The Nature of Love

Chapter 12

Copyright (c) 2014 Phyllis Zimbler Miller

All rights reserved.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux publish Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." – August 19, 1968

Jennifer's Story

Cambridge, Massachusetts 1968

         It was my own fault. As the saying goes, I had no one but myself to blame.

         Two months pregnant. By Rusty. Steve and I hadn't had sex in ages.

        I hadn't told Rusty. I certainly hadn't told Steve. For a month I considered seducing Steve, then telling him the baby was his. But I couldn't bring myself to do this.

        Rusty was on his way back to New York, the play over.  We had agreed never to see each other again. And now I had to get rid of the only piece of him remaining. At least he'd never know what I did.

         I picked imaginary lint off my skirt, squeezing my eyes shut against a mental image of what a child of Rusty's and mine might look like.  I told myself that eventually I would have children with Steve – when he would finally decide to fit this into his schedule.

         But what was the matter with me? Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. on October 16, 1916, in Brownsville, Brooklyn.  As a women's history student I had seen the poster announcing the clinic in English, Yiddish, and Italian:

         Can you afford to have a large family?

         Do you want any more children?

         If not, why do you have them?

         DO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE BUT PREVENT

         Safe Harmless Information can be obtained of trained

        Nurses at

       46 AMBOY STREET

       NEAR PITKIN AVE – BROOKLYN  

        What would it have been like to be a poor woman at this time being offered a way out of numerous births?  Would I have had the courage to come to the clinic?

        In my mind's eye I saw Judith, the protagonist of my story.  When this first birth control clinic opened in Brooklyn, she was already in Chicago.

       Once there, would she have chosen an illegal abortion rather than have another child?  And if she had an abortion that went wrong, she risked leaving two motherless children.  I wasn't risking this.  But I was breaking the law.

       I plucked more imaginary lint off my skirt.  I was incredibly lucky – the pill had been approved in 1960 in the U.S. for contraceptive use. Of course, the only drawback was remembering to take it.  Had I gotten pregnant because I purposely forget to take my pills?

       Although I didn't want to tell anyone about my condition, I had to tell someone. I called Laura in Madison. She called someone who called someone who called who knows? The bottom line?  I had ended up sitting in this damp cellar, waiting for my turn.

       If only abortions were legal I would not had to be here feeling like a criminal.

        The woman across from me was the mother of five. A Catholic so no birth control. She had whispered that her husband was unemployed and the children were hungry. The family couldn't feed another one. She hadn't told him. Instead she would carry the burden of this act alone.

       How many people thought an abortion was considered killing even if the fetus wasn't viable yet? 

         Was abortion a sin like adultery?

        I thought of the sotah, the term given by the rabbis to a woman suspected of adultery who underwent the ordeal described in the Torah.

         I personally vacillated between thinking the ritual a very clever way to allay false accusations or a very clever way to punish the women if the ritual resulted in the horrifying consequences. 

         As described in the Bible translation published in 1966 by Dr. J.H. Hertz, the late chief rabbi of the British Empire, a jealous husband was to bring his wife before the priest with the proscribed offering.  The priest mixed dust on the floor of the tabernacle with holy water.  He would say to the woman:

        "If no man have lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness, being under thy husband, be though free from this water of bitterness that causeth the curse.  But if thou hast gone aside, being under thy husband, and thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee besides thy husband."

        The priest would warn the woman that, had she committed adultery, when she drank this water "the Lord doth make thy thigh to fall away, and thy belly to swell."

        The woman would then be made to drink the water of bitterness.  If she had been defiled, the curse would be enacted.  If not, she would be cleared "and shall conceive seed." 

         The conclusion of this section of the Torah was translated as:

        "This is the law of jealousy, when a wife, being under her husband, goeth aside, and is defiled; or when the spirit of jealousy cometh upon a man, and he be jealous over his wife; then shall he set the woman before the Lord, and the priest shall execute upon her all this law.  And the man shall be clear from iniquity, and that woman shall bear her iniquity."

        My hands clenched in my lap – "the woman shall bear her iniquity."  Yes, this seemed very harsh.  And what about the requirement in the ketubah – Jewish marriage contract – that a man had to provide for his wife's food, clothing and conjugal rights?  Where were my conjugal rights when Steve was never available?

        Wasn't my time with Rusty simply a proxy for Steve's obligations? 

        Yet wasn't the Bible's punishment for adultery the same as for murder? Death?

        "Next," the woman who had taken my payment called out.

        I rose from my seat. What if I died from this?

__

If you would also like to read women's fiction that takes place in the future rather than the past, check out THE MOTHER SIEGE here on Wattpad at http://budurl.com/MSintro