Letty Cottin Pogrebin was a cheerleader throughout her time at Brandeis.
Rather Than Live in Disgrace, ‘I Decided To Kill Myself’
COURTESY OF LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN (LEFT); KENNETH C. ZIRKEL
I
Abortion in the pre-Roe v. Wade era | By Letty Cottin Pogrebin
seemed to have missed the memo on contraception, an ignorance partly attributable to my deceased mom not being there to explain ovulation and partly to the fact that I trusted street myths like, “You can get pregnant from sperm on a toilet seat, but you can’t get pregnant if you do it standing up.” Had Mom lived, I probably would not have confided in her, anyway; talking about sex would have embarrassed us both. Like many Jewish mothers of her generation, her medical specialty was constipation and her all-purpose cure was a warm water enema. Everything else in the physical realm fell beyond her purview. All of which explains
why I was dumb enough to have sex without a condom and get pregnant in 1958, the fall of my senior year at Brandeis University. At that point, all I knew about abortion was that it was illegal and it cost hundreds of dollars, money I did not have. So, despite being paralyzed with fear and shame and anticipating his deep disapproval, I told my father, a proudly pragmatic but emotionally unavailable lawyer, that I was pregnant and I wanted an abortion. He didn’t try to talk me out of it. He didn’t ask me who the boy was. He didn’t lecture or scold me. (Neither did he comfort me.) He just told me he would take care of it. I have no idea how—maybe there was a Jewish JULY/AUGUST 2022
mafia in Queens, N.Y., where I grew up—but he found a gynecologist not far from his apartment in Jamaica who performed the procedure in the dead of night. It cost $350 ($3,500 in today’s money), and I paid him back every cent from my hourly wage (working for Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, then the rabbi at Brandeis Hillel). For the remaining 25 years of my father’s life, neither of us ever mentioned that episode again. It would have shamed us both. In 1991, I went public with my illegal abortion in a column published in The New York Times Magazine. I intended to rebut those who, without regard for our bodies, health, feelings or circumstances,
I 20 I hadassahmagazine.org
