There was no sexual revolution in South St. Louis, not for me or my friends — it was a sexual concentration camp. In the halls of our high school we stumbled around, crazed with sexual hunger, dying of lust. The stench of menstrual blood soaking through nonabsorbent pads, the boys’ and girls’ sweat and cheap cologne forming a cloud of misery, the rough clutching and pushing away of hands in the darkened auditorium — oh, it was terrible. You wanted each other so much, and spent hours, days, plotting a way to almost have sex without having sex, figuring out precisely how far you could go without getting pregnant.



Because getting pregnant was the end. No, this is not about back-alley abortions, I’m sure you’ve heard about that, and the knitting needles and coat hangers and lye sprays used to end pregnancy. We actually didn’t know what abortion was, because nobody you ever knew had ever had one. […]



Then we heard that abortion was legal in London, England, and our committee helped a girl to collect enough money to fly there. Then, soon after, we heard it was legal in New York. Our little committee had found professors, ministers, and even one doctor who believed women should have the choice of having an abortion. They, the adults, formed the Clergy Consultation Service. It was all very serious and sorrowful and sacred. We counseled girls, helped them get their pregnancy test from the one kind doctor, Dr. Pfeffer, bless him forever, and if they were pregnant — AFTER discussing all the alternatives with the liberal ministers in a circle, alternatives that were relatively shitty (leaving college, going to a home, having the baby somewhere, giving it up for adoption, or having it, usually as a single mother, with zero help from unforgiving relatives and doomed to hang out with hippie mothers in the park playing with naked babies and dogs with bandanas), then we would help her take up a collection from all of her friends, maybe even get some cash from the guy, and one of us would drive her to Lambert Field in St. Louis, where she would fly to a clinic in New York, and return, unpregnant, usually in pretty good shape, and being given lots of supportive counseling afterwards because of the guilt thing.



Then it was legal in Kansas. I drove so many girls, leaving before dawn to get to a small clinic in a run down part of Kansas City, Kansas. I can’t remember all their names, and only a few faces, but I remember the books I read while I waited all day for them to be counseled again, to sign the form that said they had physical or mental health reasons for an abortion, to show their permission slip from the kind doctor, to be tested again, to have their procedure, and to be counseled again. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. The Second Sex. Feminine Mystique. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson. The Bell Jar. The Complete Poems of W. H. Auden. The Complete Poems of Dylan Thomas. Catch-22. Love Story. Therese Desqueroux. Madame Bovary. The Condition of Man. Jane Eyre. King Lear. The Religions of Man. On Aggression. The Double Helix. You might say my college education took place in the abortion clinic waiting room.