Nightmare from the Sixties

• Knowledge, attitudes, practice
• Abortifacient agents
• Abortion, induced
• Physician role

Even after 30 years, it remains difficult for me to tell this story. And if doctors can learn from it, then I suppose the story is worth the telling.

I was at the time a college student in Boston. It was in those days of the sixties, those days of the Beatles and Vietnam, when protest was everywhere—and yet, incredibly, the Brahmins of Boston, together with the Catholic Church, still managed to legislate morality. Having myself been sheltered from life by family and Church, I found the freedom of the university setting exciting, and—I won't make excuses—I found the intimacies of sex too inviting to resist. In other words, I learned at that time in my life what is now for many teenagers common experience in high school.

Birth control was illegal in Massachusetts in those days. One purchased the Pill or condoms across the border or used “the rhythm method,” as the Church fathers had instructed. As if passion can be planned.

I became pregnant.

These were the days, remember, when there were no clinics one might call upon anonymously—no Planned Parenthood, no understanding physicians readily at hand. Abortion was illegal and, where it was illegally practiced, a danger to one's life. “Don't go the coat-hanger route,” was the piece of advice my sensitive roommate …