Chapter 1 of Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles:
Tragedies of Abortion in America Before Roe v. Wade
A
Victorian Woman Speaks
My grandmother, Florence Stockbridge
Sargent, Dar to everyone who knew her,
was the perfect Victorian lady. Even in the early1960s she would never leave
the house without her hat, gloves and corset.
I couldn’t imagine her having sex, and
that is not a grandchild’s lack of imagination. She bragged that her husband
had never seen her naked, but they must have had sex at least three times
because she had three children.
She repeated the story of helping at the
birth of her nephew, Lawrence. Her sister-in-law was in agony.
“You are next Mrs. Sargent,” the doctor
was reported to have said.
“Not until I forget tonight,” my
grandmother claims to have replied.
She must have forgotten. My Uncle Gordon
was born in 1910, his sister Lois in 1915.She died during her first year in my
grandmother’s arms, cause unknown, but she had failed to flourish.
My mother was the replacement child in
1917.
Anxious to preserve my purity, my
grandmother cautioned me on the proper distance on the dance floor with a boy.
After I had dated my future husband for several months while a sophomore in
high school, she asked if he’d ever kissed me. When I nodded, she asked, “On
the mouth?” I did not go into our petting sessions in his 1950 green Chevrolet.
Thus, when my grandmother referred to the “knitting
needle” method of birth control, I was shocked not that she said it, but with
the same way she would have said, “It’s time for bed,” or “What will we have
for dinner tonight?”
Sex was somehow not all right, but
abortion, when necessary was. My teen brain didn’t understand.
The mores of the time, was that good girls
didn’t have sex. Part of it in our middle-class existence was described by
Marilyn French, that a virgin had a chance to attract a better husband if she
had a “factory-fresh hymen.”
Good girls did have sex and good girls did
get pregnant, more because even though oral contraceptives were approved in
1960, doctors were not allowed to prescribe them by law to unmarried women.
They also could not talk about older methods such as diaphragms and rhythm.
Women told and retold an unfunny joke “Question:
What do you call a woman who practices rhythm? Answer: Mother.”
Information about Intrauterine Devices
(IUDs), which had been around for centuries had been improved until failure
rates hovered about 0.8% with copper devices and even less 0.2% with the
hormone levonorgestrel. These too, were off limits to married women.
Before I married I knew better to try our
family Dr. Halligan who’d seen me thru childhood diseases and poison ivy. He
resembled an aging Irish Leprechaun and when he walked into the room, his
patient automatically felt better.
I did try Dr. Land. Even a Woolworth’s
wedding ring did not fool him. The law served its purpose: I stayed pure until
I was married.
As we went thru the sixties and into the
seventies, I had friends struggle to find someone to provide birth control to
unmarried women. They were braver than I was and when they were caught, tried methods
from riding horseback to throwing themselves downstairs. They resorted to
do-it-yourself chemical methods to seeking an abortionist that might or might not
kill them.
The other alternative was to marry. We
planned one friend’s wedding when we were at university. She could not face an
abortion, more from fear than conviction. About an hour before the wedding, she
got her period and cancelled the wedding much to her and the groom-to-be’s
relief.
Much has improved over the years. Birth
control is available as is abortion. Yet many years later, the right of a woman
to control her body is under threat once again.
Abortion is a horrible choice. Women who
have had abortions do not make that decision easily. Some of have confided, “My
child would be ten now.” Yet asked if they would do it again under the same
circumstances, a large percentage would.
This book looks at what it would be like
to go back to the bad old days, when the solution to an unwanted pregnancy
(especially if birth control is harder to get) would be like.
One thing is certain. If abortion is not
available legally, a woman who wants an abortion will find a way to do it
illegally or to herself. The only thing that is not certain, will it be safe or
will it kill her too?
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