by Ann Fessler
—Maggie
The most readily available contraceptive for nonmarried couples was condoms but they were often kept behind the counter at the pharmacy, and in some towns just asking to purchase one might result in a phone call from the pharmacist to the boy’s parents. Sometimes prophylactics were found in gas-station vending machines, but for a number of reasons—including difficulty getting them or young men feeling confident that they knew how to prevent pregnancy without a condom—they were not often used by young people.
I got pregnant at the end of July 1969. I remember, I went to the drive-in movie to see Easy Rider because the birth father loved motorcycles. He was just home from Vietnam and the first thing he did was buy a motorcycle. So we had to go see that movie.
I mean, this was before the days of birth control. You had to be eighteen to buy a rubber. They didn’t have them in Stop & Shop, like they have today. They were down at the corner drugstore. The boys would maybe buy them, sneak them, or something. But as a female? To go and buy rubbers? Oh, my God, that did not happen. (I probably should have said “prophylactics” but you’ll white that out.) There’s no way. They wouldn’t have given them to you. And you think, “Aw, it’s not gonna happen to me. I’ll never get pregnant.”
We had dated for about two and a half months before I got pregnant. But that was the first time I ever had sex. In the backseat of that car, watching Easy Rider.
—Cathy II
The state of Connecticut, home state of Anthony Comstock, still had a law in 1961 that prohibited counseling and medical treatment to married persons for the purposes of preventing conception. The constitutionality of that prohibition was struck down in 1965, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Griswold v. Connecticut.17 Estelle T. Griswold, the executive director of Planned Parenthood League in Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, a Yale professor and physician who served as medical director of the league, were arrested in 1961 for giving information and instruction to a married woman to help her prevent contraception. The Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut guaranteed all married couples in the country the right to receive information and services to prevent pregnancy based on the right of privacy in marital relations.
By 1970 most women, whether married or single, were able to get prescriptions for the pill or other contraceptive devices and control their own pregnancy prevention. But in the state of Massachusetts a law still prohibited the dispensation of any kind of birth control to an unmarried man or woman. In 1967 William Baird, longtime reproductive-rights crusader, challenged the state’s anticontraceptives law—which also stipulated that only doctors or pharmacists could provide contraceptives—by giving vaginal foam to a woman after a 1967 lecture on birth control at Boston University. Baird was not an authorized distributor of contraceptives and he was promptly arrested, convicted of a felony, and spent thirty-six days in jail for “crimes against chastity.” Only when his case, Eisenstadt v. Baird, reached the Supreme Court and was decided in his favor in 1972 was access to birth control guaranteed to all single men and women in the United States.18
With little information or access to effective birth control, until the early 1970s most young people either took their chances or took ineffective precautions such as the rhythm method and withdrawal—more commonly called “pulling-out”—which required no access or planning. Boys were convinced that withdrawal was a surefire method and most girls took their word for it. Interestingly, a survey conducted by the Kinsey Institute in 1989 indicated that one quarter of those surveyed still believed that withdrawal was an effective method of contraception.19 In fact, withdrawal, the rhythm method, and vaginal foam are the least effective methods.20
He knew all about the rhythm method, so he asked me when I had my last period. That’s why it was okay to have sex without any condom. What else was there in 1963? There wasn’t anything. I guess there was a diaphragm, but who knew?
I became paralyzed by the fact that I was pregnant—I was so unprepared for it. When I was in high school, I remember there were a couple of girls who got pregnant and there was just all that negative gossip. That was not me. I wasn’t part of all that.
—Judith III
My mom hadn’t been real big on telling me about sex. I think, like most girls my age, we kind of tried to figure it out on our own. I knew having sex could get me pregnant but I didn’t think I would get pregnant. I don’t know why, but that’s what I thought.
—Barbara
I had no idea what I was going to do. I mean, abortions were not legal. The world wasn’t going to accept a white, Anglo–Saxon, Protestant single mother in 1966. I knew I wasn’t going to tell the father. There was another girl who was pinned to a guy in the same fraternity and when she got pregnant he trotted out three or four of his fraternity brothers to say they’d all had sex with her.
—Nancy III
I was twenty-three years old at the time. I was not educated at all about sex. In Catholic school they just constantly, constantly, put in your mind that you never had sex before marriage—you didn’t need to know anything about it. The only time I heard anything about the reproductive system was when I was a senior in high school and one of the nuns got up and tried to tell us about two frogs having sex. When I stop and think back, I never even knew that parents slept in the same bed until I went to a girlfriend’s house and her mother and father did. I thought that was a mortal sin.
—Bette
Most of the women I interviewed had been wholly uninformed about sex and pregnancy prevention. Few reported that they or their partner had used protection. Many did not think they could become pregnant after only a few sexual encounters. Some had boyfriends who used condoms on occasion, and others tried the rhythm method with only a vague notion of the days during which conception was likely to occur. They had been left to figure it out for themselves and they were ultimately unsuccessful. Given sexual activity and inadequate precautions, there was a high likelihood that pregnancy would occur. A sexually active teenager who does not use contraceptives has a 90 percent chance of becoming pregnant within a year.21
Hearing these women tell their stories today, one can’t help but acknowledge the unfairness of calling them “bad girls” and of the social scorn that was inflicted almost exclusively on them, and not on the young men with whom they had conceived.
I was a senior in college and I was getting ready to begin my student teaching, which was very exciting. I had been dating somebody for a few years and he was the person I was going to marry. We had gone through the traditional steps of that time. First it was the friendship ring—everybody got that pearl ring—and then the Christmas right before I was given a hope chest. It was a beautiful hope chest and everybody was giving me gifts and planning for this marriage.
Once I finished school, the next step would be the engagement. Of course, I was thinking maybe that summer after graduation. He was a couple of years older than I and he was teaching at the time. So, you know, we had a relationship and we had plans for the future. But the plan didn’t include my becoming pregnant at that point in time. But it was still going to be okay. We went out and we ordered wedding rings and we were having them engraved. I don’t believe those rings were ever picked up.
I knew that my parents would be upset but I didn’t know how bad it would be. My mother was screaming and yelling and my father threw him out of the house and then hit me so hard that I went across the kitchen. It was horrible. I just never expected that. Then we went to tell his family and they were horrible, too. He left me sitting there in his house with his mother screaming at me and the last thing I remember her saying to me was “What have you done to my son? What about my son’s life?”
My parents said that if I agreed never to see him again and do exactly as they told me to do, everything would be taken care of. I remember calling him and telling him that, and he said that might be the best thing because we had too much going against us.
—Kathi
NANCY I
Things began to get fairly physical between us. I had never entertained the idea of sex before, because it just wasn’t done in our family. In those days, there was just a certain decorum in puritanical families. We were never even allowed to say the word pregnant; we had to say expecting. Everything I learned about sex was off the walls in the A-wing bathroom. We would talk about it at lunchtime: “Can you believe this is what they do?” “No. You’re kidding.” I mean, we were seniors in high school—how pathetic is that?
I could tell that he knew a little bit more than I did and, as ridiculous as it sounds, I was learning from him. He had come out to visit me one evening and we went for a walk, and he decided that that was going to be the evening he would “have his way with me,” and he did. I was scared. I just didn’t know…I mean, the whole biology of it. He kept saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s really hard to get pregnant. Don’t worry.” What did I know? I didn’t see a lot of pregnant people, so I figured, I guess it is really hard. Maybe you have to do this a lot to get pregnant.
Later, I began to notice that there was something awry. I started getting sick in the morning. I knew something wasn’t right. I got clothing for Christmas and I knew that however badly those clothes fit me then, it was only going to get worse. I remember taking a particular green-and-white dress that my father had bought me up to my room. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, “This is a joke. This is going right back to the store.” I took it back and later my father said, “I’m not gonna buy you kids’ clothing anymore. Soon as I do, you hightail it right back to the store and take it back.”
I had stayed after school for a student-council meeting and I was sitting on top of a desk in a classroom, participating in this meeting, and I saw my mother’s face through the door. She was a teacher at the elementary school in town, but I don’t think she had ever set foot in the high school. I knew when I saw her face that she knew. She motioned for me and I got my books. We walked down the hall and she said, “I need you to come with me.” In the car she turned to me and said, “Are you really four months pregnant?” I was, like, “Me? Pregnant? Of course not. What are you talking about?” My sister had heard a rumor and told her. She reached over and sort of pulled my shirt up ever so slightly and touched my stomach and said, “Are you?” I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She starts driving and we wind up in the parking lot of our church. My father’s car is parked there at three-thirty in the afternoon, next to the minister’s car. This is a party I don’t want to be going to. The Reverend and my father were sitting in his living room. I had never been in the Reverend’s home before. My mother sat down and my father said, “Okay, what’s going on?” I said, “Beats me. I have no idea what you people are up to.” He dismissed that. He talked right over that and said, “We’ve got a problem here. We’re going to get this taken care of. We have to figure out what to do with the baby.” That was the first time I had ever heard that phrase, “the baby,” and it was almost like a safety net for me. It wasn’t my baby, it was the baby. I could separate myself from this problem and I knew I wasn’t going to have to make any decisions about it, because it wasn’t mine.
I continued to deny it up and down: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no baby.” My mother finally said, “Okay, if it’s not true, would you at least do us a favor and go to the doctor’s tonight, just to get it confirmed?” I said, “Sure, there’s nothing to confirm.” My father, my mother, and I drive to the doctor’s. He meets us there at eight at night. It’s this big, huge Victorian home that I’m terrified to be in. I had never met this guy in my life, never had any kind of exam at all, except for a dentist appointment.
He takes me to the examining room, has me take off all of my clothes and put on a johnny. He does an internal exam and then he says, “Okay, you can put your clothes on.” I considered leaving through the back door, in the middle of the winter, to go to another planet. All I knew is I did not want to go back out into that room where my parents are waiting. We went home and there were some tears and I remember my mother saying those classic words “Why?” and “How could you?” until finally, out of emotional exhaustion, we all went to bed.
Arrangements were made for me to be sent to this home. It was presented as an option at the time: “It would be more comfortable for you. If you’d like to do that, we’ll help you.” The night before I was scheduled to leave, my mother was starting to feel the effects of the impending separation and I had the very first, possibly the only, honest conversation I’d ever had with her. I felt safe enough, as we do when we’re feeling close, to ask her this question: “How do they get rid of the mark when they take the baby out?” I’d seen people in bathing suits and I could never tell if they’d had children. She stood there, three feet from me, with a look of horror on her face and said, “My God, Nancy, that baby comes out the same way it went in.” I said, “You have got to be kidding me.” She said, “No.”
I mean, it’s borderline child abuse not to share this kind of information. How can anyone think that we will just absorb it naturally, or that it’s our responsibility as children to figure it out? It just mystifies me. I had no idea. I mean, we had never had pets. I didn’t live on a farm. We had a very puritanical, Beaver Cleaver lifestyle, and it just wasn’t anything that was ever discussed. I mean, as amazing as it sounds, I was sixteen and pregnant and I did not know how babies were born. It’s pathetic, but it’s true.
At the maternity home there was a roster on a bulletin board, near the stairway, that indicated people’s chores. The chores rotated. They were minor, like cleaning the bathrooms, running a vacuum cleaner, helping out in the kitchen, setting the table, that kind of stuff. As new girls came in, their names went to the bottom. So, over the time you were there, you would watch your name continue to move up that list—that was one indicator of how close you were. When a girl left we would never see her again. A few girls, revolutionary girls, talked about keeping their babies but we knew they were crazy. We knew: no one was allowed to keep their baby.
When I went into labor, someone from the home drove me to the hospital. She left the car running, went into the emergency room, and said, “I’ve got a girl from the home here” and she turned around and left. They put me in a room and I lay on a bed holding on to the bars above my head, enduring contractions in silence. I was afraid to make any noise. I lay there almost all night. It got worse and worse and I held on for dear life. Finally, someone came by and said, “What are you doing in here?”
They took me into the delivery room. It was a huge room with a lot of people milling around. Here I am, up in stirrups, and all these young doctors are kind of walking by chitchatting, like they’re at a baseball game. I remember being so humiliated. Finally, a doctor comes in. He starts saying, “Push,” and I’m thinking, “Push what?” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t know how to help. I couldn’t help; I had no control over my body at that point. He started yelling, “Who gave this girl so many drugs?” Then two other people started pushing on my stomach, and I could see, in that round light above my head, the reflection of what was happening. My child was being born. And this guy saw that I could see and moved the light. He tipped it away once he realized I could actually see this event that was mine. He took that away from me.
Every day I asked if I could see my baby, and every day they said, “Yes, we’ll come and get you and take you to the nursery.” But they never did. Then the day I was being released, someone took me upstairs and wheeled me in front of the nursery window. She pointed to the one that was mine and said, “That’s him.” I asked if I could hold him, and she said no. I just looked through a piece of Plexiglas and she stepped back from the wheelchair and said, “Are you done?”
Afterward, I sort of fell into my old ways and started seeing my friends again, but I wasn’t the same anymore. I mean, you just can’t be the same after the experience of becoming a mother. I knew that my son
was gonna be part of my life again one day. I never let go of that from the very beginning. I remember writing to the agency because I had some things I was making for him that I wanted to send. I got a note back saying, “Don’t send anything else.” I remember thinking, “Over my dead body are they gonna tell me this is done.” When he was about two, I met my husband. I remember it was one of the first things I told him: “I have a two-year-old son that’s gonna be a part of my life someday.” I figured, you know, I’m a package deal now and there was no way to undo that.
In the late eighties, I was reading the paper one day and there was a little block ad, which I still have, that said, “Adoption Issues group meeting at the Library.” I closed the paper and then I opened it again, and I thought, “Adoption issues? I think I have an adoption issue.” So I cut it out and put it on the bulletin board in the kitchen. I found myself ruminating over it constantly. I remember sitting at the table one night and my husband was looking at me and he said, “What are you thinking about?” And I said, “Nothing.” He said, “You’re going to that meeting, aren’t you?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m going to that meeting.”
I had to say it many times over the next few weeks in order to actually get my strength up to go. When I walked in someone approached me and said, “Hi, I’m Barbara. I’m a birth mother.” I thought, “She just said that in front of everybody in this room with a smile on her face.” And as those meetings progressed, over October and November and December, all the tears that had never come finally came. I decided that if I could go to the meetings for a year without crying, then I would be ready to pursue an active search.
