What it Was Like Before Abortion Was Legal

by Barbara Kerr, PhD (posted with permission)

There was no sexual revolution in South St. Louis, not for me or my friends -- it was a sexual concentration camp. In the halls of our high school we stumbled around, crazed with sexual hunger, dying of lust.  The stench of menstrual blood soaking through nonabsorbent pads, the boys' and girls' sweat and cheap cologne forming a cloud of misery, the rough clutching and pushing away of hands in the darkened auditorium -- oh, it was terrible. You wanted each other so much, and spent hours, days, plotting a way to almost have sex without having sex, figuring out precisely how far you could go without getting pregnant.

Because getting pregnant was the end. No, this is not about back-alley abortions, I'm sure you've heard about that, and the knitting needles and coat hangers and lye sprays used to end pregnancy. We actually didn't know what abortion was, because nobody you ever knew had ever had one, although a lady who lived next door had been sterilized, we heard, in the mental hospital where she had her lobotomy. Her name was Jo Anne or Roberta, I can't remember, but she was spookily silent. Taking away her ability to get pregnant with more crazy people was the scientific thing to do.

Anyhow, getting pregnant meant exile -- the end of your parents' love, your teachers' respect, your friends' affection. Not to mention the end of your dreams of going to college, becoming somebody, or ever having a real wedding.  Girls who got pregnant just disappeared, and you never, never heard from them again.  There were unwed mother homes where they were sent. I didn't know where those homes were, or what they were like. They were spoken of in whispers.  I pictured them as these unairconditioned, old houses with mean nurses and nuns, where ballooning girls sat by curtained windows, fanning themselves and crying. Sometimes you knew who got them pregnant, but the guy was still in school and never talked about her, and started dating somebody else.

The funny thing was, the girls who got pregnant weren't the ones who were slutty, the dories -- god knows why we called them dories. Maybe it was an Irish term, there being a lot of Irish people in Dogtown. The dories ratted their hair high, wore lots of lip gloss and thick blue eye shadow. They were known to have sex with boys in cars and in other peoples' parents's basements. They hardly ever got pregnant. No, the girls who got pregnant were just like me, really nice girls, really smart girls. Well, they were a little quieter than me and my friends, and more in the third tier of popularity. I was in the second tier. The girls in the first tier -- don't even ask. Banker's daughters, car lot owners' daughter's, with name brand clothes and purses and shoes, who looked almost like county kids -- that was what we called kids in the suburbs. Being from Ladue or Clayton was like being from California, it was so completely golden and distant. They were untouched by lust or its consequences. But those third tier girls -- good at math, with neat handwriting, always friendly and sweet, who loved their pet poodles, kind of pale, thin, not much makeup -- it was they, the nondescript nice girls who got pregnant. Kim, pregnant by Tim the baseball player, from sex at a party. She'd been my best friend once, loved the Beatles. I didn't know that she knew Tim, or that she went to those kinds of parties. Cheryl Lynn, math club type, kind and awkward -- always ready to give you her sandwich or the her circle pin you admired. Jesus, we heard she had twins and we didn't even know who the guy was or if he married her or what. Or what. She just disappeared in the middle of the school year. Lois, a Christian scientist who got drunk and threw up at someone's pajama party but otherwise was a docile, smiling girl, also just went away, a pregnancy victim never heard from again. There were five girls who got pregnant in my class of about thirty Track 1 A "headed for college" group. They weren't headed for college any more.

It didn't get better in college, even though it was finally ok to have sex in college, it was kind of the sophisticated thing to do once you were lavaliered and then pinned, which was sort of pre-engaged. Girls were pretty smug about it. That is, until the first pregnancy scare, which was not just a personal crisis but a crisis for everyone around her in the dorm. At any one time, some girl on the dorm floor thought she might be pregnant. This was college, so many of the girls were on the Pill.  Here is how you got the Pill.  You went to a doctor, in St. Louis or Kansas City -- you would NEVER be able to get it in Columbia without being married -- and you complained of excruciating menstrual pain and irregular periods. My doctor (so embarrassing, he had delivered me eighteen years before) gave me a prescription, furrowed his brow and said, "Now, these are not to be used lasciviously." No kidding, that was the word he used, and I remembered blushing and feeling hot all over.  But of course I took them back to college with me and first chance I got, told my boyfriend -- of FOUR years -- that we could at last have sex. Can you imagine four years of waiting, of agonizing discussions, promises and pleas?

And two weeks after that lovely, long awaited night in a quite nice hotel room -- Un Homme et Une Femme on TV, completely ignored by us except for the wonderful music -- of course, I thought I was pregnant. Maybe I hadn't been on the pill long enough, maybe I had missed one, maybe somehow, some way... Pregnancy fear. It was so numbing, so terrifying that it perfectly mimicked the symptoms of pregnancy. Vomiting, depression, sleeping restlessly, waking early, constantly feeling one's belly, one's labia, trying to figure out the probabilities. You had to wait at least a month after your first missed period to get a pregnancy test. And that in itself was an ordeal. They gave them at the Student Health Center -- the same joint that wouldn't give contraceptives. But the pregnancy test was like being finger printed and booked for a crime. You sat in folding chairs on a certain day in the hallway with other silent girls, waiting your turn for your test and your lecture. You gave a urine sample and sat across the desk from this old guy, Dr. Galleota, who really, really glowered at you, looked disgusted, spoke with utter contempt. He said I was not college material. That if I was pregnant, I would have to leave college. That I should have controlled myself. That college was a place for people with self-control. It was terrible. Then you waited three days for your tests to come back, because they shot your urine into a rabbit and if it died, you were pregnant. Like voodoo or something. It came back negative, and I felt re-born, somehow purified, even from the sexual act. Not pregnant. The truth was, the sheer stress of it all broke up my relationship, as it did many relationships. What kind of guy wanted a crying, fear crazed girlfriend? What kind of girl wanted a guy who said, "Then we'll just have to quit college and get married" in the same tone as if he were suggesting double suicide? After two more scares, I had had enough.

I became a contraceptive scientist, getting my prediction equation as close to 100% effective contraception as possible -- Pill plus rhythm plus condom -- and I learned enough to tell everybody I knew about every aspect of fertility and the art of nonreproduction. I started a committee by putting up posters called the Birth Control Committee.  We couldn't get any reliable books or pamphlets, so we wrote to McGill University in Montreal, where a newsprint pamphlet had been published with the absolutely best information about contraceptive methods, including a new one, the IUD. We sold it for a dime on the street corner and gave it out at the YMCA.

Then we heard that abortion was legal in London, England, and our committee helped a girl to collect enough money to fly there. Then, soon after, we heard it was legal in New York. Our little committee had found professors, ministers, and even one doctor who believed women should have the choice of having an abortion. They, the adults, formed the Clergy Consultation Service. It was all very serious and sorrowful and sacred. We counseled girls, helped them get their pregnancy test from the one kind doctor, Dr. Pfeffer, bless him forever, and if they were pregnant -- AFTER discussing all the alternatives with the liberal ministers in a circle, alternatives that were relatively shitty (leaving college, going to a home, having the baby somewhere, giving it up for adoption,  or having it, usually as a single mother, with zero help from unforgiving relatives and doomed to hang out with hippie mothers in the park playing with naked babies and dogs with bandanas), then we would help her take up a collection from all of her friends, maybe even get some cash from the guy, and one of us would drive her to Lambert Field in St. Louis, where she would fly to a clinic in New York, and return, unpregnant, usually in pretty good shape, and being given lots of supportive counseling afterwards because of the guilt thing.

Then it was legal in Kansas. I drove so many girls, leaving before dawn to get to a small clinic in a run down part of Kansas City, Kansas. I can't remember all their names, and only a few faces, but I remember the books I read while I waited all day for them to be counseled again, to sign the form that said they had physical or mental health reasons for an abortion, to show their permission slip from the kind doctor, to be tested again, to have their procedure, and to be counseled again.  Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.  The Second Sex. Feminine Mystique. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson. The Bell Jar. The Complete Poems of W. H. Auden. The Complete Poems of Dylan Thomas. Catch-22. Love Story. Therese Desqueroux. Madame Bovary. The Condition of Man. Jane Eyre. King Lear. The Religions of Man. On Aggression. The Double Helix. You might say my college education took place in the abortion clinic waiting room.

By then I was a hippie feminist activist. After Woodstock, it seemed like every single day, the world changed, and new, wonderful idea or a new, lovely freedom was born. Free speech and the end of censorship --with peace marches, sit-ins, teach-ins, The Haight Ashbury Free Press, Comix, and Prairie Fire. Consciousness raising groups and equal rights rallies. News of Stonewall, where gay men fought back. Concerts by Beautiful Day, Quicksilver, Simon and Garfunkel, where everybody smoked dope and dropped acid and nobody got busted, because the cops were stoned, too. The first yoga classes and drum ceremonies and transcendental meditation. Earth Day. The first Food Co-op, the first Daycare Co-op, the Free University. And finally, one January afternoon as I dozed on the ratty couch in our office at the crisis center, our sort-of leader, Rev. Roger walked in and quietly said, "Abortion was legalized today, all over the country, by the Supreme Court."  It was the last and most important freedom that we gained that day. There were five or six of us sitting around, smoking and drinking coffee. Nobody spoke.  We just sat there. I didn't feel joyous, or victorious, or anything. Just grateful, and weary, and a little stunned, like those prisoners in the opera Fidelio, walking out into the sunlight, blinking and stumbling, hardly knowing what to do, but free.