{"id":32268,"date":"2020-10-24T00:01:09","date_gmt":"2020-10-24T07:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=32268"},"modified":"2020-10-24T00:01:09","modified_gmt":"2020-10-24T07:01:09","slug":"unplanned-pregnancy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/unplanned-pregnancy\/","title":{"rendered":"Unplanned Pregnancy? I Wasn’t as Alone as I Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"unplanned-pregnancy-stories<\/a><\/p>\n

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

It was the late 1960s, I was a single woman living on my own in New York City, I thought I might be pregnant, and I thought I was alone.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t.<\/p>\n

All over the country, women and men that I had known in the past or would meet in the future were also living in fear of unexpected pregnancies.<\/p>\n

They were pregnant. Or their girlfriend was pregnant. Or they were haunted by the possibility of a pregnancy outside of marriage at a time and place when abortion was not legal and single motherhood was a scandal.<\/p>\n

I posted a story last week describing the isolation and fear I felt as an unmarried woman living in New York City faced with the possibility of an unplanned pregnancy.<\/p>\n

In the days following the publication of that story,\u00a0 “Unmarried and Pregnant in Mid-Century America,”<\/a> I heard from dozens of friends and colleagues. They were high school classmates, college dormmates and colleagues from my newspapering days.<\/p>\n

More Than One Unplanned Pregnancy<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Many sent emails of support and concern. Others had stories of their own to tell.<\/p>\n

Many told of illegal abortions in places like Puerto Rico and Mexico. Others told of traveling to another state — as I had feared I’d have to do — to wait out the pregnancy and give up the child for adoption.<\/p>\n

I wrote the story partly in response to the death of that great advocate<\/a> for women’s rights, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and to the subsequent nomination to the Supreme Court of a judge who seems to have a different view of women’s reproductive rights, Amy Coney Barrett.<\/p>\n

But mostly I wrote it because I wanted to do something toward dispelling the secrecy and shame that women have suffered because of an unplanned pregnancy — in the U.S. during the ’60s and around the world for millennia.<\/p>\n

More about my high school in the suburbs of Detroit at\u00a0“High School Revisited: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same — Only Different.”<\/a>\u00a0 Some thoughts on modern-day marriage at “Would My Husband Like to Add My Name to His?”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"unplanned-pregnancy\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was the late 1960s, and I was a single woman living on my own in New York City facing the possibility of an unplanned pregnancy.\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,30],"tags":[601,2373,34,2134,2377,2364,2378],"class_list":["post-32268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-case-of-the-human-condition","category-my-changing-family","tag-abortion","tag-amy-coney-barrett","tag-dont-miss","tag-new-york","tag-pregnant","tag-ruth-bader-ginsburg","tag-unwanted-pregnancy-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}