by Barbara Nevins Taylor
I had an illegal abortion in 1965 when I was 18. A friend I grew up with had a boyfriend who knew Paul Krasner, founder and editor of The Realist. He passed on the number of a doctor in Jersey City who performed abortions in an apartment there.
Abortion didn’t become legal in New York State until 1970. Then the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion for the nation with the Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973. Before that, women did what they could. In the 1920s and ’30s, my grandmother ran a candy story and had four children. She apparently thought that was enough. When she got pregnant a fifth time, she went to a woman who used a wire hanger to perform an abortion. The woman punctured her abdominal wall and she got an infection that almost killed her. It was a story my mother told often.
The notion that we are rolling back the clock to a time when a woman of any age has to get a scary and perhaps dangerous abortion horrifies me. I don’t want anyone to have to endure my grandmother’s experience, or mine, or worse.
My pregnancy snuck up on me during the winter of 1965. I missed one period and then another. My boyfriend wasn’t someone I really liked and I don’t think he liked me at all. We slept together in an apartment on West 84th Street that he shared with several other guys. One was a friend and I met Fred through him.
Fred had recently graduated from college in Virginia and moved to New York to work in finance. I was just starting out and didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do. I’d recently graduated from the High School of Performing Arts and unlike my friends didn’t go directly to college. I was trying to figure out who I was and where I wanted my life to lead.
I did know a couple of things for sure. I liked the body heat and messy passion of sex and took the opportunities when I could without getting hurt. I had discovered my sexuality in junior high and by the time I was in my last year of high school, I had intercourse on the green carpet of my mother’s living room with a boy who was just a friend. It wasn’t as exciting or even sweaty as the groping and touching with those I had been with before. And I felt nothing when it was over. He wanted to talk. I did not.
This was the sixties, remember, and many of us felt free to explore sexuality in a way previous generations did not. Although, I will say to my mother’s credit, she reminded me often that, “Your generation didn’t invent sex. It didn’t invent everything.”
By the time I met Fred, I’d had intercourse with a number of guys and found ways to make it more satisfying for me than that first time. But I was also working on myself, trying to hold my fire, develop discipline and focus on making good choices. He was the only person I slept with for several months and that’s all it took.
After I admitted to myself that I was pregnant, my body flushed with red-hot humiliation and fury at me. I wished for a giant eraser to wipe it away and make it a dream. It felt like the time a couple of years earlier when I was in a car accident, but worse. That happened so quickly. A friend drove into an intersection. A car slammed into us. We spun around and crashed into a light post and we could not spool the moment back. We were both okay then. But this time, I was not going to be okay. It did not seem possible to continue the pregnancy and have a baby. I was a baby.
I imagined what would happen if I had to marry Fred. He was from Norfolk, Virginia, a place that I had never been. I envisioned me in a little white house behind a white picket fence with a stroller. I wanted to scream. Pete Seeger’s version of “Little Boxes,” a satire about suburbia, replayed in my head like a damning ear worm.
I didn’t talk about marriage or keeping the baby with Fred. He was decent and supportive when I told him about the doctor in Jersey City and he said that he would pay the $500 cash fee. I made the appointment.
We stayed together in his apartment on the Upper West Side the night before. At about 6 a.m, we took the subway to 34th Street and then the Path train to Jersey City. We barely spoke. I was in a fog. When we got out of the train, the people rushing around and the colors swirled before me like a kaleidoscope. It seemed as if we had stepped into a carnival. We left the station and walked for several blocks to a red brick apartment building. The instructions guided us to the super’s door at the back of the building. We could not use the main entrance. The door was unlocked and we climbed the three flights and rang the bell at the designated apartment.
A thick-set, dark-haired man opened the door and motioned to chairs in a small foyer. Another young man sat waiting. A few minutes later, a woman maybe a little older than I was came out and they left together. It was my turn.
The man led me into another room where three or four men who looked like him sat at a table. He introduced me to the doctor. The doctor had a pock-marked face and seemed like he was in his thirties. His dark hair waved up off his forehead in what they called a pompadour. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up to expose hairy forearms. Rings glittered on his fingers as he motioned me into another room.
There was a bed off to the far side and I didn’t head there right away. I stopped to look at pictures of strippers in spangles and pasties taped to the wall above a small sink. “Great,” I thought to myself, “This guy likes women and sex and what does that mean for me?” I was terrified but my feet would not move toward the door to flee.
The doctor came to the sink and washed his hands. “Take off your pants and panties and get on the bed,” he said. “Go ahead,” he said when I hesitated.
The white sheet was clean and I closed my eyes and got on the bed. “Good. Now count from one.” I stared to count and he put something over my face. The last number that I remember was 18, just like me.
I felt myself rolling and then I fell. My body hit the floor with a thud. I had rolled off the bed and I was alone on the floor in the room. The doctor came through the door. “You okay?” he asked. When I shook my head yes, he stuck out a hand and pulled me up. “You’re done,” he said. “You may have some bleeding. Not too much.”
Fred had heard the thud and was standing in the door. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Yes. Please let’s get out of here,” I said. We walked to the Path train and then headed back to New York City. I felt the pad the doctor had placed between my legs getting wetter and wetter. By the time I got home I was soaked in blood.
I bled for two day before going to my gynecologist Michael Truppin. He said that I should have come sooner, I could have bled to death.
So are we going back to abortion 1965 style, or maybe earlier like my grandmother’s time? I teach journalism at The City College of New York and every semester in one class, I pick a current issue, white supremacy, for example, or attacks against Asians, and explain how history informs journalism. I want my students to understand and appreciate that history brings us to the present moment and that very little occurs in a vacuum.
Abortion has a history and it is because of that history that laws were passed to protect women. The abortion horrors of the past led to the understanding that a woman needs to make her own decisions about what to do with her body and whether she should have children. This is a fundamental right. Don’t led zealots of any stripe take it away.
