“The abortion was a life-altering experience. It was a life-altering experience.
felt very self-determining and self-affirming.”
Loretta Ross
Had an abortion in 1970
Ms. Ross, who was 14 years old, became pregnant through incest. Her parents considered sending her to Mexico to have an abortion. They lived in San Antonio and had heard of many women crossing the border to get an abortion. They were not the only ones who left. Instead, they placed their daughter with unwed mothers and encouraged her adoption.
“The home was a compound behind really tall walls with barbed-wire fencing,” Ms. Ross recalled. “I was the only black girl that I could see there.”
“We did no gossiping, no giggling, no exchanging of stories about what had happened to us,” she said of the 20 or so other girls who were in the home. “It was like we had all taken vows of silence.”
She remembers the message from staff being: “We were bad girls, because that’s what got us in the compound, but if you just do what we say, then you can come back and become good girls again.”
Ms. Ross decided that the baby would not be put up for adoption. She was vice president of her class at Howard University in Washington shortly after having her son.
At 16 years old, she became pregnant again and knew that she wanted an abortion. She needed parental permission to have an abortion in the District of Columbia. Ms. Ross’s mother wanted her to drop out of college instead.
“By the time I had gone through all the fighting with my mom, and all the delays, I was in my third trimester,” said Ms. Ross. “I had to have a saline abortion, where they inject this huge — it felt like a mile long — needle into your stomach, and induce labor.”
It turned out she was pregnant with twins. “I could have conceivably been a mother with three kids at 16,” Ms. Ross said. “And all I can do is thank God that that abortion was available to me in 1970, because otherwise my story would have had a vastly different ending.”
Source: NY Times