My doctor would not help me, so I feigned migraine to get a prescription for ergotrane… I went on a two-day castor-oil diet and lost five pounds and a quart of hemorrhoidal blood, and nothing else… I detested the taste of alcohol, but I held by nose and downed two pints of Everclear…
My husband was ready to stick me in a straightjacket. He wanted me to go through with the pregnancy – or rather, he wanted me not to kill myself, or to be killed by the only sort of abortionist that was available at the time…
But…I knew that had I given birth to a child conceived under those circumstances, I would not be able to look at it without remembering. And remembering would mean hating all over again. And I wasn’t willing to put myself or a child through that…
My husband reluctantly agreed to take me to the local back-alley abortionist – an alcoholic who had buried more than one of his mistakes… This was in 1954, when a dollar was worth perhaps three times what it is today. I had to hand this drunken butcher one thousand of them before I even got through the door. After I had swallowed my two-aspirin ‘anesthetic,’ I was told to climb up on what resembled a dirty kitchen table and hoist up my skirt… Then the pain. Eyeball popping pain. Lots and lots of it. Far more, I’m sure than was necessary…
Another trip to the hospital, another ten-day stay, a little bout with peritonitis, a half-dozen transfusions…and the old girl was as good as new…"
The following essay by actress Beth Armstrong was also written in 1991:
"In July of 1986 my daughter, Lucy, was born with an underdeveloped brain. She was a beautiful little girl – at least to me and my husband – but her disabilities were severe.
By the time she was two weeks old we knew that she would never walk, talk, feed herself, or even understand the concept of mother and father. It’s impossible to describe the effect that her five-and-a-half-month life had on us; suffice it to say that she was the purest experience of love and pain that we will ever have, that she changed us forever, and that we will never cease to mourn her death, even though we know that for her it was a triumphant passing…
…no one can tell us why Lucy was born the way she was. There was nothing genetically or chromosomally wrong with her. Her condition, we have been told over and over again, was a fluke. Consequently, no one can promise us that it won’t happen again…
Stories like mine are not about rights; they are about need – need, because I had to stand by helplessly while my six-pound daughter arched rigid in seizure that no medication could control; need, because she died fighting for breath in my arms. Precisely because I loved her so, shouldn’t I have the right to think twice before bringing another such child into the world? The irony is that if so terrible a decision comes for me, I honestly can’t say what choice I will make. But I do know that no one else should have the right to make it for me."
Late abortions (after 22 weeks’ gestation) constitute less than 1 percent of all abortions
the average parent spends over $33,000 a year on a child
The fetus is definitely a part of the mother's body. Without the mother's body the fetus cannot survive. Therefore (and I'm probably going to be chewed out for saying this but oh well) it has no rights or voice. It is no different than a mole or a cancer or any other growth on the woman's body. A person can go to the doctor and have a mole cut off and not get chewed out. Why then, if she goes to get a different type of growth cut out that may be equally unwanted, is she put down and hated? Let her do what is best for her.
