by Susan Steele
People try to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we g-g-get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
(The Who, My Generation, 1965)
On a road trip from Los Angeles to Puget Sound, my mother and my grandmother made a detour to our home in the Bay Area so Grandma could meet her newest great-grandchild. Using every dish and piece of cutlery in our kitchen, I prepared our teak trestle table – the first major purchase my husband and I had made together and essentially the only piece of furniture in our home – to meet Grandma’s high standards. Grandma had a critical eye and little hesitation about expressing her judgements. But, as her oldest and favored grandchild, I knew her soft side. She had taught me how to swim in the icy waters of Puget Sound, and she comforted me during a stay at her home when the onset of a case of mumps caused me to vomit the raspberries I had just eaten all over her pristine bathroom. I also knew the defining moment of her life, because she had told me the story often.
Grandma was not quite 12 when she last saw her mother. A hurried leave-taking in the middle of a cold, snowy night is how I always imagined it. Horse-drawn wagon at the door; plumes of steam from the horses’ nostrils; everyone bundled up against the Minnesota winter; a last quick check on sleeping children. I saw my grandmother awakening in confusion before being soothed back to sleep, comforted with the whispered explanation that her mother would be back soon from an unexpected short trip. Her father worked on the railroad and was often gone for short periods, so the overnight absence of a parent wasn’t cause for alarm. But her mother never returned, leaving three children to wait and wonder.
I was at the door when Grandma and Mom arrived, newly washed baby in my arms, ready to hand her to her great-grandmother. Grandma lifted her from me, beaming and cooing. She settled into a chair at our table and, breathing in our daughter’s sweet scent, she expressed wonder at her serious gaze. ‘I think she looks like you!’ Grandma had a soft spot for baby girls. After raising four daughters, she had had to make do with only three granddaughters among her fourteen grandchildren. The constant upheaval surrounding eleven unruly, noisy, smelly grandsons offended her need for order.
After her mother’s death, the family had a string of housekeepers, she had told me, but, as the oldest daughter, she assumed the responsibilities of managing the household. Three years later, her father remarried, to her mother’s younger sister. This change offered a release from household management, but it didn’t provide the emotional comfort my grandmother craved. Her father and his new wife quickly had a child, a son. Upon his arrival, my grandmother and her siblings were moved to the basement.
Grandma went to college, unusual for a woman early in the second decade of the 20th century. She graduated on time and married, happily, I think, after a long engagement to an aspiring doctor she had met as an undergraduate. But she was always searching. She told me, and any other grandchild who would sit still long enough to listen, that one of her forebears came to this country on the Mayflower and another signed the Declaration of Independence. I was never clear on the evidence for these claims and, many years later, my sister’s study of our genealogy disproved the first and could find no concrete evidence for the second. I’m glad that Grandma wasn’t around to hear her history cast into doubt, because she found such comfort in the connection it provided.
My husband, the main cook in our family, had considered the dinner menu at some length – he was meeting my grandmother for the first time too. He settled on grilled fish, a nod to Grandma’s many years in the Pacific Northwest. He watched, a little anxiously, as Grandma took her first bite and then, relaxed as she nodded her approval. After a few more appreciative bites, Grandma laid down her fork. ‘I now know what happened to my mother.’
In a short memoir she wrote in her 60s, Grandma speculated that her mother had died of pleurisy, an inflammation of the tissue that surrounds the lungs and separates them from the ribs. Remembering her palpable distress about the mystery of her mother’s disappearance, I had been surprised by her acceptance of such a relatively prosaic end. Now, in her late 70s, after over 60 years of trying to understand what had happened, she had come to a very different conclusion.
‘My mother was the victim of a botched abortion.’
The absence of a reaction from my mother suggested that she had already heard the story, perhaps on the way up. I was riveted.
In part by my grandmother. She had been adamantly and vocally opposed to the Vietnam War, but the sexual revolution that accompanied it shocked her to her core. She and my grandfather were the only married couple I knew who had twin beds. Now, here she was, at my dinner table, talking openly about her mother’s abortion.
In part by my mother. The woman who was nodding sympathetically as Grandma gave her final explanation of the cause of her mother’s death was the same woman who responded to the male interest in me and my teenage body, as revealed in my tight skirts, by imposing rigid curfews and issuing dire warning about the consequences of not abiding by the rules. The home environment made it impossible for me to move back after my first year in college; sharing a one-bedroom apartment with two other rising sophomores and eking out an existence as a telephone operator was preferable by far.
In part by my own reticence about responding to Grandma’s announcement. Our dinner conversation was taking place in early 1978, almost exactly five years after the Roe versus Wade decision. Because of Roe, a close friend, who was faced with an unplanned pregnancy when her IUD failed and already raising two young children, hadn’t had to disappear in the night, like my great-grandmother. But I was unsure whether the acceptance and understanding Grandma and Mom were showing my great-grandmother would extend to her – or to me, had I chosen to share my story.
I no longer recall Grandma’s evidence for her theory. My sister says that one of her relatives finally told her what had happened. But, even in the absence of concrete evidence, the abortion story is consistent with my grandmother’s visceral memory – and with the realities of the time. Although abortion was illegal in 1907, retrospective estimates suggest that 20-25% of all pregnancies in the United States in this period ended in abortion. And the lion’s share of women seeking abortions at this time were married with at least one child.[1] The consequence of an abortion could be death, but pregnancy carries its own, not insignificant, risks. The number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in the early 1900s was roughly 750. (It now hovers around 20.) In contrast, The Practical Home Physician and Encyclopedia of Medicine, the bible of medical treatments and remedies in the 19th century, says that ‘pleurisy itself is not a grave disease’.
The major hole in Grandma’s story is its most dramatic moment – the departure itself. At the time of my great-grandmother’s death, most medical care, including abortions, took place at home. My other grandmother, my father’s mother, told me that her female neighbors, living on farms in rural Oregon in the 1920s, would secure the services of an itinerant ‘doctor’ to end an unwanted pregnancy – on the kitchen table without anesthetic. (I often wondered, but never asked, if she were describing her own experience.) So, it’s strange that my grandmother’s mother would have gone away to have an abortion or, if she were suffering complications, that she would have sought medical help elsewhere.
I never told – never even considered telling – either my grandmother or my mother that I too had had an illegal abortion. I am absolutely convinced that their willingness to claim my great-grandmother’s experience wouldn’t have extended to understanding mine. She was part of a chapter in the history of women asserting the right to control their reproductive life and suffering the consequences; I was a floozy.
At the time and place of my experience, in early 1960s California, a woman who had an abortion or actively sought to have an abortion regardless of whether she went through with it was guilty of a criminal offense. The legal situation improved slightly in 1967, but too late for me, with the passing of the Therapeutic Abortion Act, which authorized a licensed physician to perform an abortion where there was a substantial risk that the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother, or where the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.
But I lived in Southern California, within a few hours’ drive of the border with Mexico. When I was in high school, kids crossed over all the time, often to do something that was easier there than on this side – usually, to bar hop; sometimes, shocking the community back home, to get married. So, a quick trip to Tijuana, over in the morning and back in the evening, would be entirely unremarkable. But bars and justices of the peace were easy to find, and your life didn’t hang in the balance. No billboards promoted the services of an abortion provider; once found, it was impossible to know whether this one was competent and careful.
The competence issue terrified me – for good reason. While accurate figures are, unsurprisingly, hard to come by, one 1960s study indicates that almost one-third of the maternal deaths in California were related to illegal abortions.[2] I didn’t know about the study, but I was aware of the scuttlebutt. I didn’t see that I had a choice. I was in my late teens, with one year of college under my belt, old enough to be considered an adult on some measures, but certainly not mature enough or financially stable enough to raise a child.
Although I was sexually active, I had never entertained the possibility of a pregnancy. My method of birth control consisted of magical thinking. Then, the summer after my first year of college, during my stint as a telephone operator, I suddenly realized my period was a week late. A visit to a doctor – these were the days before home pregnancy tests – confirmed my fears. The magic had ceased. To be fair to my younger self, magical thinking was close to my only option. Birth control pills were just being introduced and they weren’t being prescribed to unmarried women. Diaphragms were available to young single women only if you knew the right doctor. IUDs were more than five years in the future. Avoiding a pregnancy in this environment depended on the man wearing a condom. The woman’s role, my role, consisted of requiring that he don one. Obviously, I didn’t do so or didn’t do so regularly enough, but he also didn’t take any initiative on this score.
The utter dearth of birth control options might explain why the pep squad at my high school – cheerleaders, flag twirlers, and baton performers (all female) – was significantly reduced in size by the end of an academic year. Pregnant girls were kicked out of school. Who knew? Maybe pregnancy was catching. The male participants were allowed to remain.
I informed the other participant in my situation, and, after some tough negotiating, he agreed to pay for an abortion. The cost -- $300 – seems trivial now, although $300 in 1964 money is roughly $3000 in today’s dollars. But even $100 would have been beyond my means at the time; food and my third of the rent and utilities were eating up my meagre salary. I never considered asking my parents for the money, much less advice about what to do. Their advice would likely have been little more than a string of recriminations and, in the end, giving me money to solve the problem would have been unthinkable.
So, one morning, accompanied by the man who was paying for the procedure, I crossed the border at San Ysidro and sought direction from a taxi driver at the busy stand on the Tijuana side. We had to ask only once, even though our Spanish was non-existent and his English, minimal. A reasonable tip changed hands and we followed his cab to an office, with a chair, a desk and a doctor’s certificate on the wall, but dimly lit and utterly silent – an unsettling contrast to the colors and noise outside. After we had waited for an interminable 30 minutes, fidgeting, reading the doctor’s credentials hanging on the wall again and again, we followed our taxi driver to another office, where we were greeted by a man in a doctor’s white coat and a woman in street clothes. The man in the coat explained that the woman would assist but she couldn’t dress as a nurse because she had to be prepared to be at the reception desk if someone came in. Abortions were illegal at that time in Mexico, too.
I can’t remember if I had to take all my clothes off or just my pants and underwear. In fact, I can’t remember much of anything about the preparation except for my determination to proceed. As the anesthetic was administered and I started to go under, I was sure I was going to die.
I didn’t. In due time, the anesthetic wore off. The woman in street clothes helped me get off the table and put my clothes back on; I walked to the car; and we drove back across the border. No infection; relatively little bleeding. I wasn’t unscathed, however. I continue to pay for the fear I felt, now so long ago. Watching a movie or reading a book with an abortion scene triggers a blackout, what one doctor diagnosed as a powerful vasovagal response. Under undue stress, my vagus nerve cuts off the blood supply to my brain. I try to avoid such situations, but, if I’m not successful, I have been known to shock my movie companions with what appears to be a seizure. My very own long-term PTSD. Even so, I was immensely lucky.
My reticence about telling my story to my grandmother or my mother reflects more than my expectation of their judgmental reaction. It speaks to how fully I had absorbed the prevailing societal consensus that any abortion is shameful. An illegal abortion can be redemptive if it leads to death or immense suffering, like permanent sterility. A legal abortion, which almost never has serious side effects, has no redemptive power, not even when it preserves a family that would buckle under the weight of another child or allows a young woman to claim a future.
Unlike my great-grandmother, I wasn’t redeemed. I not only lived, but I wasn’t even denied future pregnancies, as the baby girl sitting on my lap at my dinner with Grandma attests. That baby is now a grown woman with children of her own. The protections Roe afforded meant that had she become pregnant when she wasn’t ready, like I did, she wouldn’t have had to take her life in her hands. For almost fifty years, young women didn’t have to cross the border in terror, like I did. I can’t believe that I now living in a time when my granddaughters might have to depend on luck, like I did.
[1] Mohr, James C. 1978. Abortion in America: The origins and evolution of national policy, 1800 - 1900. Oxford University Press.
[2] Brian Pendleton. 1967. The California Therapeutic Abortion Act: An Analysis, 19 Hastings Law Journal. 242.
***
A retired academic and non-profit executive, Susan Steele has written many articles (most in academic journals) and a number of books (most for academic presses) She is now a freelance writer deeply interested in exploring the experiences of women of her generation and their implications for future generations.
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