My first college girlfriend, with whom I fell into conversation one afternoon at the Indiana University campus bookstore, was kind, pretty, energetic and smart.
AND she had a car – her dad’s white Thunderbird convertible. Soon that T-Bird could be found, night after night, in a field not far from campus. Contraception? You could get birth control pills at the campus clinic, but Terri wasn’t about to be interviewed by a nurse about her sexual activity.
For my part, there was a service station on campus that had a condom machine, but I confess I was only an occasional customer. We relied mainly on the rhythm method, history’s surest guarantee of pregnancy. Our luck held for the better part of a year, until the evening when Terri announced her period was late. Real late.
We had a hard talk that night. Neither of us wanted to get married. We weren’t ready to become parents. Terri couldn’t imagine telling her parents. Our options were few, all bad. Abortion was illegal in Indiana and commonly considered a form of murder. Abortionists were punished severely. But an abortion seemed our only way out. Finally she said, “I’ll go through with it if you can find someone to do it.” With the clock ticking down and no idea what I was getting us into, I went looking for an abortionist.
Within a few days, I found an Indianapolis telephone number to call. It was like an espionage movie: drop a quarter into a slot, listen to a few rings and then hear a voice tell me to dial a second number in 10 minutes. Then a dial tone. I would scribble the number and glance at my watch. Could I hold the booth while I went sprinting to a pizza joint for more quarters? With luck I’d reach the voice again and he would instruct me to call a different number in 10 minutes and hang up.
On and on. Sometimes the voice would make me wait another three days to call back. I had a yelling match with him. “We don’t have forever!” I told him. He wanted money, and plenty of it – all up front. Terri and I scrambled to find it. Finally an appointment was reached and we drove off to Indianapolis.
We pulled into an alley and, as instructed, knocked at the door. An elderly man appeared. He glanced both ways and took Terri inside. He accepted our cash payment and told me to wait in the car. A couple hours later the door opened and Terri came staggering out. The doctor put some towels on the front seat and helped me lower her into it.
Terri bled all the way back to Bloomington. The only thing she would – or maybe could – tell me about the experience was that he had fondled her. I took her home and she didn’t want me to come in. She didn’t return my calls over the next days. Then she called me one afternoon, in tears. She was in pain, but didn’t feel that she could go to the campus clinic. She didn’t want me to come over. She just wanted me to know.
Over the next months we broke up, then got back together, then broke up permanently. Years later I contacted her and she showed me photos of her son – at least the abortion had not cost her the ability to conceive a child.
In 2017, I Googled the doctor’s name. Expecting to find nothing, I was surprised by two local news articles about him. The first reported that he had been charged with performing an abortion that resulted in the death of a young woman – from peritonitis, an acute internal infection. The second article reported his arrest for being part of an “abortion ring.”
I share this story only to describe from experience the alternative to a safe, legal abortion for those who seek to terminate a pregnancy. It’s a life-threatening nightmare.
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