As the 2024 election cycle nears its end (hurrah!), reproductive health is one of this campaign’s most important issues for me as a woman. I do not trust one major party presidential candidate to protect women’s rights. His previous behavior around women causes me grave concern. Also, I have granddaughters whose reproductive lives are just beginning, and I want their choices to be at least as robust as mine were.
Along with reproductive choice, respecting differences and showing compassion are important to me. I can honor those who disagree with me, while hoping my views and how I came to hold them will make sense.
A summary of what I know of the reproductive lives of my grandmothers and mother:
—Both my grandmothers lost children early to contagious diseases.
–One grandmother suffered multiple stillbirths.
–My mother used contraception, mostly successfully, to delay, then space her pregnancies. Her children all survived her.
As of now, I seem to have been a winner in the reproductive lottery for my generation:
—Through a combination of luck and contraceptive use, I was able to delay pregnancy until after marriage and after my husband and I were both ready to become parents.
–I had two uncomplicated pregnancies and easy deliveries.
–Both my children have survived me into middle age and have children of their own.
Others in my family were much less fortunate.
My mother gradually shared with me stories of growing up when women faced heavy legal restrictions on their access to either contraceptives or abortion. When she married my father in 1944, her naval draftee husband was about to be shipped out to the Pacific on an aircraft carrier. Mom was terrified of becoming a war widow with an infant, so when she and Dad managed a brief honeymoon in Boston, she disobeyed the law. She obtained illegal contraceptives and avoided an unintended pregnancy. Luckily, Dad survived the war and came home in 1946. He and Mom started building peacetime lives together. I arrived about a year later.
The reproductive part of my life spanned both the “pre-Roe” and the “Roe” eras. When I was entering my teens during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, abortion was illegal in nearly all circumstances. Knowledge about responsible sexual behavior was limited, too, partly because public teaching about human sexuality was also restricted.
Before I started having periods, Mom took me one evening to a short, clinical Disney animated film about “becoming a woman.” She and her friends later did their collective best to supervise our dating behavior. They cautioned their daughters in veiled terms to avoid “going all the way.” Our moms had been socialized to avoid discussing sex. We daughters sometimes got misinformation from other sources. Various religious groups promoted total sexual abstinence before marriage, and “rhythm” afterwards, avoiding sex during the supposedly few days of a woman’s menstrual cycle when she was fertile and could become pregnant. Neither approach took into account our sometimes raging hormones or the irregular menses of many women.
Starting when I was in eighth grade, a few of my female classmates began dropping out of school, either temporarily or permanently. Both before and during Roe, many pregnant young women who did not have abortion access, or who chose not to abort, chose rushed marriages, sometimes under extreme family and social pressure. They’d typically wed the baby’s father, often before they showed many external signs of pregnancy. Sometimes referred to as “shotgun marriages,” some of these marriages endured. Many didn’t. By the time I finished public high school in Maryland in 1965, more than a few former classmates had hurriedly married their boyfriends, dropped out of school, and become teen moms.
Other classmates disappeared for several months, supposedly visiting an “aunt on the West Coast” or some such, before reappearing looking sadder and less confident. My guess is that they’d been sent to homes for unwed mothers, given birth, then immediately surrendered their infants for adoption. A few years ago, I read an extensively researched book about this option, Ann Fessler’s 2006 study, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. The book estimates that the number of mothers who surrendered infants in the U.S. during the period 1945-1973 was roughly 1.5 million, an average of over 50,000 per year.
Starting during the 1960’s, women gradually gained more control over our reproductive lives. A few states began to allow consideration of rape or incest, of a mother’s physical health, or of severe fetal abnormalities for legal abortions. Just as important as the abortion changes, women got access to more widely available, more reliable contraceptives, such as birth control pills. Reliable information about contraceptive practices also spread.
Between World War II and the 1973 Roe decision, though, the incidence of unplanned pregnancies skyrocketed. Illicit abortions also increased. Estimates of the number of pre-Roe “stealth abortions” in the U.S. vary widely. I know some such abortions occurred, because for about a decade there was a stealth abortion clinic less than a mile from my house. I learned of it by chance—the address of a criminal complaint about running an illegal abortion clinic matched a secluded property along our road. My friend Ann had noticed the complaint while working a summer job at the county prosecutor’s office. She told me about it because six years earlier she and I had knocked on the clinic’s front door while selling Girl Scout cookies.
In the pre-Roe period, a double standard about the consequences of sexual activity for young women and young men was common. Girls who “got into trouble” were vilified, while the boys or men who’d gotten them pregnant frequently avoided any consequences. The tendency to disparage women persists these days in the form of online “slut shaming,” often without evidence. Other online and in-person abuses, including pussy grabbing and other sexual assaults, continue.
The “Roe era” lasted from January, 1973 until June, 2022. Women’s reproductive lives then were less regulated legally than either before or since. The Roe decision had allowed abortions with few restrictions before a fetus is capable of life outside the womb—typically around 23-28 weeks of gestation. Since the 2022 Dobbs decision reversed Roe, I’ve explored more of the nuances of fertility, infertility, and choice. While no choice about ending a pregnancy is ever easy, I strongly believe that restoring women’s ability to make that choice is essential.
The U.S. abortion debate will not go away. Much state legislation since Dobbs has proved tragic for women experiencing ectopic pregnancies, pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, miscarriages, or serious fetal abnormalities. It has increased distrust and anxiety among women of childbearing age and their health care providers.
I believe we need a more flexible national legal framework surrounding abortion. I believe that as a society we need to better prepare both young women and young men for the possibilities and challenges of parenthood. I believe that sharing our reproductive stories, with more empathy and less judgment, can help promote reproductive health for all.
Above all, I believe we need to get better at treating women as full humans. When former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder was asked how she could manage to be both a mother and a member of Congress, she responded, “I have a brain and a uterus and I use both.”
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