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Abortion Stories
Granny
My maternal grandmother, Granny, was a hybrid. Her mother, an immigrant from Ireland, worked as a maid in a large home in Manhattan. She had a relationship with my wealthy great-grandfather in his parents' house.
They married, and it did not work out. Even though my great-grandmother was no longer a maid, she was treated as one.
A divorce back in those days was a huge black mark. However, my great-grandmother was gifted a large home on Riverside Drive. The deal that was struck was simple: my grandmother had to go to her grandparents several times a week. As she grew older, the things they said about my great-grandmother were so unkind that my grandmother decided to no longer see her father or any member of the Held family. To this day, not a single Faughnan family member I know of has met a Held.
The Held's reaction to Granny's decision to stand by her mother resulted in their being cut off financially. So, my great-grandmother rented out rooms to pay the bills.
My grandmother met a man there, and they had a love affair. She got pregnant.
She told me this one day when I was home from the University of Buffalo. It was when I told her I was I was gay. She told me it was no one's business who I slept with. She then went on to say to me that she never regretted cutting off the Helds. She never regretted the abortion.
Without it, she said, she would not have finished college, she would never have played piano in Carnegie Hall, and she would never have had a career or the family she would go on to have.
Mom
My sister has a life-sized portrait of my mother that my father painted of her in the early seventies. She is wearing a ball gown and pregnant, not with my brother Seth, as many assume, but with my other brother, Jacob. He's dead.
We sat on the beach in Boca Grande when she told me this story. She was slathered in her mix of baby oil and iodine.
She was talking to me about her sobriety, and in that discussion, for reasons unknown, she shared her very private fear that her drinking had interrupted a pregnancy. Mind you, she told me that she was not drinking heavily, and her OB, Dr. Klingger, told her to have a drink to relax. She was told it was okay.
We lived on Richmond Road in a very old house. While it was large, there was only one bathroom, and it was on the first floor.
She told me she woke up bleeding; in her panic to get to my father, she slipped on her blood and fell on the stairs while trying to hold the baby inside herself.
My father rushed her to the hospital, where she had a D&C (the actual term for the procedure.) Jacob was dead.
If she was living in these times in some places, she would have been forced to deliver a dead baby, might have bled out and died, or lost the ability to get pregnant again.
My mother then later got pregnant with my brother Seth.
Every family has these stories. I shared my story years ago. I will not go through that again, aside from saying I remember clearly posting it and getting torn apart because I should have "manned up" and supported the girl and child.
I was 14 and had a paper route. I had sex because I was lonely and terrified of being gay. I thought if I had sex, it would make me not gay.
I was a kid. It was a series of bad decisions by a boy and a girl. My family life was very chaotic then; I felt so alone. I also thought I had committed a sin that would land me in Hell. I grew up very Catholic.
It was my beloved Aunt Gayle who I told crying on her sofa on Lenox Avenue. Many young people don't have an "Aunt Gayle". She also laid out to me that I was not going to Hell.
The lives that are going to be lost or ruined because of religious zealotry will be countless, and this time is upon us. So many fought to contain these people for years and preserve reproductive rights for all, but Trump and the Supreme Court, who all promised that this would continue to be the law of the land, lied.
I am sharing stories because I read Sally Field's story. She was brave for telling it. This is such personal choice, not one the government needs to be a part of.
November 4, 2024, vote thinking of the women you love. Click Here To Get To The Home Page

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