Planned Parenthood

My memory of the Spring day in 1970 when I first walked through the doors of San Diego’s Planned Parenthood is a little blurry. My best friends of the time both confirm and deny that we all went together.

We needed, we wanted, birth control. No one told us about it. Birth control of any kind. We were 17 years old. We were not supposed to be having sex. Why would anyone have to tell us about birth control?

We’d heard about “the pill,” though, in the papers, and we wanted it. And, of course, our boyfriends urged us toward it because they didn’t “like” condoms. Didn’t then. Don’t now.

More than two decades later, at my mother’s 25th wedding anniversary to her second husband, one of her friends, a bit worse for drink, told me her mother’s single sentence instruction on the subject of “a wife’s marital duties.”

And read a book she had. At least during that first year of marriage. By then, of course, the first baby had arrived. The Joy of Sex wouldn’t be published for another 20 to 30 years when I’d be 17 and explaining to my mother things you can’t write in the pages of a family business daily.

Back then, in the 1940s, and still in 1970 San Diego, only one gender was supposed to take joy in “the act.” And you know which gender that was. The darn women’s movement was a-brewin’ though, and we young’uns had a few dreams about a better life. One more attuned to our own nature. One less bound to our bodies’ age-old burdens.

Decades later I would learn my own grand-mother’s story of a back-alley abortion from my mother – the first and only time she didn’t vote Republican. Because, she said, shame and tears breaking after more than fifty years, her own mother had an illegal abortion. That was after her first three children died in their infancy. She couldn’t bear another tiny white casket. She would have lost her balance. My grandfather had connections. Money passed hands. The pregnancy was terminated.

The family secret remained sealed until the United States Supreme Court decided that George W. Bush would serve his first term as President, come hell or high water. Something about that made my mother burst into the teary admissions that her mother once had an abortion and that she’d voted for Al Gore. This latter must have been as shame-inducing as her mother’s back-alley horror.

Before the termination of unwanted pregnancies during the first trimester was our goddamned Constitutional right, between 5,000 and 10,000 women died every year from the complications of illegal abortions. But I didn’t go to Planned Parenthood with my Advanced Placement girlfriends to have an abortion. I went to Planned Parenthood to avoid having an abortion.

I have a couple of friends who were pregnant at 15, one of whom became the President and CEO of Planned Parenthood – Gloria Feldt, author of the must-read No Excuses, 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. I want to tell you that I am no Gloria Feldt. I just don’t have her energy. Few people do. That’s why we call them exceptional. Because they’re the exception to the rule.

There’s a 10 to 18 percent chance of getting pregnant while using a condom, the only form of birth control that would have been available to me in the absence of Planned Parenthood. So there’s a fair chance that without Planned Parenthood I would have become pregnant at 17 and given birth at 18, a single mother.

At eighteen, I was a freshman at San Diego State University working as a counter girl at an A&W Root beer stand for $1.25 per hour. After taxes, I took home $15 a week. Had I been working full-time, I would have been making about $120 per month. Knowing the subsequent history of my phantom child’s father, I know I would have been supporting him or her alone. I could type at 18. That was my sole salable skill.

Several years later, I’d be earning $600/month as a full-time typist in a typing pool in a small Manhattan law firm. By that time, my unplanned child would have been nearly five. It’s unlikely I would have entered college, let alone be headed to law school. I might even have been receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

On $600/month in 1975 Manhattan with my then boyfriend in graduate school, we lived with rats in the lobby, cockroaches doing the hat dance in the kitchen, our winter coats procured from the Good Will and our furniture purloined curb side on trash day. I might have scraped by without government assistance alone. I don’t think I would have had that boyfriend if I’d been a single mother by the time we met.

As late as 1979, when my unplanned child would have been eight years old, women’s wages were 62.3 percent of men’s earnings. I might have risen in the ranks by that time from typist to administrative assistant or even legal secretary. But my child and I would have been living hand-to-mouth.

Ambitious by nature, I might have begun taking a few college classes as my sister, with two children did, taking ten years to earn her Bachelor’s degree. I would have felt like a bad mother, though, working 40-hours a week, attending school three nights a week and studying on the weekends.

Childless (because of Planned Parenthood) I was beginning my last year of law school, headed toward a productive career as an attorney, a solid member of the American middle class, and a major contributor to charitable causes and to the tax base of my community, my state and my country.

This is the cover of Newsweek in 1970, my senior year in high school. Defund Planned Parenthood and I guarantee you that you will see Women in Revolt one more time.