Fifty-five years ago, before Roe v. Wade, I was a senior at then nearly all-male Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lucky enough to have a girlfriend at Wellesley College. One day before dinner we and four or five gals were sitting in a Wellesley dorm room discussing the issues of the day when a telephone rang. Our hostess answered with her usual pep but before 10 words were exchanged she became ambiguous and veiled and every woman in the room became silent and tense. The conversation was brief, cautious, and included a promise of confidentiality, a phone number, and a first name.
I was clueless while every young woman present knew the drill. They knew someone needed an abortion and guidance to a discrete, safe doctor. A lead to a doctor brave enough to help her was being passed.
Our hostess told no one the caller’s name and no one asked. She swore me to privacy, and in fewest possible words my girlfriend informed me what had happened. The room remained somber until we all went as usual to the dorm’s rather elegant daily sit-down dinner where nothing was said aloud about the call.
This was the rarest of situations for a woman in need of an abortion. Well-to-do young women with significant resources rose without hesitation to help another in trouble while protecting each other from disclosure and unnecessary personal knowledge. The woman in trouble did not have to resort to a back-alley butcher or forced marriage.
Woman have always needed and obtained abortions regardless of laws and religions. Few will ever have the resources available to that gal 55 years ago.
Rowe v. Wade is a wise compromise between parties that will be forever contentious. It respects a women’s ownership of her own body while saying that after viability, she must commit to a birth. The antiabortionists intend to destroy that compromise and distort the definition of viability beyond all reason. In effect they say that if a woman is pregnant they own her body and they may force their religions and personal moral views on her. They have no right to do that. A woman’s body is her own.
If the antiabortionists succeed, they will not stop there. We will be on our way back to the 1950s, with sex education banned in the schools, condoms and birth control hidden in locked drugstore cabinets available only to people over 21 or with some proof of marriage, and lives of young women dictated by others. The only birth antiabortionists will secure will be the rebirth of those back-alley butchers.
Phillip Davis is a resident of West Gardiner.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
