“The abortion was a life-altering experience. It
felt very self-determining and self-affirming.”
Loretta Ross
Had an abortion in 1970
When Ms. Ross became pregnant at age 14 as a result of incest, her parents considered sending her to Mexico for an abortion. They lived in San Antonio, and they had heard of many girls and women crossing the border to end their unwanted pregnancies. But so many of them never came back. Instead, they placed their daughter in a home for unwed mothers and encouraged her to give the baby up for adoption.
“The home was a compound behind really tall walls with barbed-wire fencing,” Ms. Ross recalled. “I was the only black girl that I could see there.”
“We did no gossiping, no giggling, no exchanging of stories about what had happened to us,” she said of the 20 or so other girls who were in the home. “It was like we had all taken vows of silence.”
She remembers the message from staff being: “We were bad girls, because that’s what got us in the compound, but if you just do what we say, then you can come back and become good girls again.”
Ms. Ross decided not to put the baby up for adoption after all. Not long after she had her son, she went to Howard University in Washington, where she became vice president of her class.
She became pregnant again at age 16, and this time, she knew she wanted to get an abortion. Abortion was by then available in the District of Columbia, but she needed parental permission. Ms. Ross’s mother wanted her to drop out of college instead.
“By the time I had gone through all the fighting with my mom, and all the delays, I was in my third trimester,” said Ms. Ross. “I had to have a saline abortion, where they inject this huge — it felt like a mile long — needle into your stomach, and induce labor.”
It turns out she had been pregnant with twins. “I could have conceivably been a mother with three kids at 16,” Ms. Ross said. “And all I can do is thank God that that abortion was available to me in 1970, because otherwise my story would have had a vastly different ending.”
