Could it have been me?

Like many people, I was stunned when the opinion was leaked that may overturn Roe v. Wade. 

I’ve debated whether or not I should write my own opinions about Roe, and I may in future articles. But as I was thinking, I realized there were at least two instances where I could have been in the position many girls/women find themselves in: pregnant with an unexpected baby and no idea what to do next. 

I grew up in the 1970’s. My entire sex education consisted of a Sunday School teacher telling us that “Fornication is WRONG!” and watching a movie in the 5th grade about women’s bodies and periods. My mother also had a hysterectomy when I was 10, and I knew that meant she couldn’t have any more kids. 

I got my period on my 13th birthday, three years after I saw the movie I referred to, and when I told my mother, she said, “Go put a pad on.” That was it. I suspect now that my mother may have gotten even less sex education than I did. Maybe she had “the talk” with her mother. I don’t know, and since my mother is now dead, I can’t ask.

The first time I knew what a penis looked like was when I went with my parents to a school supply store. They’d just opened a day care center and needed certain things for the kids. We passed by a line drawing of a man in silhouette, which included male private parts. I thought, “Oh, so that’s what it looks like.” 

I had my first boyfriend at 16. I’d never been very popular, so it was a pleasant surprise to me that someone was interested in me. We never went beyond holding hands and kissing. It was after one of our first dates, with hugging and kissing, that I noticed my breasts were a bit swollen around the nipple area. 

I didn’t learn until I was in counseling in my 30’s that that was part of the body’s response to being aroused. No one told me.

In thinking about the Roe decision being overturned, and in thinking about my high school relationship, I asked myself, what would I have done if he’d taken off his clothes in front of me? Or taken off my clothes, all the while telling me, it’s okay, we’re in love, this is what people in love do. Or telling me, if you don’t do this, we can’t be boyfriend and girlfriend anymore.

 I probably would have stared at his body in shock, given that, at 16, I had never seen a man naked. I might have put my foot down and said “no”. Or, perhaps, being as naive as I was, and wanting to keep a boyfriend, I might have gone along with him.

In the movie I mentioned, I did learn about a woman’s egg being released from the Fallopian tube. But I don’t recall the movie saying that “if you have sex at a specific time during your cycle, you can get pregnant.” In fact, I don’t even remember when I learned that part of “having sex” means “insert penis into vagina”. 

In other words, I was very naive at 16, and could have been coerced into having sex. I could have had sex at the proper time in my cycle. I could have been a teenager who’d gotten pregnant due to her lack of knowledge. 

And I could have been a teenage girl who would have either been a single parent, given up a baby for adoption, or chosen to have an abortion. 

Fast forward to 1981. I was in college, 17 going on 18, lonely, looking for friends. I lived in a co-ed dorm (boys on some floors, girls on others) and a boy I barely knew said he’d drop by my room later. My roommate was not there. 

We both laid down on my roommate’s bed, me on top of him. I told him that I wasn’t going to have sex before I was married, and he said, “That’s okay. There’s lots of other things we can do.” We kissed and hugged, and that was all. No one took any clothes off. 

I felt guilty and ashamed the next day, and I remember taking my diary and going off campus to write about what had happened. 

Soon afterwards, I started going to a Bible study and was eventually baptized into the denomination I now belong to. (The specific congregation I was baptized into was not a healthy church. That is a subject for another article.) 

What if the guy had decided he wanted to do more than kiss and hug? What if he’d very gently taken off my shirt, and my bra, and told me that “this is something else we can do without having sex”? What if he’d then taken off his clothes? Suppose, in the middle of arousal and passion, we really had had sex? 

Again, I might have found myself in the position of being pregnant and not knowing what to do, and this time, I would not have had a support system at all. I was new in college, and this episode happened about a month or so after I’d started. 

I could have been that girl who had an abortion to keep my family from knowing what had happened. 

I’m nearly 60 now. I’m married and I have a child, so obviously, I figured out how this sex thing worked. :-) My husband and I were both virgins when we got married. We had some good pre-marital counseling along the way and listened to some tapes about the sexual relationship. I’d also read two Christian books about sex, The Act of Marriage by Tim LaHaye and Celebration In the Bedroom, by Charles and Martha Shedd. 

But my knowledge about sex before that was limited, and my naivete left me open to possible sexual exploitation. I wasn’t taught how my body worked, how certain parts got aroused, when a woman was likely to get pregnant. My religious background taught me that you weren’t supposed to have sex before marriage, and you weren’t even supposed to think about having sex, because if you even thought about sex or having sex, you were committing lust. No one told me that curiosity about sex was normal. No one told me that attraction to people was part of how hormones worked. 

I was married by the time “purity culture” had its heyday, so I wasn’t exposed to the lessons basically shaming girls if they had sex as teenagers, and telling girls that they were responsible for controlling boys’ lust by “dressing modestly”. 

I’m very good at getting on my high horse about what *I* did/didn’t do before I got married, “and look at me now! I did the right thing!”

But, as a teenager, my lack of knowledge about sex, and my naivete, could have gotten me into situations I wasn’t equipped to handle. 

More than ever, after hearing/seeing the stories about girls/women who’d had abortions, or who’d been raped, or had gotten pregnant as the result of a relationship, I realize that this could have been me. 

I could be the person talking about my abortion, or how I had to leave college to raise a child, or how I gave a baby away for adoption. 

It could have been me.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.