Pro-life and

pro-choice

“I’m pro-life and pro-choice,” my daughter said, as she straddled the canyon of thought that divides our nation. I was reminded of a conversation I had, a quarter of a century ago, with a woman at a community fair on Third Avenue in New York City. She was angry about abortion and her attitude was that pro-choice advocates were pro-abortion. In those days, the abortion rights movement was just starting to re-frame the rhetoric about abortion rights to the right to choose.

At that time I held the secret of my own abortion experience tightly shut among all but a few friends and family members, let alone strangers on Third Avenue. But this woman’s ire sparked something in me. I knew something she needed to hear. “Nobody is pro-abortion,” I said. “Anyone who has had one or been close to someone who has had one is forever touched with the pain of the decision. We’re just saying that it is a decision to be made by a woman and her doctor.”

I went on to explain that as a 20 year-old college student, I made the choice to end a pregnancy. I had been using contraception since I was 16, making that choice on my own with the help of Planned Parenthood. It had been effective until then. I knew it was my fault I was pregnant. I had thought I was safe with a partner who had adopted two children with his ex-wife because of his supposed infertility.

But it was not that simple. There were subconscious urges—I wanted children someday and deep down I wanted to know I was fertile. That I ended a pregnancy that confirmed the question has left a stain on my heart forever. Do I wish I had made another decision? That is for me to know. The only important issue is that it was my choice to have a legal abortion that safely preserved my ability to have children when I was ready.

In my freshman year in college, my roommate was a tiny spit of a girl from Kentucky. She arrived in our Boston dormitory freshly de-flowered and pregnant—a fact that emerged weeks later, after a missed period.

It was 1971 and there were no legal abortion clinics in Boston. My roommate felt that she could not confide in her parents, so I offered my mother as a resource in NYC. My mother met her at the clinic in Manhattan and stayed with her for the procedure, putting her back on the bus to Boston the following day.

When I found myself in my roommate’s condition a few years later I knew where to go. The Charles Clinic was housed in a stout brick building at the base of Beacon Hill in Boston. I cashed in the plane ticket to Ireland that my brother had given me for my birthday to pay for it.

The doctor was a kindly older man. He explained the procedure, and asked if I had any questions. Then he said something I never forgot. “I don’t want to see you in here again.” There was a mixture of compassion and pain in his voice that I still carry in my heart. He knew this was not easy for me, or for him. He knew it was final, that it would forever frame my life as a woman, pre- and post-abortion, and that it ended the potential for life that was inside me at that moment. But he also knew it was the result of an unplanned pregnancy and that my life was my responsibility and the choice was my right under the law.

After talking with that woman on Third Avenue 25 years ago, I felt that my story, that is so like everywoman’s story, was the only way to confront the anger that is stirred in all of us when we hear that terrible word, “abortion.” We hate the word, the procedure and sometimes, the outcome, but like my daughter, if we think about it, we can be pro-life and pro-choice. Because that is the law and we are a country of laws.

- Cass Collins