Letters to the Editor
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Why I Wouldn't if I Could
I was raised by pro-choice feminists, long before either of those terms was coined. In fact, before my older brother was born, they wrote their wills leaving EVERYTHING to Planned Parenthood, and have been pro-choice, pro-sex education, anti-war, civil rights activists going back to the 1940s. They are also retired academics and psychoanalyzed atheists. (You get the picture.) I have had loving and warm relationships with them for my entire 47 years. Yet, as a 16-year-old college freshman, faced with a positive pregnancy test, I was unable to ask for their help in getting an abortion. In New York. Post Roe. (The positive test turned out to be false and I never really had to address the issue more concretely than that.)
As a straight-A superachiever, I was too ashamed to tell them about this big blunder of mine. I turned to my brother, who helped me figure out how to deal with the logistics. Years later, when I told them about it, they were both very sad that I had been so ashamed. My father even told me that when he was divorced and a graduate student in Chicago in the 50s, he helped someone get an abortion. He didn't tell me much more than that, but I understood that he was saying gently that these things happen.
If someone like me couldn't talk to her parents about having an abortion, I shudder to think about those poor girls who have religious, uneducated, low-income parents with no health insurance trying to discuss the subject with their parents.