Posted on 10/24/2006 10:02:53 PM PDT by Lorianne
Between Sandy Hingston's teen years and her daughter's adolescence, "abortion" became a dirty word. It was time to tell her child a secret from her past.Theoretically Pro-Choice There were 20 little girls in the Brownie troop that I took over from another overstressed mom when my daughter was 7. Twenty girls, fat and thin and pretty and plain and brave and timid, shilling Thin Mints, earning badges, going camping, and saluting the flag. It was on one of our first camping trips that I looked at my co-leader, Jeannette, and said, "Who do you think will be the first one to get pregnant?" She stared at me for a minute, then laughed.
I was only half joking. Girls mate young in this blue-collar town outside of Philadelphia. College isn't much on the radar; kids graduate from high school (or don't) and go to work at Wal-Mart or the supermarket or Jiffy Lube.
The first Brownie got pregnant at 14. "She's due in six months," my daughter, Marcy, told me.
I gasped in spite of myself. "She's having the baby?"
"Well, what else could she do?" she asked matter-of-factly. I looked at her, surprised. "She could have an abortion."
Something flickered in my daughter's eyes. "Nobody I know would ever do that," she said.
It was my first glimpse of the enormous gulf between Marcy and me on the subject, and I was stopped cold. She knew, had known all her life, that her father and I are staunch supporters of a woman's right to choose. She'd even professed her allegiance to the concept. But clearly, it was all theoretical to her, something we believed some imaginary women somewhere ought to have the right to do.
I wanted so much to say more to her. But she was so young: She was only 14. There was plenty of time.
The second Brownie who got pregnant was 15. "She's showing," Marcy said knowingly. "Her mom is giving a baby shower for her." I was dumbfounded.
"I can't believe she's having the baby."
"Like she has a choice." Marcy was curt.
"She has a choice."
"What choice?"
"She could get an abortion."
Marcy's back went straight. "And kill a baby?"
"It's not a baby. It's a fetus. And if she got an abortion, she'd still have a future."
"Nobody gets abortions," Marcy said. Again, that abrupt dismissiveness. My throat was aching with what I longed to tell my daughter. But I couldn't figure out how to couch it. I was suddenly seeing the issue not from my comfy old political perspective, but from a different angle: that of a young, naive, kindhearted girl who wouldn't hurt a kitten, much less an unborn child.
Fetus.
Not to mention, she still believed in happily ever after.
"I think they can make it," Marcy said of the ex-Brownie and her baby's father. "They seem really solid."
"They're 15," I said.
"But they're in love." Speaking Up About My Abortion We are all products of our times. I am 50, and in the time I grew up in, good girls didn't have sex. I was a good girl. For a while. I lost my virginity when I was 16. I would have died before I let my mom and dad find out. Teens who became pregnant when I was growing up never kept their babies. They were discreetly sent off to group homes, or they managed to get themselves abortions. Either way, the pregnancy didn't permanently alter -- at least outwardly -- the arc of their lives. Now, girls my daughter's age were having babies and showing off their bulging tummies like Britney Spears on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. What had happened to shame in those 30 years?
Don't get me wrong. I'm no particular fan of shame. I didn't want my former Brownies branded with scarlet letters. But I did want some sort of -- what? Acknowledgment that their choices hadn't been wise? Warning to those coming up after them that this wasn't the way to maximize your potential? Sure, there's a Planned Parenthood outpost in this town -- but there are three places with heartwarming names like Golden Cradle, eager to reassure reluctant moms-to-be that, as long as they stay pregnant, everything will be all right. Marcy sees the cute onesies at the showers. She sees the babies toted to football games and fawned over. Nobody is telling her the other side.
So I do it. I tell her that I had an abortion. It takes a long while. I start the conversation a dozen times without finishing it. I'm terrified that I'll stop being Mom and become Mom-who-killed-a-baby. I explain that I was 19 and in college at the time. I tell her how frightened I was to go into the city to the clinic, but that I was even more frightened my parents would learn I'd had sex. I tell her I've never regretted my decision. We are driving in the car, at night. I can feel her beside me taking in what I'm saying, feel it altering her perception of me, just as I'd feared, like a kaleidoscope that shows one pattern, spins and blurs, then clicks into another pattern.
"Wow," she says, a little breathlessly. "I didn't think anybody really did that ... I mean, anybody I knew --"
And that, of course, is why I had to tell her. Who else was going to speak up, to witness to her? Movie stars? They were all trying desperately to get pregnant or adopting babies in Africa. Female musicians? Athletes? Politicians? Ha! There's no shame at all in Katie Holmes bearing Tom Cruise's child out of wedlock. But when's the last time you saw a headline saying "Star Aborts"?
"Did you ever feel guilty?" Marcy asks me.
"No," I tell her, honestly. "I was too worried that Pop-Pop and Nana would find out." She takes that in too. Then she says, "I guess I won't be afraid to tell you."
I wrote a magazine article about our conversation and got dozens of e-mails in response. Some said I was a murderer, a selfish monster. I printed those e-mails out and showed them to Marcy. "You're brave," she said, knowing perfectly well that I'm not, really. The rest were from women who'd had abortions. They told their stories, different stories with a single theme: I had a choice, and my life is better because I did. A lot of them said, "I've never told this to anyone before." The writers spoke of secrecy and shame.
I showed Marcy those e-mails, too.
The third Brownie to become pregnant was Marcy's age -- 16. When the news reached Marcy's lunch table, she spoke up loud and clear: "She could have an abortion." Her friends didn't argue politics with her. They weren't aghast. They just blinked and stared, she said, "as if they'd never thought of that."
Sandy Hingston is a senior editor and parenting columnist at Philadelphia Magazine. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their teenage son and daughter.
Originally published in MORE magazine, October 2006.
Wouldn't it be funny if the young girl set the old dinosaur feminist straight!?!
Daughter: "She's having an abortion?"
Mom: "Well, what else could she do?"
Daughter: "She could give the baby up for adoption."
Something flickered in my mom's eyes. "Nobody I know would ever do that."
For ripping the natural love and affection that a mother has for the life growing within her out of the heart of your daughter, Satan thanks you very much.
So she killed her daughter and her granddaughter. What a sick, sad, creed where she is a brave hero.
The dead children, however, could not be reached for comment.
A couple of years ago, my mom told me about her abortion, it had to be in the 1950's and she told me that she was eight months pregnant. The back alley abortionist took a baby that even in the 50's would have survived. It was a boy.
My mom told me that her mother forced the abortion and I have to take her word for it, it bothers me in a personal sense, but it bothers her a lot more.
She is 68 years old and her abortion, to this day, still bothers her. Her abortion is the biggest thing troubling her soul.
I can also say that she went on to commit the worst of acts that are signs of post abortion stress: She got married very quickly and tried to have another child; had problems getting pregnant and went on hormonal treatments and was able to conceive another child, but ended up hating him and giving him treatment that would be used as testimonials for kinder treatment for serial killers. He has/had developmental disabilities and brain trauma that I think she inflicted or allowed the stepfather to commit. She has admitted to shaking him, violently, and he had a bite in his tongue from his youth, where a stepfather was beating him and pulled him off of the bed and he bit his tongue during a violent struggle.
It is very hard to instruct girls today. I have daughters that are 21 and 17. The youngest is very against abortion and the oldest believes/believed the easy abortion story about it being just a clump of tissue. I have instructed the oldest not to buy into the easy abortion story because she was once just a clump of tissue and it will not be easy on her when she has to make that choice.
Some women make it sound easy but does the choice ever justify the means? I want 70 year old women saying that it was the best choice that I ever made, does that ever happen?
I can think of another "A" word for this mother, and it's not "abortion."
Reminds me of the pro-abortion march covered on TV a year or so ago and a grandmother, mother and 13-year-old daughter were there protesting the people who were against abortions. At the time it struck me what a terrible example that mother and grandmother were setting for that impressionable child.
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Oops, I read the date she graduated as her birthdate... yes, it could be true -- still disgusting, though.
Although I am fairly confident that this story is a pure fabrication, I look forward to the day when these people who bragged about procuring abortion are looked upon with mature societal hindsight. Like former slave owners in the reconstructed South to Nazi party members after WWII, the revealed evil of their actions will be regarded with the decades of pent-up contempt they deserve.
Sandy Hingston graduated from Duke University in 1978.
That would make her a little older than 28. Be that as it may, she's one sick woman. Her daughter had the right gut feeling, until she was "educated".
I caught that mistake and posted it below my original post -- sorry about that... I did so more looking and found a recent interview where she said her daughter is in the eight grade.
It is truly sad that people sacrifice their children to Baal in order to increase their prosperity, just as in ancient times. I hope that when it is their time to leave this earth that they will all have to face their children asking them, "Why mommy, why did you kill me?"
One has to wonder that if she found "no shame" in what she did why then was she so terrified that her beloved Marcy would view her as "Mom-who-killed-a-baby".
I guess denial isn't just a river in Eygpt.
Can we have a merit badge in "Reading teenaged boys BS to get you in the sack"?
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