Before Roe v. Wade

          Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision which opened the door to legalizing abortion, changed everything. Four decades later, people can hardly remember what women did beforehand. Imagine with me one woman’s story.
         She was young in 1962. And beautiful. I don’t know her entire story, so you’ll forgive me for exercising some imagination to fill in the gaps. Let’s call her Jane. In the summer of 1962 she was in love. A petite woman, and, as I said, lovely, Jane was intelligent and perhaps ambitious. But romance doesn’t particularly allow for the clearest of thoughts. I know very little of Jane’s “Lover.” I have heard that he was a professional golfer, but I cannot confirm the fact.
         In the sixties everything was changing. Nothing in life went unquestioned. Religion, politics, art, music and morals—everything was being doubted, especially among young people. And Jane was young. I don’t imagine that she was a hippie—it was a little too early for that. But she probably listened to Rock and Roll music while her upper middle class parents shook their heads. Or she might have been independent, out on her own, in college or maybe working at the local country club.
          In July of 1962 she and her lover had sex—probably not for the first time. But this time she got pregnant. She didn’t realize it for several weeks. First would come realizing she was “late” and the scrambled checking of a calendar to figure out how many days it was. There were no take home pregnancy tests, and the thought of going to the family doctor was frightening, even humiliating. It was hard for her to confide in a close friend. She suspected by the end of August and was fearfully sure by the end of September thanks to Morning Sickness.
         But when did she work up the courage to go to her mother and ask, “How does a girl know when she’s in trouble?” When did she go to the child’s father and tell him the news? It was all very “hush, hush.” Pregnancy outside of marriage was scandalous in 1962. Her father was angry. Her mother felt a sense of guilty failure. If Jane was a church going girl, she wouldn’t be anymore. The baby’s father couldn’t allow such a scandal to affect his career. He might have simply run away and never looked back. He might have talked to Jane about a certain “place” he’d heard about with a certain “doctor” who didn’t ask questions, suggesting what was called a “back alley abortion.” Jane refused such an illegal and dangerous procedure. The child’s father probably left town or at least the relationship after that. He might have contributed money to what came next, but he otherwise washed his of the affair.
         What came next was shipping Jane off to Dallas where she could stay with anonymous people while her belly grew too big for the truth to be hidden. Friends of the family would suspect something in Jane’s home town, but no one would say anything in public and certainly not to the parents’ faces. If Jane was in college, she dropped out. If she worked, she had to quit. Only the money used to send her on her way or support her while she was gone—an envelope with a check or a handful of cash dutifully sent by her father—would be there to sustain her (if there were any support at all).
         Her life was utterly put on hold. And for seven or so more months she did nothing but sit in a strange house (out of which she would not venture for the shame she felt), anguishing over the mistake, feeling the growing child inside her stomach, wishing the father had asked her to marry him, wishing he’d at least write a letter or two, and wishing for some other alternative than this.
         The only alternative left was anonymous adoption through an agency which specialized in this sort of thing. Arrangements were made. Jane gave birth to the child on March 14, 1963 at St. Paul’s Hospital in Dallas. She probably never saw it. It was taken immediately into the care of doctors and nurses, and only two weeks later, through the work of the adoption agency, given to a couple who could not have children of their own.
         Jane might have been spared a lot of misery if she’d had another alternative, if Roe v. Wade had been passed just a few years earlier. But I am glad she didn’t have that alternative. She was my birth mother. If she’d had the option of abortion, I’d probably be dead.