My 16-year-old body in Texas today

My father had died in February, and my mother and sister were ready to move on. I was the only one who was still sagging with sadness, and I could feel how I changed the mood in the house whenever I came home.

Every day was the same: I went to swim practice, came home to shower and change my clothes, and then I drove out to my boyfriend’s farm in the blue Buick LeSabre that had been my father’s car. I wrote in my journal; I devoured a stack of books my father had left me. My only comfort was sleep.

My boyfriend’s mom scooped me up into her big Catholic family and tried to feed me and tease me back to life. My boyfriend was gentle, a football player who loved poetry and music. I cry as I write this, remembering how they tried to make me happy that summer.

When I told my mother I was pregnant and asked her for help, she had two conditions: I had to tell my younger sister, and I had to promise never to see or talk to my boyfriend again. Even when he called me, two years later, depressed beyond words, all I could eke out was, “I can’t talk to you. I promised my mother I wouldn’t.”

When my youngest daughter was sixteen, I told her. She had this very fierce look in her eyes, and said, “Mom, I was there. It could have been me.” At that moment, all the complexities of this abortion conversation were sitting right across the table from me. She was right: that aborted fetus was one of over a million eggs I was born with, one of several hundred thousand still alive when I was 16. She was there, and there is mystery and faith, as well as science and politics, in this discussion.

I sat with my mother and let her talk about her shame, at age 41, having a 16-year-old daughter who was pregnant. She had poured everything she couldn’t say to me then into helping other women through challenging times. In her small town, she is known as the woman who will help you figure out what to do next— whether it is your marriage, your business, or your brain that is falling apart.

I reached out to my boyfriend to apologize. “It was a hard time for everyone,” he said, the same steady voice I remembered. It is hard for me to convey, to anyone other than him, the complexity of my choice back then.

There are few days I have not remembered my secret abortion in the fall of 1975. The feelings are many and have shifted over time: shame was the first shroud; then gratitude that my mother had the money, connections, and chutzpah to whisk me out of town to “take care of things;” and finally a sense of responsibility for a hard choice, an imperfect choice, a choice that enabled me to go on to college, to get married and choose to have three children later.

I talked to my husband, the father of our three children. In each of our hard choices, there are so many other people, ones who are there and not there at the time.

Now that I’m old enough to be a grandmother, I sometimes imagine myself as the mother of that child of my 16-year-old spirit, grandmother to their children. It’s a completely different life, one that I would like women to be able to choose. To enable my child self to choose pregnancy and maternity at age 16, we also need to let her choose not to be a mother when she is not ready. That includes access to safe birth control and abortion. And we need as a community to provide the support that enables that young mother and her child to thrive. She will need shelter, health care, including mental health care, and food.

Right now my 16-year-old girl body is in Texas, yearning for help through a dark time, back into the light of day. I am certain that this punitive, draconian legislation has not been written with the health and sanity of my 16-year-old body in mind.

History tells us that limiting access to abortion does not lessen the number of abortions; it just makes them more expensive and less safe. My body is at the heart of this debate; my body is being constrained.

When I go back to that 16-year-old girl, I see her young spirit drawn to life. I see that she is both extraordinarily courageous and full of fear. I see how that abortion was her first precarious step into adult life and how years of silence continued to constrain her and hold her back.

I scoop her up and let her soul speak to me now. “We all make mistakes,” I say to her, “it is not my place to decide for you. Whatever you choose will be both imperfect, and it will be enough. I am here for you. This community is here for you. Learn from this, accept it, and let it go.”