Share Your Story or Your Mother's Story about the Challenges of Accessing Birth Control

My family lived in a small college town in the Carolinas in the 1950’s. My grandmother worked in a print shop. My grandfather worked at the local gas station. Working class girls often had no sex education and were expected to graduate high school and marry. When my mom first started menstruating, she thought she was dying! My mother became engaged while still in high school, to a local “good boy”. Then my mom realized she was pregnant. She said that she knew nothing about her body, had never heard of birth control or even “how a girl got pregnant!” My enraged grandmother took her to several doctors, but found no doctor who would perform an abortion. They immediately took mom to a home for unwed mothers in another town. The home brought my mom into their office every day and tried to browbeat her into signing adoption papers. She refused so they told her to leave. Next my grandparents carted her to the coast to stay with a distant relative. The woman was addicted to paregoric/laudanum and by the end of the afternoon was prostrate on the floor in front of a locked refrigerator on the back porch waiting for her husband to come home and dose her with a fix. The woman called my grandparents and told them ‘I can’t take care of her, she’s suicidal, come and get her’.  So, my grandparents ended up keeping my suicidal mom prisoner in the back room of their house, thinking no one would find out. Of course, by then the whole county knew. The ‘good local’ boy instantly dumped my mom. His parents went around town, telling everyone their doctor said that their son ‘couldn’t make children’, so this pregnancy couldn’t possibly be his!  Mom learned that ‘good boy’ had another girl pregnant in another state at the same time he had been engaged to my mom. His parents had quietly paid for the other girl’s medical care and got rid of her. They were furious to find out about my mother’s pregnancy. A young friend, home on military leave, friends with ‘good boy’ and my mom, heard what was happening to my mom, came over and brought my mom some records. When he left, my grandparents told my mom ‘he likes you, so you get him to marry you a.s.a.p.’  He married my mom. I was born. My mom immediately became pregnant with the second. No birth control. He ran off with another woman. My mother spent years being considered a ‘slut’ and the deadbeat fathers remained ‘good boys’ in the community.  

My beautiful mother was a Catholic .  She married my dad after WW2.  She was not allowed birth control.  She delivered 5 children very quickly, and ten years after the fifth they were greeted with the birth of their sixth. Yes, they loved their children, but the expense and time involved in raising so many kept them from achieving their dreams and goals.  Their lives were spent toiling to feed and clothe their family.  Had they been able to access birth control, they could have planned their family. One of the story writers seems to think women are asking for free government birth control when that is not the case. Women merely want to have access to affordable birth control and to not have self righteous politicians making health care decisions for them. When will women be allowed to make laws concerning mens health care? Why is viagra covered by insurance? Are men forced to watch a video of a vasectomy before they decide to not have children? In 1980 my lovely mother in law, who had raised 7 children told me that I am so blessed to be able to decide the size of my family.  A few of the story writers seem filled with rage when they should actually be celebrating women, mothers and non mothers. Some women have made unwise choices but we should learn from each other, support one another and stand together although we may disagree.  We should appreciate our differences, our histories and ourselves. 

My paternal grandmother who was born in the 1890's only used the papal approved birth control method which at that time was celibacy, also called, "don't touch me until the baby is four." She had 4 children in 20 years. My maternal grandmother never had more than 3 or 4 periods a year. Both of her husbands were widowers with children when she married them. She never used birth control. After eight years of marriage at age 28 she got pregnant once and that was it. People in their small town thought she'd gone crazy when she first said she was pregnant because everyone knew she was infertile. She was very glad she had my mother but also very grateful for her infertility as it was the Depression and money was very tight. She told me if she'd started getting pregnant frequently she would have sent her husband to work overseas & not come home to visit. 

After making a very subconscious decision not to have children (after a rather difficult childhood of my own), I wound up with three.  I'm the exception who skews the statistics, since I got pregnant while on the Pill, got pregnant while using an IUD, and got pregnant (as did many others) while using a diaphragm.  When the fourth ( ! ) pregnancy arrived, my husband supported my decision not only to end the pregnancy, but to ensure no further pregnancies by means of a tubal ligation.  At the age of 29, please imagine my astonishment when the doctor (male - the last I've seen) told me I was "too young to make that decision" - but he was quick to change his mind when he found out I already had three and suggested he should contribute to their college funds.  I should have just sued the bastard.