“An abortion is no one else’s damn business,” my mother would say, always saying “damn” in a muted voice because ladies, in her neo-Victorian upbringing, weren’t supposed to swear. She had an abortion in the mid-1930s when it was illegal in New York State where she lived.
My mother always said that she and my father didn’t have a marriage contract, but it was agreed from the start that they would have children. If they couldn’t have children, they would adopt. As it turned out, six of their seven grandchildren were adopted, but my parents didn’t need to adopt in order to have a family that included three children.
Did my mother’s abortion prevent my parents from having a fourth child? No. The pregnancy that ended in abortion was my mother’s first. According to her story, she got pregnant (there was never doubt that her partner was my father) before she and my father were ready to start a family.
I never asked if my parents were already married, and my mother never suggested that they weren’t, but who knows? They married during the Great Depression in 1935 when my father was 25 and my mother 22. I know they had financial difficulties of the sort that were common in that era. They lived with my father’s family for awhile and then with my mother’s widowed mother. Such living arrangements are not a sign of prosperity. It’s not hard to imagine that they would have considered themselves too poor to start a family early in their marriage.
In order to avoid having a child before they were ready for one, they agreed that my mother should have an abortion. Fortunately for them, my mother’s aunt was married to a doctor who practiced in Ontario, Canada. So, my mother took a train (alone as far as I know) to Toronto to have an abortion and then returned to my father somewhere in Greater New York City.
So how does my existence depend on this abortion? I was born in 1945. The answer lies in my mother’s family history. She was the middle child of her parents. Born in 1913, she had an older brother born in 1910 and a younger sister born in 1920. My mother was very close to her mother, making it probable that she would want to have three children because her mother did.
But the story is more complex. By the time my mother’s older brother was a teenager, he was living with my grandmother’s rich aunt and her husband on the upper west side in Manhattan. These rich relatives didn’t have children of their own, and wanted to treat their grand nephew to New York City’s cultural life.
According to my mother’s story, which I always found fanciful, my would-be uncle, then fifteen years old, went to the theater and saw a play in which a character hangs himself. After he came home, he tried to re-enact that part of the play, without any intention of actually killing himself. That last bit is the part that I find fanciful. I’ve seen pictures of him taken shortly before his death and let’s say that he was no chick magnet. I’m guessing he was a very lonely child. In any case, he died from hanging himself in his aunt and uncle’s posh apartment.
This traumatized my mother, of course, who consoled herself in part by recognizing that at least she still had her sister as a sibling. The death of her brother seemed to have convinced her that she would never want to have an only child, as that child might die. But neither would she want to have only two children, if she could afford to have a third, because if one of the two were to die the remaining child would be an only child.
After my mother had her abortion in Canada, my parents’ fortunes improved enough to start a family. My brother was born in 1938 and my sister in 1942. They planned to have a third child as a spare. (It’s not just for royal families anymore.) I am that spare. Fortunately, I was never needed in that capacity as my sister died in her 70s more than twenty years after my parents.
If my mother hadn’t had her abortion, other things being equal, my sister would have been the spare, and I wouldn’t exist. I argued in a previous blog post that it’s arrogant for people to think that they know when the unborn has a right to life. We see here that it’s arrogant to see a loss without considering a possible, hidden gain, or see a gain without considering a possible loss. The arrogance is particularly egregious when we judge the choices that other people make, including the choices of pregnant women.
Comments