A few weeks after turning 18, I met the boy who would become my first husband and the father of my eldest child. He was 20 when we met and we fell head over heels, very much in that first love kind of way. Hot, heavy, and intense. We mistook hormonally fueled teen passion for love, and less than four months after turning 18, I made the kind of decision which is proof of how brains really aren’t fully developed until the later twenties. We were so young and in love that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with each other.
Instead of talking it over with any actual adults, we borrowed a ring from his mother’s jewelry box and went down to the Chicago City Hall and for less than $40, we were married by a justice of the peace who asked no questions. We spent the first night of our marriage in our respective parents’ homes because only one of us had a job and neither one of us had our own place to live.
In our childlike minds we figured it would all work out. For almost two months, we lived in our respective homes, our parents unaware of the life-altering decision that we had made. Until my then-husband told his mother what we had done and asked if I could move in. She asked to meet me and looked over the marriage paperwork. She looked at us like the idiots we were but agreed that I could move in. I only had to tell my parents.
On Mother’s Day 1991, my dad and I went to run an errand with my then 10-year-old brother in the backseat. I told my dad I had to tell him something. We were driving down Ashland Avenue on the way to the Jewel grocery store near 95th and Ashland, and Dad pulled the car over. When I told my dad what I had done, he was incredulous and my little brother’s eyes were bugged out from the back seat. I feared what his response might be, but he only said, “You must tell your mother and grandmother when we get back home.”
We returned home and before I could get my bearings, my dad announced to my mom and grandmother that I had something to tell them. I still remember the quizzical looks on their faces. Granny was sitting at her usual seat at the kitchen table; mom was standing by the stove.
I gathered the courage and barely whispered that I had gotten married. My grandmother fell out the chair and my mother looked like a wounded animal. “You did what?” The rest of that day was a blur, other than my dad’s next words which were to call my husband and tell him to get to the house immediately. By the end of the day, I would no longer live with my parents. I was moved into my new mother-in-law’s house with my new husband. I was living in a house with white people from New England. My world was turned upside down.
A few weeks after moving in with my husband and mother-in-law, I started to feel queasy almost every day. I could barely eat, and I was feeling run down. I went to one of those free pregnancy clinics and after peeing into a cup and receiving a talk on pregnancy, I would learn that I was pregnant. I hadn’t even been 18 for six months and in that span I had dropped out of high school, run off and gotten married to a boy I really didn’t know, and was now pregnant. I had a dead-end job as a telemarketer and in a flash any dreams I had of being someone in the world dissipated. I was a wife and mother; I was married to a young man whose work ethic was questionable—and, honestly, I was started to think that getting married was a mistake. Except I was pregnant.
My initial thought was to terminate the pregnancy, except as a Christian whose father was currently in seminary, I felt that termination was a sin and I would go to hell. My husband was also against termination. I agonized over the decision but in the end, I decided to have the baby—my beloved son.
Over the course of the next year, life didn’t get better. We did eventually get our own place with the help of my mother-in-law, who paid for us to get a place and assisted with rent. My mother helped me get a job as a bill collector and I had to apply for assistance—food stamps and what used to be called a medical card. Every time I went grocery shopping there was the humiliation of being poor, as I paid with bright-colored food stamps. The situation was made even more comical as we had no car, so my mother-in-law, a director for the IRS in Chicago, would take us shopping in her very expensive and snazzy BMW. My husband, who had not grown up poor, often was embarrassed to shop with me.
I worked up until a few weeks before my son was due. By this point, I knew I had made a mistake in getting married. The passionate young love that had gotten me in this situation was quickly dissipating as the reality of being a teenage wife with a baby on the way settled in. It was a harsh reality. I went into labor less than two weeks after turning 19 and my labor lasted four days and I was given nothing for the pain. To add insult to injury, my son was a large baby, and I tore from the rooter to the tooter. For weeks after giving birth, every time I needed to urinate, I felt like I was on fire. In the first months of my son’s life, I had to apply for cash assistance because I had no job, and my husband’s attempts to work consistently were fruitless.
Most of my peers were off to college or traveling and living carefree lives in the early 1990s and I was doing my best to survive in a relationship with a man with whom I was not compatible while also mothering. Books were my only refuge and dreams of a better life. The only time we were compatible was when we were horizontal which is why it was no surprise when I discovered I was pregnant again and I was barely 20.
However, unlike with my first pregnancy, I did not agonize over what to do. I knew immediately that I could not have another child. While I still grappled with the moral implications, I was more concerned with the practical ones. We were two high school dropouts, barely surviving, and maybe if there had been a deep well of love that made the struggle worth it…but that was not the case.
My husband didn’t want me to have an abortion; he was adamantly opposed, but thankfully his opinion was irrelevant to the situation and I went to my mother and grandmother who—despite also being morally opposed to abortion—both agreed that another baby would be a very bad idea.
Looking back, I have blocked out many of the details of the day of that procedure but what I do still remember three decades later was a sense of relief. It wasn’t long after that procedure that my husband and I would separate, and I would spend my son’s toddler and preschool years working multiple jobs and taking classes at community college.
My son is an adult in his 30s with his own kids, and his memories of that time were that I worked a lot and we didn’t have a lot of spare money but that I would always make sure we had something fun as a treat. On Fridays when I picked him up from daycare, I would stop at the local coffee shop and buy a large mocha with extra whipped cream, where I would let him have all the whipped cream and a sip or two of my mocha before I drank it.
I never had enough money for two drinks—just one. He didn’t realize that until recently. Sort of how we lived in a rented condo in a high-rise with a doorman, but we lived in a one-bedroom unit, so my son got the bedroom, and I slept on the couch. The only way we could afford to live there was because the unit owner was a stockbroker-turned-priest and he rented the unit out well below market rate.
Obviously, my life turned around and I guess I did make something of myself, but had I been saddled with multiple babies, it might have been a different story.
The day after Roe v Wade was overturned, I signed up to become a monthly donor to the National Network of Abortion Funds as well as several other abortion funds. Turns out that I wasn’t the only one. Millions pledged to make sure that abortion access would stay available despite the shift away from federal protection, but like with most activist moments, people move on and the state of abortion access in this country has gotten worse.
A recent piece in The New York Times details the reality of accessing reproductive care outside of blue states. It’s infuriating that we aren’t discussing this more or the fact that this isn’t even an issue for many this election season. It speaks to where we are as a country.
Post-Roe America is a scary place where women are dying because the ability to make the kind of decision I was able to make in the 1990s no longer exists for them where they live. Where an underground network of people, including over 400 pilots, are in some states aiding and abetting to ensure women get the care they need. In 13 states abortion has been outright banned and in others, providers’ fears of the law are changing the nature of the patient-doctor relationship. In some states, where providers can’t openly talk about options, they stick information on their water bottles so patients can get the information to the underground system without breaking the laws.
Of course, post-Roe America doesn’t get the same coverage as other pressing social issues because by banning or damn-near-banning abortion in so many states, no one is going on TikTok or social media to post about their plight. That’s’ a great way to end up in jail.
In our short-attention-span world, where our passions and concerns are fed to us by algorithms and the loudest voices on social media platforms and aided by the lack of functional media access, we simply aren’t talking about an issue that impacts half the people in the United States: people with uteruses.
The data is clear that post-Roe laws are impacting women and killing them and honestly a large majority of those women are Black. Almost half of Black women live in the South. The thing about these laws is that it’s not just women who like me decided they would not have a child that are affected. It’s also women who miscarry, who need D&Cs for their survival because of ectopic pregnancies, who very much wanted pregnancies who for a myriad of reasons but can’t carry those pregnancies to term. All of them and others who literally need abortions are being forced to use a patchwork system that depends on the generosity of strangers to access care. In 2024, when just a few years ago, these same women could have accessed care in a timely and less costly fashion.
The reason we are in this situation is because when Trump was last in office, he was able to push through three uber-conservative Supreme Court justices who were happy to see Roe collapse. Whoever the next president is will almost certainly be appointing at least two justices given that both Thomas and Alito who are well into their 70s probably will be retiring.
Women have effectively become second-class citizens in the United States and two more conservative justices would likely ensure the setback to women’s rights along with the rights of marginalized groups will continue—and worsen—for generations to come.
In the ideal world, we get to live and stand on our highest moral values, but life is often a series of compromises where sometimes, the lesser evil is the best and only choice. This was one of the hardest things I have had to learn in my years managing organizations. I am still not always comfortable with it, but I also have learned that sometimes living my highest moral values can have unintended consequences that we aren’t prepared for.
Sometimes you take a stand for what you feel is right, only to face a tsunami of even greater issues. That is my biggest fear in this election—that many will sit it out or vote third party to live their values, which is most certainly their prerogative, but if our blue state bubble protections are weakened under a second Trump term, where does that leave us? What are we saying to women and girls when we don’t think that their bodily autonomy is a factor in our collective decision-making?
While some believe we can use mutual aid as a workaround in a crumbling society, the truth is that isn’t working. How many GoFundMe’s can we collectively support? Hell, I am struggling to crowdfund the funds needed to cover expenses related to my work. The sad fact is that many of the abortion funds and network providers across the country have had to reduce their operations due to a steep decline in support after the initial burst of support immediately following the collapse of Roe v Wade. Meaning a woman can call a network or fund to ask for assistance only to be told they are out of funds for the month, so try again next month. Women are resorting to buying abortion pills online and asking for help on platforms such a Reddit.
Friends, this is unacceptable. Our presidential election process is broken; the electoral college needs to be abolished. And yes, the situation in Gaza is horrific and overall, the system isn’t working. But now is not the time to stick it to people who are the lesser evil, because at the end of the day, only one of two people is going to win, and handing the reins of power back to the guy who effectively turned women into second-class citizens is just cutting off our nose to spite our face. The women in your life and country deserve better.
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