Just As I Thought Read Online Free Page A

certainly scared, and it’s not something you want necessarily to do, but I don’t see it in that whole ethical or moral framework. I guess I really didn’t think of the fetus as a child until it was really a child.
    But you’ll hear plenty of abortion stories. I will tell you what happened next after that was over, which is what I really want to talk about. I became pregnant again a couple of years later. I wanted to have the child, but my husband didn’t. It was very hard; I didn’t know what to do. I was kind of in despair.
    I got three or four addresses, again from women in the park. My husband wasn’t going to come with me. Partly I didn’t want him to come; I probably was mad at him. I had this good friend, and she said, “You’re not going alone.” I was very grateful to her. She said, “I’ll go with you,” and she did.
    I remember very clearly traveling to those places—to the end of Long Island and the end of Queens and the end of Brooklyn. I went to each one of these guys, but they wouldn’t do it. One guy said, “Look, if you weren’t married, I would risk it, but you’re married and maybe you just have to make do.” He felt I didn’t need an abortion that much. I’ll never forget. The only person we could find was some distance away and didn’t sound very good to me at all. I was frightened … terribly frightened.
    A week or two later, I remember, it was a freezing night; I was visiting people, and I ran home very fast. I was distraught and terrified because I was going to have to go either to Puerto Rico or someplace else. It was late in the pregnancy; it might have been the second trimester. That night I ran home at top speed—I can’t tell you—in the cold, crying, from about eight blocks away. I ran all the way home and just fell into bed. I remember I had a terrible bellyache from the running.
    When I woke up the next morning, I was bleeding fiercely. It seemed to me I was having a miscarriage. I’d had another miscarriage, and both my children were born early, so it was not a weird thing that this would happen to me.
    So I called this doctor I’d been to several times before, and he said to me, “Did you do something?” I said, “No! It’s just like the last time I had a miscarriage. I’m bleeding.” And he said, “Call somebody in your family. Get some ergot [a drug that stops uterine contractions].” I said, “Don’t you want me to come over?” and he said, “No! Don’t come.”
    By this time my father had had a serious heart attack, so I didn’t tell him anything about it. I continued to bleed. I bled and bled, for three, four days. I was really in terrible shape, and I couldn’t get anyone to take care of me. On about the third or fourth day, my doctor finally said, “Come over.” He had to do a D&C.
    Sometime after that, when I spoke to my father about it, he said, “That doctor was being watched. There’s no other explanation. He was a kind guy. He knew you. He must have recently done something, and he was scared.”
    These things are not talked about a lot, this kind of criminalization of the medical profession, the danger these doctors were in. It meant that they could not take care of you. It’s not even about abortion.
    A good friend had an even clearer experience with this. She also was bleeding at the wrong time, and it didn’t stop. She went to the emergency room here at a Catholic hospital, and they refused to take care of her. They just flatly refused. They said she had to have a rabbit test to see if she was pregnant and the results would take a couple of days. They would not touch her because she might be pregnant, and they might disturb the child. She continued to bleed, and they would not take care of her. She was a little skinny woman; she didn’t have that much blood. Well, she wasn’t pregnant. It turned out she had a tumor. It was an emergency—she had to be operated on immediately.
    Your life, a woman’s life, was simply not the