CHOICE

I would like to tell a story told to me by a woman who faced a choice long before Roe vs. Wade.

She was not yet seventeen when her first child was born. By the time she turned twenty one she was the mother of four. When she was pregnant with her fifth, she thought another baby would be the straw that broke the camel's back. She told her sister; who made the arrangements.

In the late forties the East Village in New York City was a place for poet and dreamer. Yet also lurking in the shadows was the doer of dirty deeds.

Each step to the fourth floor brought the girls closer to the choice. When they arrived at the third floor, an old woman looked at them with disdain through the crack of the partially opened door, for she knew why they were there.

A young man opened the door, he was almost handsome in a grubby kind of way. To the sisters his effeminate ways would have seemed funny if it was not for the seriousness of why they were there. The place was a pigsty, the stench of old socks was so thick it made the sisters skin feel oily.

He motioned for them to come sit while he filled two glasses to the brim with whiskey. "Drink it all down" he told them. "You will need it."

"I need another drink," the woman said.

He told the sister to wait while he  accompanied the pregnant woman to a back room. As she followed, she turned to look at her sister, both women were crying.

The bedroom smelled worse than the front room as if that was possible. Sitting by the bed was an old man who looked at her above his glasses with piercing blue eyes that floated in reddish brown pools. The collar of his shirt was yellow with sweat and the front had stains that ran down to his belt. He had a bottle in one hand and a Bible in the other.

After the young man placed a rubber sheet on the bed he told the woman to take off her clothes. He looked at her; his eyes dull and passionless as she laid there naked and ashamed. The old man with Bible in hand, kneeled beside the bed and mumbled prayer after prayer as the young man laid out the tools of his trade.

The old man stood up and said "I can't do it today, come back tomorrow."

The young man started shrieking "you old fool, you son-of-a-bitch. you are going to do it and you are going to do it now." With that he slapped the old man..

"I can't, not today. I just can't its not right, something is not right today." The old man was crying as he tries to hug the young man, who pushes him away.


This completely unnerved the woman who grabbed her clothes and fled the apartment never to return.

Once home she still could not bare the thought of another child and threw herself down a flight of stairs.

That woman was my mother and I am now a man who almost never was.