In June 1969, I was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary. My first “pulpit” was rabbi of the Hillel Foundation at the University of Florida. I was 26 years old and married with a three-month-old child. I grew up in Boston, intensely aware of the ideas and thinking of the Catholic Church. In retrospect, I…
I was married and in my third year of law school when I had my first abortion. I wasn’t using the pill because physicians were warning women that the pill increased a woman’s chance of having breast cancer. I was using a diaphragm and spermicide. I got pregnant in the first semester of my last…
I am 56 years old, a wife, mother and soon-to-be grandmother. I’ve just retired from a joyful career as a teacher’s assistant in an elementary school in Georgia. This wonderful life of mine was made possible by two abortions in my teens. My first abortion was as a ninth grader. None of the adults in…
I had an illegal abortion in 1964, and I have hardly mentioned it in the last 52 years. I might have mentioned it to my former husband. I know for sure my four adult children didn’t know because I told them one by one on the day I decided to write this piece, and asked…
When memory bursts, it’s like a dam opening, flooding the present. Still, I did not expect it to happen in a late-night taxi as I headed home from work, reading a New York Times story on my smartphone. On its face, the story before me had nothing to do with my own history: It was…
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