What my abortion taught me about rights
My mother told me once abortions were wrong, but when a close relative of ours got a girl pregnant, Momma paid for it. They were 16-year-old classmates in a Mississippi high school. No one except Momma could afford the abortion, and she drove the girl to Jackson and back home in 1975.
“They were too young. They had no money,” she said to me a decade later. “It was a hard decision for her, me and your cousin, but it was the right one.” So often, that’s the way it goes: One’s principles often go out the window when people they know and love are forced to make a life-altering decision.
I never told Momma about my own abortion. As an Ole Miss junior in 1978, there was no way I was going to confide in her. Her disappointment in me would have been extremely painful, even though she would have ultimately supported me. In high school, she caught me making out on the porch with a boy one night, and she cautioned me about getting pregnant. Momma even admitted she had slept with my father before they married in 1950, when she would have had no choices if she had gotten pregnant.
I had a choice: to tell my mother or not. To decide on keeping my child as my own or not. To decide on having my child adopted or not. To have an abortion or not.
I’m fortunate to have had choices in my life. A bad one was the decision to stop taking the birth control pill. Instead, I decided to count the days on the calendar to avoid pregnancy. Obviously, I didn’t know that the practice of counting the calendar wasn’t always reliable.
My boyfriend didn’t go to the Memphis abortion clinic, only an hour or so away from Ole Miss, with me. A college friend had had an abortion there the year before. She not only accompanied me; she helped with the arrangement and told me what the doctor would do and how it would feel. Even so, I was so nervous. Admittedly, I felt guilty, so much so I was nauseous and dizzy by the time I laid down on the stretcher.
When I thought I would faint, I threw up on the stretcher with the doctor and nurse in the room.
They asked me if I wanted to cancel the procedure or postpone it to another day. I said no to both. During the procedure and after, I closed my eyes and questioned my reasoning for having the abortion.
A few months later, though, I knew I had made the right choice. I know it today. If I hadn’t had the abortion and kept the child, I would have turned my attention away from college, away from my future plans and away from being me at 20. I wasn’t ready for a child. If I had placed the baby into adoption, I would have feared the harsh judgment of people who knew me and about my pregnancy. That judgment required I marry and have the baby to survive in Mississippi. I wasn’t ready for marriage, either.
This all may sound selfish and arrogant to some people, but this was my decision, my choice, when I was six weeks pregnant.
Telling this story is my small attempt to contribute to protecting our daughters from any violation of their rights.
If the Supreme Court follows through on the draft majority decision leaked last month and finds Roe v. Wade unconstitutional, allowing states to make their own decisions about abortion, even if it means banning any termination of a pregnancy from the moment of conception, women and girls in Mississippi will have to fly or drive long distances, over or past the borders of Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee.
Mississippi brought the case to the Supreme Court to prevent abortions, even though the Magnolia State is the poorest state in the country. If women there get abortions, they will be breaking the laws of their state. Some states are also planning on bringing charges against people who help women and girls get abortions, as Momma did.
Violations of constitutional rights in certain states will have the Supreme Court stamp of approval on them.
I ended up being a good mom to my daughter and my two stepdaughters who I helped raise. I’m thankful for the vast majority of the constitutional rights we have right now, and I want to keep Roe as is, pass the Equal Rights Amendment and keep the word “woman” defined as human, not property, in the U.S. Constitution.