Chapter Three of the serially-posted book I’m working on examines the choice most women make after receiving a prenatal diagnosis for Down syndrome: abortion. It begins with my own experience in high school.
“What sounds good?”
“Ice cream sandwiches.”
“Let’s find a convenience store.”
I’m in the rear seat of a friend’s car holding my high school girlfriend. Our friend is driving. My girlfriend has just left our city’s abortion clinic.
She was my first. I didn’t even have my driver’s license; hence, why our friend was driving.
I had met my girlfriend during my freshman year. I prided myself on “batting up.” My brother was a graduating senior, so I was like a mini-version of him for girls who couldn’t date him. We began dating in the fall. One night, in a most unromantic setting—the back of her Ford Escort in a Metro Park—I lost my virginity. In my juvenile, immature, John Hughes-film-filled mind, I had summited the mountain of adolescence.
We continued to be sexually active. Then, after the start of the spring semester, her final semester, she stood at the end of a school hallway with her eyes welling up with tears. When I went to hug her, she whispered, “I’m pregnant.”
While being relatively sexually precocious, I was a reproductive ignoramus. My parents had never had “the talk” with me (or with any of my brothers to my knowledge). Also, despite being raised in the Presbyterian Church, rarely missing a week of service or Sunday School, sex and especially abortion was not openly or even discretely discussed.
I recall finding a book in my middle school science class. This was the class where Sex Ed was first taught. Our teacher was a flamboyantly gay, black man whose first name was “Austin.” I only recall his name because when teaching the periodical table, he offered this mnemonic, “I always remember the elemental symbol for gold because it’s the first two letters of my name: ‘A-U, get back here with my gold!’’”
The book had anthropomorphized locomotives. The male train’s steam tank grew as it became aroused and entered the cavity in the female’s steam tank—a very odd Casey Jones sex-train crash. The tank cars on the male train pumped sperm into the tank cars of the female train with the fertilized egg then traveling down to another freight car labeled the “Womb.”
I kid you not. This is how I learned about conception and reproduction.
Freshman biology class provided a more scientific account of genetics and reproduction. The textbook detailed the Augustinian Monk Gregor Mendel’s experiments with peas to demonstrate dominant and recessive genes. It also had photographs of actual sperm cells penetrating ova to show a fertilized human egg. There may have been pictures or drawings of a developing embryo, but I do not recall that from my formal education.
Aside from these two text-based accounts of human reproduction, the remainder of my knowledge about sex was from talk with my guy friends, the viewings of a few adult movies on VHS, and Anthony Michael Hall’s goal in both Sixteen Candles and Weird Science. The focus of all of these data points, however, was not understanding human conception, the genetic uniqueness of the fetus, whether the fetus had a moral claim to personhood, or the arguments put forth by the pro-life or pro-choice movements. Rather, the goal was expressly to lose your virginity and have sex.
Embarrassingly, the main cultural input that I relied on when deciding what to do now that my girlfirend had told me she was pregnant was the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
For those familiar with the movie, it is likely best known for the debut of Sean Penn as Spicoli, with Mr. Hand, his teacher, explaining the communal nature of ownership in public high school when Spicoli has a pizza delivered. The other most common reference from the movie is the iconic scene of the actress Phoebe Cates getting out of a swimming pool, saying, “Hi Brad. You know how cute I’ve always thought you were,” and then unclasping the front of her bikini while the Cars’ “Moving in Stereo” plays.
The main plot of the movie is a love story between Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character and a geeky, but nice guy who is coincidentally named “Mark.” Like me, Leigh’s character was obsessed with losing her virginity and does so in an equally unromantic setting: with a high school graduate in the dugout of her high school baseball field while, in the background, Jackson Browne sings “She’s Got to Be Somebody’s Baby.”
Having lost her virginity, she begins studying with her classmate Mark, who is surprised at her sexual forwardness and flees her bedroom. Mark’s best friend, who had been a mentor in “cool,” later has sex with Leigh. When, she finds out she’s pregnant, in an almost matter-of-fact conversation with Cates’ character, Leigh’s mentor in sexuality, Leigh decides to have an abortion. I understood the scene as a universal algorithm: if you get pregnant while in high school, then you have an abortion.
And, so that is what my girlfriend and I did. She scheduled the appointment with the clinic. I arranged to have our friend drive us. I borrowed money from friends, and we drove down to the clinic on March 2, 1989, my dad’s 50th birthday. Being so young, I had no job. I ended up cutting every lawn I could find throughout that spring and paid back the loans from friends. My girlfriend and I would continue dating. When she left for college, we tried to maintain a long-distance relationship, but that eventually ended after her first semester.
This was my first-hand experience with abortion. Little did I know that decades later, I would become immersed in examining an issue inextricably intertwined with abortion: prenatal testing for Down syndrome.
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