A Wee Abortion in the Sixties
In 1963, when she was twenty years old, my sister had an abortion.
Vivian and Nicole
In 1963, when she was twenty years old, my sister had an abortion. The circumstances were unusual. Vivian was a vibrant, gorgeous charismatic girl, very high strung, prone, already at her age, to drama, dark schemes and vendettas. I was four years younger and for most of my life had been terrified of her because of her outsized personality and the jealous rages that were frequently directed at me. When Vivi joined our parents on a ski trip to Davos, Switzerland, I — a junior in high school — was pleased to have her out of the house.
Vivi was to spend a week in Davos, returning home a few days before my parents. As far as we knew, she was a virgin, a fact she wasn’t shy about advertising or musing over. On the second day of the trip, she had a private lesson with a ski instructor whom she immediately formed a crush on. He was a ruggedly handsome Italian and he must have woken something in her soul because that night she agreed to visit him in his apartment. Where she had sex with him. The only detail of this she related to me was that, to her horror, there was a crib beside the bed where he took her virginity — his wife and baby were out of town for a few days. She didn’t let the crib deter her, but the next morning she rushed straight to my parents’ room, telling them what had happened and that she was convinced she was pregnant. Of course, this seemed ridiculous, but she insisted she felt different, already slightly nauseous and weird. My parents, who were amazingly open-minded about the whole thing, told her to relax and enjoy her vacation; her worries would amount to nothing. But they were wrong because Vivi was indeed pregnant.
Abortion was illegal at the time. We lived in New York City where a cut-up body had recently been found in the sewer system due to a botched abortion. Every girl I knew was terrified.
The Pill was in its early stages, so all that was really available were condoms, withdrawal or the diaphragm. (When I myself went to the gynecologist a year later, he insisted that I learn how to use a diaphragm though I wasn’t yet sexually active, a task at which I really sucked at since the thing was so slippery.) My point is, despite what people liked to think back then, teenage girls had the same raging hormones as boys and things happened in the back seats of cars, hidden beneath trees in a park, or on an apartment couch when the parents were out. And those things inadvertently led to pregnancy. Girls who’d had sex with a guy who used a condom that ripped, counted the days till their next period and if it didn’t arrive they were screwed. Some would go to Mexico or Puerto Rico for abortions. Some would use the coat hanger method, sticking god knows what up their vaginas, till they started hemorrhaging, developed fevers, were sent to the hospital. Many died.
Try and find someone who’d perform an abortion in those days. Even though a D&C was a simple procedure, it was illegal and therefore dangerous. My parents didn’t know what to do. They’d emigrated to the States when they fled Hitler Germany in 1938. They were in the art business and theirs was a life of books, music, painting, culture. With the advent of Vivi’s pregnancy, our house was plunged into darkness.
At the time I’m writing about, my sister Vivian, who wanted to become an actress and certainly had the talent to do so, was a junior at Sarah Lawrence College. She had an active, busy life, but with the advent of her pregnancy, she crumbled and shut down. What girl wouldn’t have? An illicit pregnancy in the sixties meant being sent away, shamed, stigmatized, pitied — or, if one was determined, seeking out some most likely shady doctor to perform an abortion.
L: Nicole and Vivian, only a few years before Vivian became pregnant. C: Nicole’s parents, Franyo & Gustave. R: Michael S.
My parents didn’t want to do either of those things. I would hear them murmuring to one another, whispered discussions about whom to consult, who to talk to. My aunt was a pediatrician and our family doctor was a cousin of my mother’s, but I don’t think they approached either with their worries. In the end they consulted my father’s nephew, a man named Michael S., who lived in Zurich.
I had known Michael my whole life. He was over twenty years older than I was, and I didn’t like him, mainly because he had no interest in children and never talked to me. If he was visiting New York and came to dinner, the whole conversation would be in German specifically so I wouldn’t be able to understand the dirty jokes and tales of sexual exploits he was telling.
A tall man with a sort of handsome face and crinkly dark hair, he was known as a womanizer and man about town, moving quickly from girlfriend to girlfriend.
I’ve known several men like him over the years, guys who can’t form long lasting relationships, who quickly grow bored with whomever they’re dating. This is no doubt due to a smothering mother, or some form of neurosis, but it’s also a curse dooming the poor “victim” to a life of loneliness and bitter frustration. (One male friend who confided this problem to me ended up committing suicide; another simply walked out on his wife one day when he went out for a pack of cigarettes, never to get back in touch with her or inform her of his whereabouts.) Michael S. was a little like this, presenting a happy face while, underneath, one could sense feelings of emptiness, possibly even despair. Anyway, he was the person my mother contacted when Vivi fell pregnant.
And he came through, of course he did, because he’d knocked up quite a number of women in his life and had to deal with the consequences.
The person Michael S. suggested to perform my sister’s abortion was a gynecologist on the upper West Side. I never learned his name. He was a German Jew, like my parents, and over the phone he told my mother the cost would be $500, which might not seem like a lot today, but back in 1963 was the equivalent of roughly $4000. I don’t know how my mother broached the subject — probably some guarded German phrase indicating her daughter was in trouble. Nor do I know how he conveyed to her the things she would need to do to get Vivi ready beforehand. This was a time, remember, when abortion was strictly forbidden; doctors could lose their license and go to jail, and so could parents, like mine, who sought them out.
With $500 in cash stuffed in her handbag, my mother escorted my sister to a doctor’s office somewhere in the west eighties. The first thing she realized was that the office opened to a hotel lobby. The second was that the doctor had no nurse to assist him. There would be no anesthesia. Vivian would not be allowed to make any noise, and afterwards she would have to walk out of there as if nothing had happened.
So my mother, who in real life was a painter, had to act as the doctor’s assistant. Her job was to keep Vivi quiet. Not a squeak could come out of her, and to this end they placed a bulky piece of gauze between her teeth for her to bite down on whenever she felt pain.
She’d also been given valium and perhaps a painkiller, but from what I heard there was very little to protect her from the agony that occurs when a spectrum is inserted into the cervix, slowly cranking it wider and wider open to gain access to the uterus and the tiny cluster of cells embedded in one of its walls.
Nicole and Vivian
At most Vivi was six weeks pregnant. She started screaming a little way’s into the procedure and the doctor yelled at my mother in German to for god’s sake shut her up. My mother thrust a hand over Vivi’s mouth. Meanwhile the doctor sweated profusely as he scraped out Vivi’s uterus. The whole thing didn’t take that long, but for the three of them it must have seemed like hours, Vivi moaning and groaning, trying to hold back screams, while the doctor prodded and scraped, and my mother, always good in a crisis, wiped away tears and told Vivi to squeeze her hand as tight as she could. For every minute of that ordeal, they each must have been aware of the hotel lobby on the other side of the door to the doctor’s office.
Vivi was in a lot of pain. My mother made her walk as normally as possible across the lobby to the street where a car was waiting for them. A few days later, my father sat us both down and said, “Look, from now on you girls have to be careful. I cannot — and will not — go through this again.” Well, for several years that put the fear of god in me every time I made out with a boy, or came close to having sex. What if we were playing around and a little bit of sperm somehow got into my vagina? That may sound like a crazy fear, but this was the early sixties and falling pregnant seemed as easy as catching a cold. A lot of my time was spent worrying that what had happened to Vivi would happen to me. It certainly happened to enough of my friends. In the end, I never got caught like that. In 1973, the same year that Roe v. Wade was passed in the Supreme Court, I had my first child, a daughter. And Vivi, who lived large in all matters, went on to have five children. As for abortion… I have a mystical belief that the tiny souls attached to those scraped out fetuses find their way back to the same or other wombs, that a pregnancy that wasn’t meant to be because the mom was too young or too poor or had a condition that would put her life in danger, should not be forced to continue. And that all women should have the choice. Always.
This story was originally published in three parts on artprofiler.com October 20, 2020.
