I find family history endlessly fascinating, their stories, the triumphs, and tragedies are part of us and woven into the collective history of this country. You will meet seven women, five from my family and one the mother of a friend, another a young woman trying to start her life over. Their names are changed, their locations masked but the facts are otherwise true.
Cora lived in Ohio, she and her husband had a thriving farm and 14 boisterous children. Fourteen children were unusual even in an age of very large families, but farms took work and the children learned to work the farm. In 1873 the Civil War was past and sense of normalcy had returned, we know from her journal how suddenly that would change.
Cora’s husband had been working to clear a field of two large trees and this particular morning he went out with their oldest son, a strapping boy of seventeen and a mule to start the clearing. Mid-afternoon their son came riding into the yard on the mule, shouting for his mother There had been an accident, the tree they were taking down had fallen on his father and crushed him. His father was dead.
Cora and her husband had worked their half section together, she could run the farm, no question about that. Her real worry was how to replace the work of her husband, that would take a grown man, could they afford a full time hired hand? She already knew she would have to take on more responsibilities as far as the physical labor was concerned. Cora also worried she might be pregnant again, this was the worst possible time. Another baby meant she would not be able to keep up her end of the physical labor for many months and that concerned her if they were going to hang on to the farm.
She would have to find something she could take that would bring on an abortion. In those days there were plenty of “tonics” on the market as well as folk remedies. She did not say what it was or where it came from, only that she was taking it and she was sad because it wasn’t that the baby wasn’t wanted, it was just the wrong time and she had to take care of the children already born.
No one knows when she took the “tonic” but she was found on the kitchen floor in convulsions by her daughter. She sent her brother for the doctor but her mother died before he got there. Something about the way her body looked led the doctor and the Sheriff to suspect it was poison and since she was doing more of the farm work, it had to be accidental.
Cora’s things along with the journal were packed away and taken to the attic, not looked at again for nearly 50 years when the farm finally left the family’s hands. Cora and her husband would have been proud of their children. They came together and worked the farm successfully until all the children were grown. Their oldest son stayed on the farm, and his son too. It is through her grandchildren and great-grandchildren we know her story.
Her name was Ava, the only daughter of a prosperous merchant, a petite pixy of a girl. In February of 1900, on her 17th birthday, Ava married her childhood sweetheart and set the course of her future with the young man who would someday own his father’s hardware business. They honeymooned at Niagra Falls and Ava came home pregnant with their first child. They moved into the big four-square a few doors down from her in-laws. There is a picture of Ava taken with the family at her brother’s wedding in the summer of 1901, she is obviously pregnant with her second child. By the end of 1901, she was 18 and the mother of two. She had not weaned the first baby because she believed nursing would keep her from getting pregnant again so soon, it wasn’t true, at least not for Ava. Her mother came to help, brought bottles and baby formula with her. Ava survived and the children thrived but by 1905 she had five children ranging from 4 to a babe in arms and found herself pregnant again.
After her second baby, Ava had gone to the family doctor and asked for something to let her plan her pregnancies, she was fitted with a diaphragm. In the end, it wasn’t effective for her, while she was able to stave off the next pregnancy for a month or two, she never got the year or more respite she needed. She had relentless morning sickness during her last two pregnancies and it prompted her husband to hire a housekeeper to help with the children and housework. Five pregnancies in five years had taken a toll on her body too and there was nothing she could do about her constant backache. Her husband had been talking about celebrating their 5th anniversary by a return trip to Niagra Falls in the summer, even without the pregnancy the trip held little appeal.
When she was several weeks late Ava had asked her doctor if there as anything he could give her to bring on her period, code for an abortifacient. He gave her a "tonic" which did little more than making her morning sickness worse. Her mother put her in touch with an acquaintance who knew someone. The abortionist worked out of small office downtown and required $50 cash paid in advance. Ava had a bit of money and borrowed the remainder from her mother $50 in 1905 was $1500 in today’s money.
She took the streetcar downtown to his office, there was an overwhelming sense of dread and guilt. She was alone. Ava loved her children and her husband but she felt another pregnancy would kill her, she was slowly being consumed and there would soon be nothing left of Ava to give to her family. The doctor finished his work, packed her with gauze and gave her a pad, warning that she would bleed so to stay off her feet.
Her short trip home on the streetcar and her walk home left her exhausted, as soon as she got home she went to the master bedroom and laid down. That is where her husband found her, laying in the middle of the bed, dwarfed by the blood stain that surrounded her body, she was cold. The death certificate read “exsanguination underlying cause abortion”.
The children would grow up with little or no memory of their mother, their father, who blamed himself never remarried. He sold the big four square and moved in with Ava's parents so the children could be raised by her mother. It was a feeling of sorrow and sadness that stayed with the family even generations later. Ava’s story is still told by family members, one not only of profound sadness but of rage that this could happen and it took 90 years after Ava’s birth to end.
Elaine lived in a small midwest farm community, her husband worked for the railroad and for the most part life was good. At age 34 Elaine already had eleven children ranging in age from 15 to twins who were 4 months old. In the dusty '30s, birth control was not unheard of and many women used diaphragms to plan their families but the catch was a husband had to give his permission and Elaine’s refused, it was “unnatural”. Like many women Elaine was left to use folk remedies to prevent pregnancy, they were sadly unreliable.
The fall of 1934 found Elaine pregnant with her twelveth child, it was too much for her. Her husband had been home for a long weekend and she asked him to drop the 4 and 5-year old at her mother’s for the day, she and the 4 youngest would be working to straighten up the shed at the back of their property.
The police pieced together the rest of Elaine’s day. She took the four youngest children to the shed where she smothered them, she then set fire to the shed and cut her own throat with a razor. Other than the sensationalized newspaper account of the murdering mother little attention was spent on what happened to the family in the aftermath, or for that matter how a woman, a mother could be pushed to commit such an act.
Barbara was 19 and recently released from a women’s prison in Calfornia, she was trying to start her life over, after serving 5 years for murder. She had been sentenced to twenty-five but in an uncustomary moment of compassion in view of her tender age when the crime was committed she was given parole. Barbara grew up in the Central Valley, amid fruit and vegetable farms, so It seemed natural she would be drawn to the Midwest and another farm community, it was what she knew. When she hit the town in 1943 she had a reference letter from the Warden and quickly got a job in the laundry of the local airbase.
Eventually, her story unfolded. At 13 she gave birth unattended to a stillborn baby with a severe cleft palate and other deformities. What she saw terrified her, it looked like a monster, a demon, not a baby. She “panicked, grabbed a knitting needle and pushed into the soft spot on the top of the baby’s head. It did not matter the baby was stillborn, there was no evidence it ever drew a breath and its defects were so profound it wouldn’t have survived but that knitting needle. That knitting needle meant she intended to kill the baby so she must be punished and of course, she was unmarried so throw the book at her. They also failed to consider she was a confused and frightened 13-year-old child. I don’t know what happened to Barbara, I hope she was able to have a good life.
Sharon married young and had four children in quick succession. Her husband had no education and had trouble finding work. They lived hand to mouth in a three-room trailer that was too hot in the summer and often too cold in the winter. To say they were poor was an inadequate adjective for the poverty they faced every day. With no reliable transportation, she walked with the children and a wagon about a mile to the nearest grocery store, rain or shine. They got food boxes from time to time from the county when they could pick them up and the county paid for the delivery of their children but there was no help in family planning even tho it would have been to everyone’ s advantage had there been. Sharon had wanted to get a diaphragm but with the office call, it was $25 or $250 today’s money. It might as well been 25 million, it was an impossible amount of money. She asked to be sterilized when her last baby was born but because she was young and healthy in 1950 no one would do it, no matter how much she wanted it.
Her fifth child was born unattended at home. Sharon’s husband was in jail for taking scrap metal to sell and she did not have the $10 for his bail. She needed him at home but at least in jail, he was one less mouth to feed. Two weeks later the new baby was a victim of "crib death", the unexplained malady later classified as SIDS. The baby's death made the news because it was a sad story and people stepped up to cover the baby's burial. It wasn’ t until years later we learned the truth about what happened. Sharon felt she had no choice if she was going to be able to take care of the four she had. Already nursing two babies and unable to afford formula her choices were limited. She suffered from guilt for the rest of her life. I wonder how many crib deaths in those days were desperate mothers smothering a child they didn’ t feel they could care for. It is a fact that when and where abortions are illegal infanticide increases.
Debbie was my school chum and playmate, we lived less than a block from each other. I was an only child and Debbie had a ton of siblings. She was next to the oldest and there were six more below her. It as a big noisy house and her mother always looked tired. It seemed like she was always washing clothes.
Debbie and I had just started third grade when one day she missed school. When I got home I found out Debbie’s mother was dead, she had fallen down the basement stairs.
Debbie and I didn’t talk about it for 20 years. The day Roe made it through the Supreme Court she opened up about that day, Her mother was pregnant with her ninth child, another case of a husband who refused permission for a diaphragm. She couldn’t handle taking care of another child and she decided suicide was the only answer.
She made a noose, attached it to one of the floor joists in the basement, put it around her neck stepping off the top stair into the darkness of the basement. Debbie said the drop didn’t break her neck and she strangled to death, the coroner told her father this was common with hanging. What a horrible way to die, what a horrible reason to die. She never really forgave her father for being oblivious to her mother's needs, he never forgave himself. Debbie and the older children blamed themselves for not helping their mother more. They not only mourned the loss of their mother but a brother or sister they would never know. She talked about how much it would have meant to all her siblings to have their mother growing up, what a terrible waste that hopefully Roe would end.
It was 1969 and a brave group of doctors was performing abortions in LA in defiance of the existing law. They did them on a sliding scale thru the first trimester, the need was great and their business was brisk. Connie was just 15, lived in Oregon along the coast. She had a steady boyfriend but the rest of her life had blown up with the recent divorce of her parents. Then she found out she was pregnant. She was in no position to raise a child, marriage was out of the question and adoption problematic, so it was determined an abortion was the best course of action. Fortunately for Connie, she had been living with her oldest sister who had read about the rogue doctors in LA, Connie wouldn’t be going to a back alley abortionist. She was able to get a quick safe abortion and get birth control information and then returned home in a few days, where she picked up her life.
There are many more stories just among my friends and family. The Pill became widely available in the 60s but many states like my own prohibited unmarried women from accessing birth control of any kind and married women needed their husband’s permission. That ended in 1972 when the Supreme Court (in Baird v. Eisenstadt) legalized birth control for every woman, regardless of marital status. A year later they affirmed a woman's right to an abortion with Roe.
To have autonomy over your own body is the single most basic human right, it is the cornerstone of freedom.