By Barbara Falconer Newhall
It was the late 1960s, I was a single woman living on my own in New York City, I thought I might be pregnant, and I thought I was alone.
I wasn’t.
All over the country, women and men that I had known in the past or would meet in the future were also living in fear of unexpected pregnancies.
They were pregnant. Or their girlfriend was pregnant. Or they were haunted by the possibility of a pregnancy outside of marriage at a time and place when abortion was not legal and single motherhood was a scandal.
I posted a story last week describing the isolation and fear I felt as an unmarried woman living in New York City faced with the possibility of an unplanned pregnancy.
In the days following the publication of that story, “Unmarried and Pregnant in Mid-Century America,” I heard from dozens of friends and colleagues. They were high school classmates, college dormmates and colleagues from my newspapering days.
More Than One Unplanned Pregnancy
Many sent emails of support and concern. Others had stories of their own to tell.
Many told of illegal abortions in places like Puerto Rico and Mexico. Others told of traveling to another state — as I had feared I’d have to do — to wait out the pregnancy and give up the child for adoption.
I wrote the story partly in response to the death of that great advocate for women’s rights, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and to the subsequent nomination to the Supreme Court of a judge who seems to have a different view of women’s reproductive rights, Amy Coney Barrett.
But mostly I wrote it because I wanted to do something toward dispelling the secrecy and shame that women have suffered because of an unplanned pregnancy — in the U.S. during the ’60s and around the world for millennia.
More about my high school in the suburbs of Detroit at “High School Revisited: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same — Only Different.” Some thoughts on modern-day marriage at “Would My Husband Like to Add My Name to His?”
It was a tough time for young women. This aloneness because of the illegality of abortion. Even getting birth control pills was not easy. Glad that we live in California. Sorry for those in other states where the ability to get assistance is being proscribed. Thanks for your writings Barbara.
Thanks, Meredith.
You always use personal experience to touch a common chord in your readers who did not realize that others shared their experience. For us. we often think, with gratitude, of the bravery of the birthmothers of our children to go through the pregnancy that brought us our children.
Sharie. Yes! You and I have talked about this — how grateful we feel toward the women who gave birth to the children we adopted so long ago. So many women have chosen to see their pregnancies through because they feel that is the right thing to do. And that has made it possible for so many women — like you and me — to have a family. I think of our son’s birth mother often and of what a generous, loving thing she did — for our son, but also for Jon and me.