Several national Jewish organizations applauded the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Monday striking down a Texas law that restricted access to abortion. In a 5-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said the HB2 law, which mandates that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, was unconstitutional. The law would have required nearly half the state’s…
What should I do? What should I do? What should I do? Those four words went around in my head in the spring of 1973. I was 28 years old, wife, mother of two sons and I was pregnant. Being an only child, my dream was having a house full of kids with all the…
Inspired by the moving teen abortion tale of 1960s Chicago, told by Larry Cohler-Esses in these pages in May, many readers wrote in to tell us how the story resonated with their own experiences. So we decided to throw open our pages to share readers’ stories of the abortions in their lives. We received dozens…
I recall sitting on the bed next to my mother during her final days, watching the Senate confirmation hearing of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. My mom commented how happy she was that she had lived to see women in such positions of power and respect, as well as how relieved she was that in her lifetime…
I am a 74-year old man, and I can look back at a life that someone sometime in the future will call a life well lived. But were it not for a mother who, against the urgings of her doctor, had refused an abortion, I might not have lived. By rights, I should be a…
It was 1964 in Southern California. I was 23, in a committed relationship, and even though I was using birth control, I found myself pregnant. I had vowed I would never have an abortion. Not because of religious or moral issues but because a 15-year-old high school friend of mine had died from an illegal…
I never again had that feeling of total integration of conscience and body as at the moment it dawned on me I was pregnant. It was eerie: I found myself standing in front of the window of a very upscale baby shop, with my head turned, observing a man holding his child up in the…
The dictionary defines regret as a sense of loss, disappointment or dissatisfaction. I do not regret my abortion, the illegal one I had shortly after my 20th birthday, seven years before Roe v. Wade became law. I didn’t regret my decision then, and I don’t regret it now. I do regret the humiliation of having…
