Sensitivity warning: language, medical/abortion, insanity. Some identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

My mother walked into the living room and found me fucking my stepbrother’s friend.

“You. GET. OUT. Right now. You are no longer welcome here. EVER.”

Wild eyed, he fumbled for his shoes and fled, shirt flapping, belt buckle jangling against his thigh. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry . . .”

I sat up naked on the couch listening to his feet slapping, the front door thumping closed. I stared at my mother and laughed. She turned away without a word. A month later, all five of us girls had prescriptions for The Pill.

It was too late for me. I began each day vomiting in the girls’ room at school. Weeks ticked by as I refused to admit the truth to myself. I refused to do or say anything. I held fast to the magical notion that I would become unpregnant.

Night after night I cried and stumbled from bed to my plastic turntable to play The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” over and over. I stared the blackness into colors. My hands began to shake. Purple shadows grew beneath my eyes. My cheeks sank.

The bleak, ashen days of fall matched my mood. Numb and unthinking, I walked blindly through school, handing in poor work and avoiding friends. No one asked why. Weeks ran into each other as my future loomed. I stashed razor blades in paper wrappers beneath my mattress and gathered handfuls of my mother’s Valium.

Night after night I unwrapped the razor blades and laid them side by side on my bed. One night, I tied socks around my arms, pumped my fists, and traced a blade gently, slowly across the distended veins. How hard will I need to push to cut them open? I guess I’ll have to cut the right one first. If I slash the left, it won’t be strong enough to do the right.

Another night I poured out the pills. The first and the second went down. The next two stuck in my throat. I gagged. I gulped water, but they didn’t go down. I shoved a finger down and threw them up. You’re worthless. You can’t even do this right. I had no options. Abortion was illegal.

Throughout much of history, abortion prior to “quickening” was a part of life for middle- and upper-class white women. Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, American doctors pushed for criminalization to oust the homeopaths and midwives who performed abortions and undermined physician’s tight control of medical care. Legislators embraced the anti-abortion movement within broad eugenics policies designed to protect a white majority in the face of rising immigration from Ireland and Italy and climbing birth rates among nonwhites.

Despite the bans, abortions continued for decades, albeit under cover, and few practitioners were punished or abused in any way. The laws generally did little more than make abortions more costly and stigmatize and endanger unwed, poor, or nonwhite mothers.

Beginning in the 1950s, during the post-War, anti-Communist era, those who performed or received abortions began to face stricter, more widespread legal penalties. Abortion prosecutions multiplied as one of several societal strategies designed to impose strict, narrow, political, social, and personal mores. The goal, of course, was to control women. As abortions became more difficult to obtain, victims of botched backroom procedures and extraordinarily dangerous attempts at self-termination filled expensive abortion wards.

Even in the 1940s, when my mother had her own accidental pregnancy, loopholes in anti-abortion laws allowed well-connected women with money or private insurance to obtain safe “therapeutic” terminations, a category the laws did not define. Less fortunate women found other ways to end more than one-fourth of their pregnancies. Some estimates suggest that more than eighty percent of unmarried women terminated a pregnancy during this era, often using risky and ineffective methods like the popular Lysol douche. Many married women also found the dangers of illegal abortions more appealing than yet another unplanned child. My mother instead chose to run away, marry a man she barely knew, keep the baby, and change her life forever.

Soon states began to relax the bans to permit abortion in cases of rape, incest, or “medical necessity,” but most doctors willing to prescribe them refused to perform the quick and safe D & C (dilation and curettage). Instead, they ordered induced delivery in a hospital because it meant they did not need to be present or to perform the abortion themselves. Access to these legal and safer abortions varied widely based on location, wealth, and the willingness of a particular doctor to apply state guidelines generously.

When I was pregnant in New Jersey in 1969, legal criteria permitted doctors to consider a range of physical, emotional, and psychological factors to decide whether a woman’s well-being made termination of a pregnancy medically necessary. Key among them was a requirement that the woman be diagnosed with a documented mental disorder likely to improve with treatment.

 At a perfunctory meeting with my mother’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hatcher, he agreed to a hefty fee to declare me “not mentally competent” to give birth. With a judgmental lecture and a quick signature, he made me legally insane. I was now officially crazy, like my mother, but I was eligible for a legal abortion. I was lucky.

What Dr. Hatcher didn’t say, what no one said to me, and I did not know, was that I needed to hurry if I wanted to have the simple procedure. Already having missed two periods, hospitals wouldn’t use the safer and quicker dilation and extraction method after another month or so. After that, I would need to be induced. Without consulting me, he and my mother arranged for my abortion eight weeks later, during my winter school break, to maximize “convenience and discretion,” as she later said.

In the last week of December, my mother checked me into Morristown Memorial Hospital, where almost precisely twenty years earlier she gave birth to her accident—my brother, Peter. A nurse came with a wheelchair, and my mother stood.

“I’ll be back when they call to tell me you’re done.”

The nurse wheeled me to my room without a word. She dropped a gown on the bed. “Put this on and get into bed. I’ll be back.” She returned with a razor to shave my abdomen and privates roughly. Then, without warning, she administered an enema.

“Hold it as long as you can,” she said and walked out.

My stomach lurched at the stench of disinfectant, rubber hosing, rubbing alcohol, and something noxious. It felt as if the walls were falling in, or I was falling, or both. I rushed to the toilet and my bowels exploded. A different nurse entered, swabbed my left forearm with alcohol, jabbed in an IV line, and hung a bottle that said glucose. She said nothing and left.

I had no idea what was going on, what was going to happen, or how long it would take. No one told me anything. Time moved slowly. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand remained in my bag across the room. I was afraid to get up to get it.

I sat staring into the blinding glare of the uncurtained windows. The room was colorless. I heard footsteps in the hall and hoped someone was coming, but they passed by. I waited as the light shifted and the sounds and odors of food trays filtered into the room. Someone placed a tray at the end of the bed next to me, where an older woman dozed behind a curtain. I did not get a tray. My bladder filled. I buzzed for the nurse. Nothing. I buzzed again.

“What?” an angry voice demanded over the intercom.

“I need to pee.”

“So, get up and do it.”

While I was up, I grabbed my book, but it was useless. I couldn’t focus on the words. I lay in bed, sweating and clammy, staring at the ceiling tiles. My hands shook uncontrollably. I wanted to rip the IV out of my arm and run. Run far away. Run forever. Run to something, anything, anyone. I began to shiver. My hands shook as I pressed the nurse’s buzzer. No response. No one came. I heard my neighbor and turned toward her. She glared and yanked the curtain closed.

 More activity from the hall sounded like a shift change. I waited. A strange nurse came in with a new IV bottle, hung it, and adjusted the drip without a word.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Saline.”  And she was gone.

My neighbor’s lunch tray was cleared. Her doctor came, glanced briefly at my chart and gave me a sour look. Her dinner tray arrived. I waited. Another nurse materialized with another IV bottle.

“What’s that? What’s that for?” I asked quickly before she could leave.

“Oxytocin. It’ll take a while.” That’s it. No explanation. No advice.

I now know that oxytocin-induced labor typically begins about six hours after the drip is introduced, is hard labor, and may last twenty-four hours or more. The patient proceeds through all the stages of labor and delivery, but the contractions are sharp, hard, frequent, and slow to cause the necessary dilation. As an abortion technique, it is highly effective, cheap, and safe when well-monitored.

I lay alone in my bed and waited. Hours went by, but I could not sleep. Long after the room was dark and the hallway lights had dimmed, I felt a cramp. It hurt, made my abdomen rock hard, and then released. I buzzed. Nothing. Another cramp. Then another and another. I buzzed and buzzed. Nothing. I called out, terrified. I buzzed. I cried out. I buzzed. Then a hard contraction, and I screamed in pain. I heard my neighbor buzz.

“Get her out of here,” she hissed over the intercom.

An unfamiliar nurse appeared at the door. She did not come in. “Keep it down,” she whispered harshly. “You’re disturbing the others. You made this bed. Now lie in it.” She closed the door and was gone.

I could barely catch my breath between the contractions. I was being ripped apart from the inside. I was going to die. Alone. I cried and screamed and begged and buzzed. And buzzed. No one came. I cried out. I buzzed and buzzed and buzzed. Finally, a new nurse flung the door wide. It banged the wall.

“Be quiet!” she nearly screamed. “No one wants to hear you. If I had my way, we’d throw you out with the rest of the trash.”

As she turned to leave, my neighbor called out, “Take her out of here. I don’t want the likes of her near me.”

The nurse’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked away down the linoleum. Moments later she returned with another nurse. They yanked my bed out from the wall, banged it against the door jam, and wheeled me down the hall without a word. Panels of humming fluorescent lights passed above me, and I thought, I should count them. They maneuvered my bed awkwardly behind the nurses’ station and wrestled it into the storage room. The bed barely fit, but they managed to jostle it around the door.

“Keep it down,” one said as she slammed the door. Dim light filtered through a small meshed and pebbled window in the door. I had no call button. I was alone among stacks of metal bed pans, swabs, cotton balls, and other supplies. Beyond the door, the volume of the nurses’ radio increased until it was very loud, much louder than before. Simon and Garfunkel. “The Sound of Silence” …

The contractions increased, harder and faster. I cried. I begged. I screamed myself hoarse. No one came. The contractions grew stronger and faster. Harder. It went on and on and on. I was sure I was dying. It was forever before the door opened and a nurse came in. She pushed hard on my abdomen once, twice, then lifted a bloody bundle in her hands.

“It was a girl,” she said over her shoulder as she walked out.

I was exhausted. One month beyond my fifteenth birthday, I was alone.

The next morning, I startled awake in an unfamiliar bed in a new hospital room. Standing at the foot of my bed in the candy-striped uniform of a hospital volunteer was Miss Brown, my chirpy high school Latin teacher, calmly reading my medical chart. One perfectly lacquered nail tapped the clipboard. Beneath her teased bouffant of bleached straw, her flawlessly mascaraed eyes looked up at me slowly. She smiled a tight, thin curl.

“May I get you something,” she asked in a syrupy voice. “A magazine? Candy? A snack?” She waved toward her cart. “Anything?” She replaced my chart carefully and looked coldly into my eyes. I pressed my shaking hands against the sheets and turned toward the windows as her cart squeaked away.

At graduation two and a half years later, I was the only one who was not surprised when Miss Brown conferred the Latin prize I had earned upon someone else. Nor was I surprised except by the timing when on some random afternoon my grandmother paused her needlepoint and said, “You know, it was I who loaned your mother the money needed for your ‘procedure.’” She stopped to evaluate the progress of her work then looked straight back at me. “I simply thought you should be aware of the debt. The sum is recorded with the other amounts your grandfather and I spent on your mother and her care. It too will be deducted from her inheritance when the time comes.

“That is as it should be. Wouldn’t you agree?”