A woman tells her story about having an illegal abortion provided by an abortion service made up of feminists called Jane. Abortion, legal or illegal, is a difficult experience for a woman to go through.
“I was so overwhelmed with emotional pain after the abortion,” Celia says, “that I broke up with my boyfriend. It was like he let me down because he didn’t stand by me. He always said, “We’re going to get married.” And then, when I got pregnant, he said, “Well we can’t get married.” I said, “Fine. We don’t have to get married. I’m going to have this baby.” And he said, “What will my family say? What will your family say?”…
The day of her abortion, as she and Eddie drove to the Front, she turned to him and said, “It’s not too late. We can still change our minds.” Eddie said nothing. They drove the Hyde Park in silence, listening to the radio. The front was crowded. Except for a few whispered conversations, everyone was quiet…
When it was Celia’s turn she went into a bedroom where Julia was waiting. When Julia put the blindfold on her she began to shake, so, instead, Julie held a pillow in front of her face. The abortion took longer and was more painful than she expected partly because she had underestimated the length of her pregnancy by almost a month. To keep from screaming she bit the pillow and squeeze Julia’s hand as hard as she could. Julia kept talking, or for encouragement: “you’re doing great. It’s almost over.”
Afterward Celia went to her parents’, feigned the flu, and curled up on the couch with cramps. She felt as if she’d “been ripped the heart, like something had been taken away from me.”
“Women should have a choice,” Celia says, “I believed it back then; I continue to believe it. However, for myself, I don’t think I could ever do it again. There’s a part of me that regrets having done it. I don’t regret the abortion, but I do regret not having had the courage to do what I really wanted to do, and that was not have it….”
Laura Kaplan The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995) 145 – 147
One has to wonder if the feminists in Jane really did help this woman. What would’ve happened if they had provided help and support for her to keep her child? Would she have suffered less emotionally? Even though the people who worked at Jane said that abortion was “a positive experience” (p 134) for women, this woman’s testimony shows that often all women need his support to carry the baby to term, and that abortion, in many cases, is a negative experience, and not a positive one
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