The Shocking Impact of an Ancestor ’ s Secret Abortion

BY MICHAEL MILLENSON When my siblings and I were young, we were fascinated by my father’s Uncle Byron. Handsome and confident, he drove a big, 1960s-era Chrysler Imperial, had a glamorous job — an executive at a Baltimore radio station — and radiated panache. He also was part of a small family mystery. His father, Louis, was married three times, and Byron was raised by Wife № 3. But he was the biological child of Wife № 2, who died just a few years after his birth from an unknown cause. Thanks to some persistent genealogical research, I recently discovered that cause: Annie Millenson had a botched abortion, and it killed her. It also destroyed her surviving family. Following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and the resulting deluge of state anti-abortion laws, I took a closer look at my family story. I not only found unsettling signs of how the past can, indeed, be prologue, I also discovered why abortion could be an integral part of your family’s story, too ­– you just don’t know it. In the last part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th, with contraception unreliable and childbirth dangerous, women of all social classes and religions (including Catholics) sought abortions. With an estimated two million abortions each year, “abortion was part of life,” writes Leslie J. Reagan, a University of Illinois professor, in the 1979 book, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine and Law in the Un...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy Public Health Dobbs Michael Millenson Roe vs. Wade Source Type: blogs