Thinking about abortions

Samuel Alito is in.
For a minute there I believed it might not happen, just like I thought Bush would lose the election both times, given how many people mobilized against him. Forgot about Diebold and the Supremes.
Eventually abortion will be illegal in this country, with the mental patients having taken over the asylum in the USA, a formidable Republican majority in both houses. Look what they did to Harriet Meirs after the evangelical rightwing nutcases thought her positions on abortion too vague, not vicious enough. They left her in a mudpuddle in the crosswalk after a rainy day, screeching over her in their Jesus powered Hummers on their way to dig Alito up out of some Klavern somewhere. She knew what hit her and got out of their way.
But first it will go state by state, presumably California going last, if at all.
I remember back to 1972 when my best friend Diane, in Grayslake High School was pregnant by her redneck boyfriend.
In those years we used to smoke in the girls bathroom at school, trading tips on how to cause ourselves miscarriages when our boyfriends convinced us that using rubbers meant we didn't love them enough.
We were pretty savvy, or at least at the time I thought we were. Carol, a sweet little thing whose parents used to beat her when they found out she was going out with guys used to be the "go to" gal when we thought we were pregnant, her home remedies having worked for her numerous times, or so she said..

Her thing was baths with powdered mustard in the hottest water she could tolerate in the tub. She swore it worked and I never had to try it, having gotten pregnant by I don't remember who and miscarrying while stoned out of my mind one day I was too sick to go to school.

But what I'll never forget was Diane, who needed an illegal abortion, not wanting to use the mustard method, or having tried it and it not working; I don't recall now.
She'd made all the arrangements. How she knew who to call I don't remember but she got on it like the junebugs on the old bluegill carcasses that washed ashore in Round Lake IL where we grew up.
She was terrified but of course we were all too cool to show any fear about anything, and since we all did everything together she asked me and Becky Rivas to go with her into the city, Chicago, to get this abortion she had arranged through some feminist underground group there.
It was 1972 and we thought of ourselves as hippies and wanted to do everything there was out there to do, legal or illegal. Becky even ran away from her brutal Mexican father in Venetian Village, a little subdivision full of working poor and joined a commune in Chicago.

Becky, Diane and I hitchhiked into the city to the location we were told was the first rendevous point.
I remember it being an old house in a neighborhood I can't recall now, but it was not where the procedure would take place; it was where we would be blindfolded and put into a van with no windows and transported elsewhere.
Becky and I thought it was all very cool; very cloak-and-dagger for us 15 year olds from the suburbs. We were excited; Diane was not.
She fought back tears not wanting us to call her a "pussy" since in our attempts at coolness we were pretty brutal and wanted to appear fearless, like Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies who threw dollar bills off the balconies at the stock exchange, Abbie having written the word "FUCK" on his forehead in magic marker. I wanted to marry him but knew I had to get a whole lot cooler before I ever stood a chance.
I don't remember much else about this, except that we had no idea where we had been taken and Becky and I sat in the van while Diane was blindfolded and taken into a private home. Becky and I waited for her in the van, our blindfolds off since the van had no windows anyway and we wouldn't have been able to identify where we were. We were stoned, which probably accounts for why I can't remember much else about this whole episode. We laughed a lot; renaming the band Led Zepplin "Led Zeprock"; imagining them on the Flintstones cartoon series. God that was so funny, at least we thought it was.
I do remember feeling sorry for Diane and offering her a joint when she re emerged.
Hitchhiking home to the burbs after an illegal abortion must have been pretty weird for her. It was weird enough for Becky and me, though we were still laughing through a haze of potsmoke while we tried to screen all cars who stopped for us on the tollway to eliminate those likely to do some "fucked up shit" if we got in the car.
I remember Becky wanting to take a hit of acid before this whole thing, with Diane and me talking her out of it; not wanting to have to babysit her if she had a bad trip.
We knew this was serious business, but we had no idea how serious it really was, since so many of us ended up doing the same thing in those years before Roe vs. Wade.
We thought it was like buying pot; you don't buy from people you don't know, you could end up in jail, you had to be secretive. We did a lot of illegal things back then and to Becky and me, this was just another one.
We feared our parents more than the cops who at that time were too stupid to be able to tell the difference between pot and incense, at least in backward Round Lake IL.
To Diane I'm sure it was more emotionally charged, the stakes higher.
We never talked about it after that.
In fact we never were even aware that abortion was made legal in 1973 with the Supreme Court decision ruling that the constitution gave woman the right to privacy in Roe.
We didn't care; we knew we'd do what we had to the next time, legal or not.
Becky Rivas died shortly after that, having dropped dead from a blood clot caused by the birth control pills.
Diane went on to marry this same alcoholic boyfriend and have 2 kids with him. They lived in a run down bungalow in Libertyville or somewhere and I remember visiting her there and feeling bad about how miserable she seemed to be.
They were poor, her husband a mechanic who drank 4 beers before work. She wasn't allowed to work; he didn't believe any wife of his should.
Diane was really smart I remember and could've taken the world by storm, but the only storms she dealt with then were the snow storms so frequent in the Midwest, storms her old storm windows in her run down house couldn't keep at bay.
I went on to move to California, where all the cool people went from Illinois. I had a child and went on welfare. I was 17, about to turn 18 when I discovered I was pregnant, and I figured I could raise a child without a man; fish don't need bicycles, right? That was the prevailing thought in 1974 when I gave birth. I gave birth without a dime to my name or a high school diploma.
You could do that then; welfare was inadequate but housing costs were low and MediCal paid for my prenatal and post natal care, my rent was $75.00 a month in a series of duplexes I lived in.
But that's a whole 'nother blog...