Flip side of 'free love'

I GOT PREGNANT the day Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, but put off an abortion until after finals.

Two months later, I sat on the banks of the Pennsylvania Railroad and watched the train roll by carrying the casket of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, assassinated only days earlier, while I pondered life and death.

The night before, a doctor had packed my uterus with something to force a miscarriage, and I was in excruciating pain for 12 to 15 hours while friends sat up with me through the night.

I didn't want to bring an unwanted child to term.

Earlier, I had told the young man I was pregnant. He backed away, unable to speak. We were not in love.

I saw him from afar recently, the first time in 40 years. He was married with children and had a prominent career, a robust figure and gray around the temples.

He looked as if he had a good life. I wondered what would have happened had the time, or our feelings, been different.

During the sexual revolution in 1968, sex was plentiful, without fear of AIDS. Birth control was not widely available, and abortions were illegal. Few talked about sexually transmitted diseases.

Before my troubles, a high-school friend told me that she "went away" to a home for pregnant girls, put the baby up for adoption and returned to finish her senior year. She was haunted by her loss.

A few years ago, the friend was contacted by the son she never knew and was joyous at the reunion, meeting his wife and daughter. She still keeps in touch with them.

But when my period was late, I panicked. I made up a story, borrowed a wedding ring and went to the doctor to get enough God-knows-what pills to bring on my monthly cycle. They didn't work.

My parents would never have paid to send me away to have the baby, nor paid for an abortion. More likely, my parents would have killed me. As for keeping the baby, my mother didn't like children.

I was on my own. I understood the moral dilemma, just like my former classmates in a religious college on the Main Line, who also chose to terminate.

After much soul-searching, I borrowed a few hundred dollars to handle it my way.

The unintended consequence of "free love," the cry of the '60s, was horror.

Those with no money, or knowledge of where to get such a medical procedure, tried to induce abortions themselves, or turned to quacks. Some women died trying. That's when the metal coat hanger became popular.

Women ended up in hospital emergency rooms, bleeding and with infections.

The rare doctors who performed illegal abortions knew that they could lose their medical license and go to jail.

Yet, they performed abortions because of rapes; or believed that women had a right to choose whether to bear a child.

My doctor was paying off his medical-school tuition.

About the same time, I knew another vulnerable and confused woman who was contacted shortly after the procedure by an assistant to an abortionist, who, she learned later, sold drugs on the side. He sweet-talked the woman into having sex.

He took the woman to an abandoned house where they had sex. She contracted gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted infection that was so painful and serious, she could hardly walk.

In her guilty conscience, she figured that God was paying her back.

I didn't want to see that happen to other frightened young women, or have them go through what I did, or die for lack of medical care.

So I became a go-to person to help young women find willing doctors.

As a volunteer, I helped the Pennsylvania Abortion Rights Association collect names of women who had had abortions to be plaintiffs for a state lawsuit.

Meanwhile, New York legalized abortion in 1970, and I urged women to seek safe abortions at outpatient clinics there.

In 1973, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, made abortions legal in the United States.

However, I would always remember that desperate time in my life, and that of my friends, when abortions were dangerous and illegal. *