Abortion & Life by Jennifer Baumgardner

Author:Jennifer Baumgardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2008-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

SALLY ALDRICH, BORN JULY 6, 1940

I grew up in the late ’50s, and there was really very little birth control. The birth control pill had not been invented. When I went off to college, I was determined to remain a virgin …

In fact, I remember saying to my mother, I want to be just like my older sister. I am going to get an apartment in New York. I am going to get a super job in New York. I am going to go to Europe. And I am going to be married a virgin. I dated. I teased boys. I necked with my boyfriends, but I was terrified of real sex. I was terrified of becoming pregnant. In fact, one of my best friends in high school got pregnant our senior year and had to drop out. It was a stigma that you did not want attached to yourself.

So my answer to life was to not have sex with anybody … until I finally did at age twenty-two for the first time. No protection. To my horror, I got pregnant. You occasionally heard stories about somebody who had tried to have an abortion using a coat hanger and how frightening an experience that was. I knew that I had to face having an abortion, and just accepting the reality that this is what had happened to me was very hard.

I had a girlfriend who was very sophisticated, and I went to her and told her I was pregnant. And she set me with this doctor. All I remember was that he said he would scrape my uterus, and that would cause [the pregnancy] to eventually dislodge, and that I would pass it. It wasn’t really painful. There wasn’t a nurse there, because I remember when I first went to the office, he was taking me between patients, and he was on the phone. And I remember getting off the table, and him grabbing me by my arm and making a pass at me, and me just pushing myself away and being totally revolted.

My boss, Keith, was very sympathetic with me during all of this. I told him that I’d had an abortion. Now that I was no longer a virgin, he felt that I was safe to date. I started dating Keith that summer, and by November he proposed to me. We were making wedding plans, and I had this diaphragm, and it was kind of awkward for me to use. He got impatient with me that I wasn’t spontaneous enough. So, guess what, I got pregnant a second time.

That was even more horrifying to me—that that could happen to me twice. And I just knew that going into marriage pregnant, I would not have a chance. I’d seen my sisters who were much older than me coming home as newlyweds with babies, and being hectic, and I just didn’t want to start a marriage that way.

I called my girlfriend and she set me up with this doctor up in Harlem.

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