MY MOTHER’S ILLEGAL ABORTION

"She was like Mrs. Dalloway in that way—she would buy the abortion herself."

My mother didn’t talk about her illegal abortion until I was nearly the same age as she was when she’d had it. I had just dropped out of college and she was worried enough to tell me her story while we did dishes in her kitchen.

In 1967, my mother was 22 and worked at a college library in Michigan. She took a payday loan to travel to Juarez, Mexico. That was very much my mother and how she took care of things. She was like Mrs. Dalloway in that way—she would buy the abortion herself.  

The trip at the time was two days of traveling—a bus to Detroit, a flight, a connecting flight, and another bus. In her pocket was the address of a grocery store, which she’d received from a doctor back at home who was rumored to be “sympathetic to women.” In Mexico at the grocery store, she said the code word to them, and was then taken to a doctor’s house. The house was small and immaculate; what would have been the dining room was well lit, had been sterilized, and dressed in surgical sheets.

My mother received anesthetic and a D&C. She woke, healthy, without complications. The surgeon gave her antibiotics and told her, “Live your life now.”

I think about that surgeon a lot and the gift she gave my mother. It was not just a safe abortion, but the new beginning she had hinted at. My mother had been dating a man that year who had turned controlling and violent. He eventually stalked her and broke into her apartment with a knife, threatening to kill her. That’s all she would ever tell me about the incident, leaving me to fill in the blanks from there. (In a small town in the sixties, I’m absolutely sure she never reported any of this.)

Having returned to Michigan following the procedure, she found out the stalking had continued. Though it was too late, he’d tried to stop her from ending the pregnancy by phoning her parents and telling them what she was doing.

She had shared this story with no one before relating it to me in her kitchen that day. It was a journey she made alone, and my father, whom she met and married only a year afterward and with whom she would have four children, knew nothing about it. My mother was not a radical by any stretch of the imagination. She had seen Dylan go electric at Newport and whenever I asked her about it, she answered, “Meh. It was okay. I guess.” That was as sixties as she ever got. But she wanted me to know that having an abortion gave her a life that was her own—not tied to a man who stalked and assaulted her—where she could go on to finish school, have a career, a better life partner, and children when she chose it.

This was the first time I really understood that in spite of the ordinary life my mother seemed to lead, she was extraordinary. She had privileges that helped her in her journey, but it also demanded vigilance and self-reliance. To receive care, she traveled 1700 miles and back again.

After the abortion, she graduated with a Master’s in English, worked for a publisher, and later became an administrator for a college, helping adults who had never finished their high school degrees graduate. That she and possibly many other middle-aged women I saw—shopping at Kmart, threading sewing machines and whipping up original Halloween costumes at midnight, and scraping small holes in their gardens with trowels on weekends—possessed such histories and strengths was something I had never considered.

I ended up going back to college and I asked her if I could write about her experience one day. She said yes, and that time has come. It’s obvious we need to stand up again for what our mothers fought for. Since losing Roe v. Wade in 2022, more and more headlines are now about the deaths of those denied abortion treatment—especially Black and Hispanic women—and we can stop those headlines by voting.

My mother, Jo, died in June at 80, going out her own way…by choice, with medical assistance in dying, surrounded by friends and family after a hard fight with cancer and a long, tenacious life. Right now, I most miss the weekly phone calls where we’d kvetch about whatever nightmare Trump was creating. Her disgust with him was profound and a safe subject for us. Sadly, it was one month too soon for her to see Kamala Harris join the presidential race against the man who killed Roe.

When I vote this November 5, I will be doing so for my mother.