Concord Monitor – Advice: Let’s not go back

Gail DiMaggio lives in Concord.

A friend challenged me to write about reproductive rights because she said, “You’re old enough to remember.” She had a point. Of course, the young never experienced what women faced before Roe. And for many people around my age, the old stories have lost their emotional edge. But I do remember what happened to Julie.

In 1967, my senior year at Connecticut College, Julie lived two doors down in the “coop dorm.” I remember Julie liked to be funny about that and everything else. She would change the sign-up list for kitchen duty by reading “scullery maids,” comparing her scrambled eggs to joint compound, adding a Texan twist (she was from El Paso) to her French recitation. At the same time, she was brilliant, completing high school in three years and speaking three languages ​​with uncanny fluency. She wasn’t beautiful in a conventional way, but there was so much spark in her. So much life.

In January, she fell for a Coast Guard cadet, a first-grader three years older. Julie fell madly in love. She “cherished” everything about him, she told us, his hair, his eyes, his bad French accent. And when the year was over and he left, Julie spent the last few weeks packing for Texas and was sad. She also went full throttle sadly.

In September, I was married, a first-year teacher, and I didn’t even try to reach Julie until a note arrived from her roommate saying they were “having a service.” It took a dozen phone calls to track down the story you’d probably already discovered. Julie had left campus pregnant, met a man at a seedy El Paso hotel for what was called “an alley abortion,” suffered a hemorrhage, and died.

I know some people’s reaction will be something along the lines of, “Well, she shouldn’t have done that.” We all agree, I think. Her friends, her teachers, her family. And I can’t explain why she didn’t tell either of us, or at least her mother, other than a combination of shame and desperation. Maybe she panicked, thinking this pregnancy meant the end of everything she had worked so hard for. Maybe she was right about that, of course.

She was eighteen. She was not yet wise, knowledgeable, or particularly courageous. She was Julie with her big smile and her shining eyes, her impeccable French and her passionate confusion. That Julie. The one we’ll never get back.