Rosy's Android Women, circa 1973, pen and ink, 

 In 1972 my marriage was in serious trouble and I was thinking about going back to work when I discovered that I was pregnant.  This was my second experience with birth control failure.  Since I had lost confidence in diaphragms after the first time, I had had an IUD (intrauterine device) inserted after The Little Boy’s birth.  Now six years later that too proved ineffective. This time however, with a failing marriage and two children, I panicked.  After much agonizing, I decided I could not have another child under these circumstances.  Abortion was illegal almost everywhere, including Massachusetts. When I discussed this with my doctor, she suggested I see about getting the prodcedure done in New York City where the law had only recently been changed and where several abortion clinics were now open.  She gave me the name of a minister who filled some campus function at the university and for some reason I had to explain myself to him. In order to make an appointment in a New York City clinic, it had to be with his recommendation and approval.  With bitterness in my heart I went through all the right moves in justifying myself to this single, childless man and got the required OK.

 The following week we all trooped down to New York where we planned to stay several days with Libby and Jack in Brooklyn and for me to recover before heading back north.  The procedure was the newest suction aspiration method and, I was told, quite quick and safe.  When I got there they gave me two Librium, which while being the tranquilizer de jour was not known for its analgesic qualities.  The procedure was extremely painful but also mercifully quick.  When it was over, I was given a cup of juice and told to lie down for a while.  After about fifteen minutes of that I got restless and left with B who had been waiting.  I felt well and had no physical after- effects at all, but was heartbroken. I have never been sorry that that was the course I took, although I have always been sorry that it had to be taken.  It was of some consolation that I had done what I could not to have gotten pregnant in the first place but not nearly enough to have ever felt comfortable about it.  All these years later I sometimes find myself flashing on who this person, who would have been such an important part of my life, would have been.  The regret that comes with those thoughts remains through the years.  I’m glad I did it but I am still so unspeakably sorry that I had to.

 My Women's Group. Eva (bottom left), Rosy (top right), 1973

 Beyond sorry however, I was soundly pissed at the idea that, as difficult as this had been, I had been expected to explain myself to a man. I was also extremely concerned about what to do next in terms of contraception since my now newly inserted IUD stayed in place for approximately one week before falling out.  We then tried a different more recently developed kind, the Dalcon Shield.  This was so painful that I had it removed after about a week.  In later years it was taken off the market due to numerous disastrous side effects.   As I fumed about it to my friends I came to hear about a women’s group that had recently formed in town who were doing some good work for the local women’s movement. I decided to look into it and see what I could do to restore my sense of dignity.  It was also then that I decided that I would have a tubal ligation to preclude the need for any more dangerous and ineffective birth control or unwanted pregnancies.  I was in my early thirties and as a mother of two I knew that I was not going to want to bear more children.  Laparoscopic tubal ligation was still a relatively new development but there was a surgeon at our local hospital that did perform this procedure.  It involved a very small expense and a one-night stay in the hospital to which I drove myself to, and from which I took myself home with nothing more to show for it than a band-aid over my navel.  I didn’t even need B’s consent, although the doctor asked me to get his signature on the release only because it would reduce his paperwork.  Still he assured me that without it we could still go ahead.  This might have been one of the best decisions I ever made and it certainly was among the most liberating.

 Sadly, all these years later, in terms of safe, cheap and effective birth control, we have not advanced far.  It concerns me that apparently many young women are unaware of how difficult life was for their older sisters and mothers, and how we struggled to get to where we are today.  I fear for our hard won victories and despair for the future of women when we stop paying attention and continue on what looks like a regressive path to me. 

 Whenever I hear talk from the religious right about these issues with their implications about the callousness of women who terminate pregnancies, I am reminded of not only my own sadness but also the sorrow of so many others I have known over the years.  At one time I managed the practice of an OB/GYN in New York City and during more than six years of working there, I bore witness to the usual number of unplanned pregnancies consistent with the statistics for failure of conventional contraceptive methods.  There was not one instance where the decision to carry to term or abort was taken lightly and in either case neither was without consequences.  I am not without sympathy for the stance of those who consider abortion unacceptable for personal reasons, and I am certainly in support of women who need to make decisions for themselves and their families in these awful situations.  I do have to take exception to the notion that women like me, who choose to terminate are cold-hearted murderers who do not respect life.

 Rosy's "Bras and Stars", circa 1973, pen and ink.

 Our women’s support group was drawn from a larger organization in the local area, both “town and gown”. Considering how new our group was we did very important work quite effectively.  One of the first tasks I took on was to interview local ob/gyns to determine what their respective stands on abortion, birth control and treating and advising minors without their parents’ consent might be.  From this information we were able to draw up recommendations for our membership to use.  We also trained ourselves with the help of early video recording, to advise and inform from within our own ranks and to become our own counselors. We did not ask for donations nor were there any membership dues, however we were not without resources.  When one of us urgently needed to get to New York to have an abortion, her time frame for suction aspiration rapidly coming to a close, we were able to, over the course of a holiday weekend, come up with the necessary funds.  From telephoning the message to our membership list, we contributed not only enough to provide her with the funds she needed but to also establish a slush fund with the leftover donations for future emergencies.

 From the larger membership we met in small “support” groups weekly to discuss more personal and intimate issues and to figure out what the work of the women’s movement at large meant to us.  I had read Betty Freidan’s 1963 “Feminine Mystique” some years before and had the startling feeling then that this woman had been looking at my life through my kitchen window.  Now, a decade after Freidan, there suddenly was a lot of writing about women and their changing place in the world, but I think (that) the first edition of “ Women Unite: Our Bodies, Ourselves” published in 1973 was one of the most empowering.  We still had a long way to go but I am very proud of these first steps we were able to take in aid of ourselves. 

 While much of what we were thinking about as women was in keeping with the more open attitudes of the day, I did find that many of our hippie husbands and boyfriends were having a hard time with the realities of our changes.  Many of our male friends, B included, were pretty good at the talk but the realties of “liberated” women were inconvenient at best and often threatening.  At that time I knew very few men, hippies included, who were capable of much in the way of “women’s work”. I am reminded of a dinner party we had in my home when after the table had been cleared by the women (among us), and we were busy making coffee, I overheard the men still seated at the table, smugly holding forth about the virtues of the women’s movement while waiting to be served. I would not remain silent today as I did then, but even so it had me seething with resentment.  Generally, when we were involved in political action, our roles had more to do with making coffee than with planning.  In the communal life that was springing up all around us in those summers of love, our jobs were more likely to be kitchen and bedroom based than in the loftier, more cerebral areas.  

 Certainly when it came to sexual liberation, it was a little more difficult for the men, at least the ones that I encountered, to accept that their own women sleeping around was the other side of the coin that allowed them their free pass.  For the men that I knew then, with an exception here and there, these were challenging times with many of their previously unquestioned attitudes now on the line and not favoring male privilege.  I found it infuriating that the boys still clung to their double standards while talking about liberation for all.  

 These were all factors in my own marriage and I was no longer pretending that everything was good enough.  I felt guilty because speaking out made it impossible for the children not to understand that the family wasn’t working well and I felt I had frightened and let them down.  As concerned as I was about my children, I just couldn’t look the other way anymore as our marital differences grew and became more impossible for me to ignore.  B was no longer the darling of his department and as his drug and alcohol use accelerated and became obvious, he soon fell out of favor.  This was a time of economic recession and cutbacks in academia had already affected many non-tenured faculties all over the country, including a number of my friends and my brother as well.  In any event, for economic as well as other reasons, it became clear that B was not going to be tenured or even re-hired when his contract came to close. Jobs in academia were non-existent.  It was time to do something else.