Abortion in Oregon, part 3 . . . several women’s real-life accounts

Here is another piece of the special feature series I initiated and mostly wrote when I was a reporter for the Roseburg, Oregon daily, The News-Review. This portion (part 4 as presented on this blog) consists of the personal accounts of residents of Douglas County who had obtained legal abortions, and how they felt about the matter in retrospect.

The series was intended to illuminate the issue for voters because there were two anti-abortion measures on the Oregon ballot in November of 1990. And here we are again, with another one on the ballot for this November. You can read about the background here, but there’s more behind-the-scenes to this project, which I will share later.

For now, treat these as a light shined into many women’s experience, especially since by the time I did this story, legal abortions simply weren’t available anywhere in Douglas County, and that is apparently the case today in nearly 90 percent of counties across the U.S.

This was published on February 3, 1991. (And yes, that was months after the election, though I had proposed and written all the pieces well before voters went to the polls; that’s another part of the tale.)

WOMEN TALK ABOUT THEIR DECISION TO HAVE ABORTION

(Editor’s Note: Each of these women has requested that an assumed name be used to protect her privacy. All are from Douglas County.)

“Beth” was 34, married to an alcoholic, and working full-time to support a houseful of kids ranging in age from 11 months to 10 years when she found herself pregnant again.

“We were in debt, and barely making it,” she said. “He was away for extended periods of time, supposedly working. I would say I was bringing in 80 percent of the household income.”

The side effects from birth control pills had made her switch to condoms. A doctor had discovered a cyst on one of her ovaries.

Beth said her husband forced himself upon her one night when he was drunk.

“It was simply out of the question to have the child. I would have been crazy. My doctor was concerned that I would carry it to term. That there would be some complication.

“I also knew that I loved all my kids a lot. And to put living children who are already existing under some strain, and to add to their mother’s strain and responsibility . . . It was one of those times when you don’t agonize about whether you should or ought to do something. You just do the hard thing.”

Beth borrowed the money and took a bus to Lovejoy Clinic in Portland. Though it was an early weekday morning, she found a handful of picketers outside.

“The thing that disturbed me the most was that a young girl, I’d say 16, had had to go through this crowd of people: ‘Don’t you know that you’re murdering your child? How can you…?’ Just these rabid, judgmental . . . We think that Khomeini and the Iraqis have got a bizarre look, these guys were just as fanatical.

“And the woman was just undone. I spent my time comforting her, she was crying and shaking. One of them said, ‘Tell your mother.’ She said, ‘Those people are crazy. They don’t know my mother.’

“No one in their right mind would believe that -- after someone has gotten to the point of coming up to the clinic doors, clearly with an appointment, and has gone through all of that agonizing -- what they do is going to make any difference, and save that unborn child’s life. They just want to make sure they stone that mother. It’s stoning.”

Beth got a hysterectomy shortly after the abortion, divorced her alcoholic husband a year later, and is now happily remarried.

*     *    *     *     *

Now 18, “Cindy” got pregnant five days after her 16th birthday, at the end of her sophomore year at Roseburg High School.

She had met a boy at a 4-H camp in eastern Oregon, corresponded with him afterward, and accepted an invitation to his school prom. He raped her while she was sleeping in a guest room.

Cindy decided not to prosecute. “The idea of having to go through their exams and things just didn’t . . . Enough humiliation for a while.”

She said it was not a hard decision for her.

“(The pregnancy) wasn’t something I had agreed to (so) I wouldn’t have stopped doing anything that I had done. I would ride horses and run and things like that, therefore the child wouldn’t be taken care of.”

Also, her parents were supportive. Her stepfather paid for the abortion and her mother drove her to the Women’s Clinic in Eugene.

Cindy estimates there are 30 to 50 pregnancies a year at Roseburg High, although that number is impossible to confirm. Only five to 18, she says, come to term.

“We probably come close to 10 pregnancies (a year),” says Sandy Walker, a counselor at the high school.

More than abortion, “It’s the fact that they were stupid enough to get pregnant” that teenagers want to hide, Cindy argues. “People look at them and go, ‘Oh, well, that’s what she did: She got pregnant.’ A lot of them end up falling out of the popular category.

“Their parents’ social classes are going to frown upon it, they don’t want anything happening to their parents. Especially the ones that are wealthy. They’re not worried about what’s right; they’re worried about what’s going to make them the most money or keep them where they’re at.”

Cindy works part time and attends classes at Umpqua Community College.

*     *    *     *     *

“Jeannie” calls herself a fence sitter. She had an abortion in California 18 years ago, she wouldn’t rule them out for other women, but she’s not sure she made the right decision and she voted yes on the two abortion measures on November’s ballot.

“The reason I voted yes was because I felt like it’s too easy to get them,” she said. “That was my way of saying the system is too permissive.”

Jeannie was a naïve teenager who had been raised “pretty conservatively” when she found herself pregnant.

“Kids who are raised that way don’t plan on having this activity happen. Because I didn’t plan on it happening, it just happened. (And I was) way too young to have any business having sex with my boyfriend. And then to be a mother.”

In retrospect, she wishes she had told her parents, but at the time Jeannie was too terrified.

“We didn’t have back-up systems like they do now. Teen moms can go to school and bring their kids there (but) we had nothing. You dropped out of school and you went away. I was really sensitive to bringing shame on my family, and I just chose to be very clandestine about it.”

Her boyfriend sold a car to raise the money and she went 30 miles to a clinic in a big city.

She calls the experience a sordid ordeal: “It was at night and there was a long waiting period. I had to lie to my parents.

“I think it had a big effect on me. My performance at school dropped off, and I became a little more cynical and hardened. I feel like I’ve suffered mentally from it. I kind of feel like I took a life, and I sacrificed something to better myself.”

Although Jeannie has been married since and wanted a family, the circumstances have not been right for it: “I have a fulfilling life, but there’s something missing there.”

Still, she will not be the one to tell other women no.

“We can’t put ourselves in that person’s shoes. And it depends on that person’s upbringing, whether they feel this is really something wrong, or something that’s not wrong. I can only say that I wish I’d had more counseling. I wish that it was a little more difficult (to get an abortion) so that people would have more time to think about it, because it’s a big, big event in your life, and I can’t tell you for sure whether my life is better for it or not.”


Read part 1: Abortion, past and future

Read part 2: An inquiry into the illegal past, Douglas County, Oregon

Read part 2a: Illegal abortions in Douglas County, conclusion