Our Abortion Stories: Shamed Into Silence, 'We Weren't Fit To Become Mothers'
(heartbreaking,shattering read)
Our Abortion Stories: Shamed Into Silence, ‘We Weren’t Fit To Become Mothers’
7/23/2022 by Julia MacDonnell
Now that infant relinquishment may once again become the only legal solution to an unintended pregnancy, it’s essential to hear the voices of women who have lost children to adoption, a wound that never heals. Our Abortion Stories chronicles readers’ experiences of abortion pre- and post-Roe. Abortions are sought by a wide range of people, for many different reasons. There is no single story. Telling stories of then and now shows how critical abortion has been and continues to be for women and girls. Share your abortion story by emailing myabortionstory@msmagazine.com, and sign our “We Have Had Abortions” petition.
St. Mary’s Infant Asylum. (Second Settlement)
Back in the fall of 1966, when I should have been starting my sophomore year at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, my father drove me instead to a gloomy Georgian mansion in a northern neighborhood of Boston: St. Mary’s Infant Asylum. I’d be hidden there until I gave birth to a baby who’d immediately be given up to closed adoption. All documents related to that transaction would be sealed forever by the courts. My pregnancy resulted from an impetuous relationship with a guy who was joining the Marines and hoping to see combat in Vietnam. It ended when I told him I was pregnant. He laughed and said the baby couldn’t possibly be his. We never spoke again.This shameful secret—my pregnancy, the loss of my child—festered inside me for more than 50 years. I went on with my life, completed my education, married and had other children but I never escaped the winding cloths of shame and guilt that wrapped around me during my stay at St. Mary’s, and the surrender of my son. My parents never again acknowledged what had happened.
. . . .
I had no idea that reunion in adoption is often shattering—that it shoves an unprepared first mother (me) back into the skin of the terrified girl she’d been when she got pregnant. Our reunion turned into a depth charge. The pain and anguish I wasn’t allowed to feel when I gave him away exploded inside me. Memories of my pregnancy and his birth, and of my relationships with my volatile and often violent parents, came back in vivid color—along with equally vivid memories of those turbulent times, the 60s! These memories brought me to my knees time and again.
While this agonized reckoning was going on inside me, Donald Trump was elected president, and a faith-driven authoritarian culture reemerged in government. Stripping women of their hard-won reproductive freedoms was a top agenda item for lawmakers in many states. In June, their ardent desires came to pass: A Supreme Court with three conservative religious justices appointed by Trump, overturned Roe v. Wade. It took days for the wretched news to sink in. I burst into tears at the slightest provocation. I was weeping for all the young girls who could end up bearing children for the many infertile couples who want them. Girls, like me, on the cusp of adulthood. I have no doubt that this will happen.
Those who have grown up with reproductive choice, including my own daughters, don’t understand what it’s like to live in a world without it. Reproductive choice: the one thing I was certain my generation of feminists had given to the women coming up behind us. We failed to end wars or poverty; we didn’t end racial prejudice or gun violence, but we did win the right to choose if and when to become a mother. We had won for our gender essential control over our own fertility.
. . . .
https://msmagazine.com/2022/07/23/roe-v-wade-pregnancy-silence-adoption-mothers-freedom/