Share Your Story or Your Mother's Story about the Challenges of Accessing Birth Control
It's been nearly fifty years since the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Connecticut v Griswold striking down state bans on birth control. Since then, contraception has become so central to women's lives that 98 percent of women use it at some point during our reproductive years. Yet we still see politicians re-litigating accessible, affordable contraception and other women's health needs.
Have you ever asked your mom, aunt, grandmother, or another loved one in your life what challenges she had gaining access to birth control? We want to hear the stories!
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Your Stories
Terri Eddings
Burbank, CA,
When I was 18 my Grandmother confided that she had an abortion after my Dad and Uncle were born in the 1920s (she went to Mexico for it) because she and my Grandfather couldn't afford another child. I found that information disturbing at the time, although I'm a full supporter of birth control and pro-choice since I became sexually active, and a Mother. Now, looking back on it in the wake of recent GOP pushbacks on reproductive rights, what stands out as the reason she got pregnant in the first place. She had some sort of IUD device implanted (she called it a button) and I guess when she had it inserted, she said that the Dr. was touching her in an inappropriate manor. She didn't tell my Grandfather fearing he would react badly. I guess she told someone (probably her Sister who was a very unChrist like Christian) who them told my Grandfather. While he did calm down enough to give up on his threat to kill the doctor, He did force her to have the device removed (by another doctor) and she ended up not only discraced and humiliated by an unethical doctor, she also ended up pregnant again, and had to face another ordeal to terminate the pregnancy.
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Timolin Burke
Santa Monica, California, Song Promotion
I was doing volunteer work for a local Church shelter for homeless families. One of the ladies there was from Texas, thirty-something, and with three small children. We chatted and she ruefully confided that all she knew about birth control in her small Texas town was that you only got pregnant on the twelfth time you had sex, and then you had to douche with diluted Clorox bleach.
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Jeanne Peck
Venice, FL, Retired
I had a friend who was married and bore two children in the late1940's and'50's. Her secondpregnancy was so fraught with peril that she was terrified when she became pregnant for the third time.She sought advice from her doctor who advised abortion, however this was in the state of NYwhich at that time had a law that said you had to be certified in need of psychiatric care by threepsychiatrists in order to receive a legal abortion. My friend did what was required and receivedher abortion. She was never in need of psychiatric care.
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Evelyn McMullen
, Alabama,
Addendum to my earlier post. About my stillborn baby (at 5 1/2 mos) I was afraid to tell the Dr I had fallen. I had never felt any movement in that pregnancy nor did I ever grieve for that baby. When I delivered the nurse and Dr wouldn't let me see the baby and to this date I have no idea if it was a boy or girl. I read an article in Reader's Digest about 45 years later. The article was about a 5 1/2 month preemie who was saved. I grieved for my own lost child at that point; asked my Dr why. He said that just sometimes happens.
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Erin Kathleen Sands
Crystal Beach, FL, Behavior Analyst
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My grandmother was a nurse during the first half of the 20th century. She told me quite a few stories about being a woman in America during that time. She told me about being in nursing school and having the head nurse conduct evening meetings to quietly amend textbooks chosen by the male dean and board of regents. She gave me one of the medical book with the carefully lined through passages with penciled in corrections. As an adult I checked all of the corrections made by the head nurse regarding pre-natal and post-natal care of women and children. They were accurate and in use today. Grandma told me that men could not be countermanded and that doing so was as foolish as tilting with a windmill. In her day, women of knowledge and conviction simply worked around them as best they could for the most part or made changes through them. She gave me an example of a very powerful and influential obstetrics doctor she had the misfortune to work under in 1908 as a young nurse in school. He refused to use a solution of carbolic acid to cleanse his hands between post-delivery internal examinations of his patients (he was old school). He had a very high mortality rate among his patients as a result, she observed. She and the other nurses would systematically hide as many of his patient from him as they would during his rounds. Outrage and determination filled her voice while discussing it, even after 60 years. She told me of a number of cases of women forced to seek illegal abortions out of fear and desperation, living children that couldn’t be fed with health issues that couldn’t be addressed, and husbands that had died or deserted their families. She told me of other nurses and doctors that she knew that chose to perform illegal abortions on kitchen tables. She told me details on the countless cases of women she had cared for that had died or were “made barren” while attempting to end pregnancies. They were even beaten or shamed and ostracized from communities. I asked her if she had ever performed an abortion. She told me about a neighbor in the 1930’s that had sent one of her six children to my grandmother’s house one evening to fetch her. My grandmother found the woman in her bathtub covered by a blood soaked robe. The neighbor was weak and crying that her husband John was threatening to leave her and that she had had NO CHOICE. When she pulled the robe back, grandma found a coat hanger entangled in a towel partially bunched between the woman’s thighs along with perforated intestines that were distending from the woman’s vagina. You don’t need the gory details and this is not an uncommon occurrence in the 20th century. The woman survived. My grandmother ended the story with a recounting of how she had fixed the the little red wagon of the husband, John. She never suffered fools gladly and had balls of steal as did many women of her generation. I admired and was comforted by that as a child. She was pro-choice and pro-contraception without restrictions. She said that eventually the ERA would be passes because women and men of reason and compassion would prevail – but sadly, she feared, not in her day. She crossed over in 1978.
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Sheila Malone
Waterville, Maine, Retired Nurse/Membership Director of a TimeBank
I am defiantly old enough to remember the days before birth control! My mother who was also an RN taught me about Lysol douches and I feel fortunate I never used them. However I saw many terrified and traumatized teenage girls in the ER because they would try all kinds of homemade remedies including one young woman who had a PID (pelvic Inflammatory disease) because she had used pieces of a cut up kitchen sponge stuffed into her vagina. After having sex she douched and thought the pieces were all gone and about 3 weeks later was running a very high fever with severe pelvic pains. She was 17 years old and all most died because she believed the story a friend told her. She had emergency surgery and according to the GYN would probably never have kids. I have nightmares because some of the girls and woman I saw who had no real knowledge and tried so many very dangerous things to prevent or end pregnancy. What I also found so hypocritical was the fact that the woman with money went out of the country for their birth control or bought the pills a very inflated prices because there was a black market for the pill. I shutter to think what horrors will come back for woman and whole families if the far right masculine agenda actually wins this war on woman. These men who are talking are not the ones who will suffer, it will be the poor woman who will have to find a way to either break the law and/or put their health at risk or will end up trying to raise and support far far to many children who will grow up in worse poverty then anything we have seen in years. in this country.
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Florence Tarbox
Gettysburg, PA,
I was told this story by my parents about an aunt who died in South Dakota in the 1940's before I was born. She was married and suffered from depression. Her doctor told her husband not to make her pregnant, believing that she couldn't handle a pregnancy. As far as I can tell from the stories, her husband was simply to abstain from sex. Circumstances intervened and she did become pregnant. At that point, she killed herself. I wish that I had had a chance to meet her. Safe birth control would probably have saved her life.
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Joanna di Paolo
Los Angeles, CA, Producer/Creative
My mother's aunt, who died long before I was born, had no access to birth control and would douche with undiluted Lysol cleaning fluid after sex to avoid pregnancy. Apparrently, this was not an uncommon practice back in the 40s. She died a painful death of uterine cancer at a young age. She was married, Catholic, and working class, and contraceptives were both forbidden and unaffordable, if accessible at all.My grandmother told me this horrifying tidbit of family history when I was in my 20s and I have never forgotten it. It is one of the many reasons that I am a devoted reproductive rights activist.
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Evelyn McMullen
, Alabama, retired surgical tech.
Birth control never mentioned. I was 5th daughter, youngest next to me was age 16. My Mother made a comment once that every time Daddy's hung his pants on the bedpost she got pregnant, parents in their 40s when I was born. When I was 13 she told me "girls bleed sometimes", bought me pads & a belt. That was the extent of my sex education until I bicycled to a local library and checked out a "marriage manual" a few years later. I was told later by sister that Mother had had numerous miscarriages. The night before my wedding (1954) Mother told me I should read "this article" in a magazine. Had I not read the "marriage manual" I'd not have had a clue.Went to a female GYN for my first exam prior to my marriage, she prescribed a diaphragm. I used that until we slipped up first child and second which was a stillborn due to a fall. I never told the Dr I fell; probably would these days be tried for "murder". Continued with diaphragm until cervix had descended into the vagina too far for it to work. Thereafter I just was lucky. Had two more children, the last 2 were 14 mos apart. All born between 1955 and 1959.Had severe hives around trunk from reaction to hair dye & that messed up my periods. Went to civilian Dr who gave me birth control pills which had just come out about 1960 and later had a D & C for uncontrolled bleeding, probably due to that reaction to the dye. Later went to AF Dr about prolapse. He asked me if I just didn't want it "cinched up". Fortunately he did my hysterectomy at age 33, best thing that ever happened to me. Husband and I both agreed but I don't recall if he had to sign anything.I am 78 now with sisters in their 90s. Oldest died before I was born, next had 4 children (one when she was about 46 had retinoblastoma, cancer of eye bilateral) middle sister had 6 kids (3 after she was 40) my next sister only had 2, something "wrong" inside when she had surgery. Probably many would not understand my pro-choice views as I worked 20 yrs for OB-Gyn Doctors. I am pro-choice and support Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Choice. Every person in State and US Congress shoud be required to read these sad tales by the very brave women who have shared them.
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Rae Williams
Bolingbrook, IL, Costume Designer
About 11 years ago, I was sitting with my then 75 year old mother, and the news was on TV. A story came up about a violent Pro-Life demonstration at a clinic that also performed abortions. I asked my mother if she was in favor of abortion being legal. Her response was that she was pro-choice, and in the case of abortion that it be done safely in a clean clinic under the care of a licensed doctor.She went on to talk about her time spent as a student nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York City in the 1950s. She saw many women come in who'd had a "backdoor" abortion. The coat hanger or what ever had been used, had not only destroyed the fetus, but also their insides and many of them were hemmoraging and some were bleeding to death. Some of the ones who survived were never able to conceive again. Mom said she never wanted to see women have to go through that kind of horrible ordeal again.When I fell in love, I was on the pill, which isn't 100% effective. Even with that precaution, I really didn't want to have children and at 53 I never did. I was relieved that, if I did get pregnant, abortion was legal and I could take that choice, especially after I married.When a woman is desperate enough to try anything to abort a fetus, she will do it whether it is legal or not. The question is are we willing to allow woman the right to live and possibly conceive at a later date when she is able to care for the child? There are so many "unwanted" children in this world already, why force people to bring more into it?I've had friends who had abortions when younger, most regretted having to make that decision, but many of them went on to have families. By not making birth control easily affordable or not making it part of insurance, any woman is forced to choose. Abortion has been done for centuries, most times at the risk to the woman's health as well.We are past the days of having large families to ensure the survival of the family name, why can't everyone realize this?
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