Opinion: When I talked about my pre-Roe abortion, other women’s stories poured out: ‘You are the only person I’ve ever told’

The summer of 1965, the first gynecologist I went to for a diaphragm turned me down. He was within his rights — birth control had only just become legal for married people, and contraception for unmarried people like me would remain against the law until 1972. With the support of a growing feminist movement, single women with financial resources and medical access managed to get the pill anyway and rode the wave of the summer of love, exulting in the sexual revolution. “Make Love Not War” demanded not only peace in Vietnam but liberation from restraints on sex and dread of unwanted pregnancy.
But a diaphragm could slip or have a hole in it. Condoms were considered ineffective and impaired our pleasure and freedom. Intrauterine devices were not in general use. You might skip a birth control pill one day or two days and find yourself pregnant, which is what happened to me. Or sleep with one’s boyfriend and be edged into unwanted sex with someone else and not know who impregnated you. That also happened to me.
White and privileged enough to pay what I remember as $2,000, I maneuvered a “therapeutic abortion,” a loophole in the law that allowed abortion for the health of the woman. Typically, the strategy was mental health. I’m sure I told the psychiatrist I didn’t want to marry the father and that I could not care for a child. The obstetrician agreed to perform the procedure, asked me on the operating table if I wanted to go through with it, and told me not to tell anyone. I told only the friends who drove me to the hospital.
The story still amazes me. Who was that 23-year-old woman who managed to get a safe abortion all on her own? What was the impact of that decision on the rest of my life? I thought little about it until recently, when I realized my students and other younger women had no idea what it had been like back in the day. What to tell them? I remember being alone. I remember feeling scared. I had paid for the abortions of a couple of women I knew and driven a friend to an illegal one in New Jersey. She ended up in the hospital, bleeding badly. “I damn near died,” she told me, 55 years later.
I did not know, when I sought to terminate my pregnancy in New Haven, Conn., that a month before in New York City 12 women had gone public about their abortions at a “speak-out,” or that in Chicago an underground collective called the Janes was arranging safe abortions, free to those who could not afford them. Fear of pregnancy haunted everything beyond a kiss, as did stories of women sent away to have children they gave up for adoption, women who died from botched procedures, boyfriends who wouldn’t help pay, boyfriends who would.
The most radical position on abortion before Roe vs. Wade was repeal not reform — the argument being that any abortion law, no matter how liberal, denied women control of our own bodies. After Roe, abortion opponents took control of the discourse, muddling the clarity of the simple fact that one’s body is one’s own. In 1977, the Hyde Amendment, which denied federal funds for abortion, further reinforced the disparity between women who could afford the procedure and those who could not. Demands for parental consent denied young women autonomy. Amid clinic bombings, the pro-choice movement seemed unable to effectively call out the cruelty of antiabortion rhetoric that privileged the life of an unborn child over that of an unrealized woman or overburdened mother.
Those of us who’d had abortions were made somehow inaudible. “Write a poem,” a friend said to me on our way to Washington for the 1992 March for Women’s Lives, an event prompted by a challenge to a Pennsylvania abortion rights law brought to the Supreme Court. Half a million rallied and Roe was preserved. I’d hardly talked about my abortion, let alone written about it, but I remembered my long-ago loneliness. The poem recounted the sex that led to my 1969 abortion and a visit to a post-Roe women-run clinic. I remember the power of the audience response when I read it aloud and my surprise when a young editor wrote me, saying that her magazine’s decision to publish it had been controversial.
With the Dobbs decision, public speech about abortion is no longer rare. What was silence has become an uproar. The new back alley is a flight you can’t afford to a state where abortion is legal, or a hospital room where you’re left to bleed out because your miscarriage is too late to be legally assisted by professionals.
On a recent women’s mobilization call for Kamala Harris supporters, two women told their stories — both were hospitalized for late-term miscarriages, both abandoned by doctors who feared criminal charges. “I nearly died,” one of the women said. “I was lucky,” said the other.
During the last two years, when I’ve told women I was writing about my pre-Roe abortion, stories poured out: Mine was in a dentist’s office; I had to go to Puerto Rico; mine was botched and I was so alone. That I’d prompted these revelations was surprise enough. More unnerving was that in almost every instance, the woman would lean forward: “You are the only person I’ve ever told,” she’d confide. “Only you will know,” a woman in her 50s whispered to me at a book signing last week.
Though friends who knew me in my 20s tell me I always seemed confident, it’s amazing to me that I was able to make such a decision on my own behalf before I even had a self. Now in my 70s, I realize that moment helped to form me, a woman who has made many decisions against the grain. I still seem confident to friends, but every time an important choice presents itself, I churn back to that long-ago lonely girl. How stunning now to join that mobilizing call where the importance of decisions like mine were acknowledged, where my life as a single working woman was not odd or unusual, where I was invited to shout as one of many.
Honor Moore is on the graduate writing faculty at the New School. Her newest book is “A Termination.”