Just As I Thought Read Online Free

first child—I had assumed that that general mode would continue.
    I knew I couldn’t have another child. I was exhausted with these two tiny little kids; it was just about all I could do to take care of them. As a child, I had been sick a lot, and people were always thinking I was anemic … I was having bouts of that kind. I just was very tired, all the time. I knew something was wrong because my whole idea in my heart had always been to have five, six children—I loved the idea of having children—but I knew I couldn’t have this kid.
    Seeing the state I was in, even my father said, “You must not have another child.” That gives you an idea of my parents’ view. They didn’t feel you had to just keep having babies if you had a lot to do, small children, and not a lot of money.
    And my husband and I were having hard times. It was really rough. My husband was not that crazy about having children anyway; it was very low on his list of priorities. We lived where the school is now, right next door, and were supers of the rooming house. He was just beginning his career. He eventually made documentary films, but he’d come back from the Army and was getting it all together, like a lot of those guys. So anyway, it was financially hard. But it was mostly the psychological aspect of it that would have been hard for him.
    In the 1930s, my late teens, I really didn’t know a lot of people who had had abortions, but then later on—not much later, when I was a young married woman in the 1940s—I heard much more. People would talk about it. By then, women were traveling everywhere—to this famous guy in Pennsylvania, to Puerto Rico. And you were always hearing about somebody who once did abortions but wasn’t there doing them anymore.
    I didn’t ask my father for help. I wasn’t really a kid, stuck and pregnant and afraid that the world would fall down on me. I was a woman with two small children, trying to be independent. I didn’t want to distress him. He already wasn’t feeling very well; he had a very bad heart. And he really couldn’t travel; he lived in the North Bronx, and I was living on Eleventh Street—it would have been a terrible subway trip. I just didn’t want to bother him.
    I talked the situation over with the women in the park where I used to hang out with the kids. None of them thought having an abortion was a terrible thing to do. You would say, “I can’t have a kid now … I can’t do it,” and everybody was perfectly sympathetic. They said to me, “Ask So-and-so. She had one recently.” I did, and I got a name. The woman didn’t say anything about the guy; she just said, “Call.” I assumed he was a real doctor, and he was. That may have been luck.
    My abortion was a very clean and decent affair, but I didn’t know until I got there that it would be all right. The doctor’s office was in Manhattan, on West End Avenue. I went during the day, and I went with my husband. The doctor had two or three rooms. My husband sat and waited in one of them. There were other people waiting for other kinds of care, which is how this doctor did it; he did a whole bunch of things. He saw someone ahead of me, and when he put me in another room to rest for a few minutes afterward, I heard him talking to other patients.
    The nurse was there during the procedure. He didn’t give me an anesthetic; he said, “If you want it, I’ll give it to you, but it will be much safer and better if I don’t.” It hurt, but it wasn’t that painful. So I don’t have anything traumatic to say about it. I was angry that I had to become a surreptitious person and that I was in danger, but the guy was very clean, and he was very good, and he was arrested within the next year. He went to jail.
    I didn’t feel bad about the abortion. I didn’t have the feelings that people are always describing. I may have hidden some of the feelings, but having had a child at that time would have been so much worse for me. I was