here, and it would never have happened if he weren’t wealthy and connected.”
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