This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor (2 page)

“The three of us were so naïve. We knew very little about these things, but we had heard that if you put something long and sharp ‘up there,’ in the private place, sometimes it would end the pregnancy.”

In spite of myself I conjured the modest room: a dresser in the corner with a kerosene lamp and maybe a hairbrush or hand mirror beside it. I saw three young, scared girls, still children, acting on old wives’ tales and whispered instructions.

My stomach turned. Was this my grandma? Was I really here in her trailer house hearing this? I could barely breathe. She kept talking, all the while stroking the top of my hand, her eyes looking off into space, traveling back in time. Occasionally a pat-pat with her hand would break the rhythm of the stroking. Such old skin, full of brown age spots and paper thin. Stroking my hand in perfect measure with her words.

Please just stop, Grandma. Don’t tell me anymore. Just hold my hand, and let’s talk about what you’ll plant in the spring. Tell me about the oatmeal bread you baked yesterday. Are there many birds coming to the bird feeder? I was flushed all over. And still she stroked while she talked. Pat-pat, stroke.

“We closed ourselves, the three of us, in one of the bedrooms late one morning. We didn’t talk much, and she didn’t ever cry out in pain. It took a few tries to make the blood come. None of us spoke. We didn’t know what to expect next, or what to do when the blood kept coming. It was all over the sheets. All over us. So bright red. It was awful. It just wouldn’t stop.”

She was still stroking my hand. I was shaking uncontrollably. I stared at the African violets under the plant light, trying to make them the focus of my attention. Her voice was a monotone, never a pause.

“We put rags inside of her to try to stop the bleeding, but they soaked full. We all three stayed in her bed. We just didn’t know what to do.”

My hand was trembling so hard it was all I could do to keep it on top of hers. She grasped it briefly, held it tight, patted it a few times, and then went on.

“We stayed there together, unable to move, even after she was dead. Her father found us, all three of us, in the bed. He stood in the doorway, staring. No words for a long time. When he did speak, he told my sister and me to leave and that we were never, ever to speak of this. We were not to tell anyone, ever. Ever.”

She stopped stroking my hand and sat still before turning to look directly at me. “That was seventy-two years ago. You are the first person I have ever told that story. I am still so ashamed of what happened. We were just so young and scared. We didn’t know anything.”

Terrible sadness welled up inside me. And anger. I couldn’t picture my grandma as someone responsible for the death of anything, much less her best friend at the age of sixteen. She had carried this secret all her life, kept it inside, festering with guilt and shame.

I wondered if the pregnancy was indeed the result of incest. Would it have made a difference? What were friends and family told about the death? What had they actually used to start the bleeding? What had the doctor put on the death certificate as the cause of death?

I knew, through the patients I had met, that no one has to look very far into their family history to find these stories tucked away, hidden from view. But it didn’t lessen the shock of finding it here, so close, in the heart of my own family.

Flower Grandma sighed and held my hand tight. Tears welled in her eyes.

“I know exactly what kind of work you do, and it is a good thing. People like you do it safely so that people like me don’t murder their best friends. I told you how proud I am of what you do, and I meant it.”

F
lower Grandma is gone now. So is my mother. I can share the story my grandmother kept inside from the time she was a young girl. Her story and hundreds of others like it desperately need to be told. We need their legacy so we don’t forget, and to remind ourselves that every family has a similar tale somewhere in its history.

It has been my privilege and honor to hear many women’s stories and to participate in their unfolding. As a young woman, the idea that I might be in such a position would have seemed far-fetched indeed. No, actually, it would have seemed impossible.

In April 1980 I was a twenty-six-year-old mom living in Wisconsin, raising a daughter alone, working part-time at a VFW bar and part-time in a natural foods co-op. I was on welfare, medical assistance, and food stamps. My post-high school education consisted of a handful of community college classes, none of which fit together or qualified me for anything, with one exception.

I had given birth to my daughter at home just north of San Francisco, where her father and I were living. To prepare for the event, I took birthing classes, which led to an interest in midwifery. Since Sonja’s birth, I had been involved in many births, both in homes and in hospitals, volunteering as an advocate for women in labor.

I knew from my own experience how empowering it was for women to be informed. With that information, women feel secure about expressing their needs. Their active participation changes the entire dynamic. I loved the energy of those births. By the late 1970s, however, midwives were being prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license, so I had resorted to teaching birth classes in an effort to optimize the hospital experience for women.

Sonja’s dad, David, and I had gone our separate ways, having fundamental differences in lifestyles. I had yearned for the rural life again and wanted Sonja to grow up knowing her grandparents. David was a jazz musician who needed and craved the big city life. When it came down to it, I couldn’t live on the road following a musician around, and he couldn’t imagine a life full of chopping wood and hunting deer. Our breakup had been amicable, and David continued to be very committed to Sonja even after I moved back to the Midwest in 1979.

On Easter Sunday 1980 I was invited to a gathering of people on the West Bank of Minneapolis. The host roasted a lamb in an open pit and provided traditional Greek wine. It was the first really warm day of spring. I was wearing a piecework skirt I had sewn, a pink V-necked T-shirt, and Birkenstock sandals. I fit right in. Sonja, nearly three, was having a blast running around with all the other kids.

I began talking with a man perhaps twenty years older than I. We sat on the grass drinking red wine and soaking up sunshine. An occasional dog streaked through the chaos.

It was one of those conversations that avoided the common superficialities. Hal questioned me about my interests and skills and background. He wanted to know what made me happy, what frustrated me. Did I like travel, or was I a homebody? He wanted me to tell him about Sonja’s birth and about the training I had as a midwife. He asked about what I liked to read. What my parents did. What my fears were, and my dreams.

I told him how much I loved the contact with women and what satisfaction I got from teaching birthing classes. I felt I could communicate the information effectively and in a way most of the women understood. My collection of books on pregnancy and birth and midwifery and early childhood development was growing rapidly, and I was devouring them. I missed the chance to be involved in home births now that I was back in the Midwest.

I also talked about my dreams of somehow making a difference, a real difference, in peoples’ lives. I didn’t know what or how or when that might happen, but I knew I would not be content to work in the local grocery store or VFW all my life. I wanted more diversity. More challenge. More adventure.

It seemed as if we’d been there most of the afternoon when Hal looked at me and said, “It is clear that you need to go to medical school. You would be a great doctor.”

“
Me?!
Be a doctor?”

I hugged myself across my belly, tipping over into the grass and laughing until I cried. He had to be out of his mind! Sonja came running up and jumped on me. I curled up tighter, still laughing.

The idea was preposterous. The logistics alone would be impossible.

We went on with the day, enjoying the sunshine and good food and music. Local musicians kept pulling out instruments and playing them late into the night. It was only much later that I learned Hal worked as a career counselor at a nearby federal prison.

Crazy as it was, in the weeks following the party, Hal’s suggestion kept echoing in my thoughts. I knew my life was on hold, waiting for some nudge, some direction. By mid-May, Sonja and I had moved into a tent in a goat pasture. We were helping some friends with a building project. Living right on site seemed like a good idea.

Summer went on, full of building fences, tending gardens, moving rocks for a foundation, but the seed Hal had planted that Easter Sunday wouldn’t go away. The idea of college and then medical school seemed far out of my reach. I had absolutely no money to pay for tuition or child care for Sonja. I didn’t know if I could even handle the academic challenges. Imagining myself in the role of a doctor was outrageous.

The biggest mental and emotional hurdle I was struggling with was wrapped up in becoming part of the medical community. True, my childhood family doctor had always been kind, someone I looked up to. But he was almost a neighbor, and he was a man. Men were doctors. Women were nurses.

That stereotype wasn’t insurmountable, but there was something else I had to deal with. Something much more visceral and daunting. The memory of my own abortion, in 1976, in Portland, Oregon.

When I became pregnant, politics and
Roe v. Wade
were the furthest things from my consciousness. I didn’t engage with the political and social issues.

At that time I rented a house with four roommates, including David. I had no money and juggled three jobs: waitressing, cleaning horse stalls, and growing alfalfa sprouts. David played local gigs with jazz musicians in bars and clubs. No part of me was ready to be a mother, and I felt no emotional connection to the pregnancy. I learned from a community health clinic that I could get an abortion just blocks from where I lived.

I called the clinic and made an appointment, but learned that the abortion cost $350, an impossible amount of money, more than I made in a month. All of my roommates pitched in to help me come up with the necessary cash.

The doctor’s office was on the second floor of a large building. David came with me. Protesters outside carried signs, tried to talk to us. I was so preoccupied, so anxious, that I only remember them as an annoyance, a hassle.

The first thing they wanted in the tiny office was my money. Pay in advance, all of it, in cash. I was so frightened and unaware. What was supposed to happen? No counseling took place, no explanation of procedures or options; no one tried to understand my circumstances or answer my questions.

In another tiny room a nurse told me to undress and lie down on the table.

“What are you doing?” I wanted to know.

“Just be still,” she said. She sat in front of me and put a cold speculum into my vagina. I could feel tugging and pulling, but no real pain. She was done quickly, took out the speculum, and then told me to get dressed.

“Am I done?” I asked.

“Done?” she slapped the words at me. “No. I just put something into your cervix that will make it open up for the abortion. You should leave now and come back at three this afternoon.”

I still had no idea what to expect.

“What’s happening?” David kept asking when we left. “What are they going to do?” I couldn’t deal with his questions. I had no answers. I had been told nothing, knew only that I had to hold on to my resolve until this was over.

I dropped David off at the house and drove on in our VW bus to work for a few hours, spraying flats of alfalfa seeds and bagging sprouts. I kept cramping, fighting against the pain and anxiety that threatened to overwhelm me. The time dragged.

When we returned, the same woman took me back to the small room, again had me get undressed, and used the speculum to examine me. She removed something she had put inside me earlier, but was impatient with me when I asked questions.

I was moved into a much larger room. It seemed huge, filled with machines and trays of exposed instruments and syringes and needles. Two other women came in. They had me strip naked, lie on a table, and put my feet in stirrups. They put a paper sheet over my upper body and told me to lie still. Then all three of them walked out. No advice, no preparatory explanation, no squeeze of the hand. For a long time I lay there in that vast, cold room, utterly exposed and as vulnerable as I’d ever been in my life.

Finally, the door opened, and a very large man, the doctor, came toward me. I remember looking down over my legs at him, aware of how physically exposed I was.

He said nothing, didn’t even tell me his name, asked no questions, but abruptly started to work. An emotional claustrophobia enveloped me. I could feel myself starting to panic.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Please tell me what you are doing!”

I could feel instruments inside me, a harsh invasion and pain I hadn’t expected. “Is it supposed to hurt?” I pleaded.

“Shut up and lie still!” His voice was rough, angry, as if I had no right to intrude. I started to squirm away from him, trying to make him stop long enough to talk to me.

“Please,” I pleaded. “Please just tell me what you are doing. Stop. Talk to me. Please!”