At 75 I have lived a lot of life, coming of age before Roe or The Pill. My previous diary dealt with the dangers of abortion when they were neither safe nor legal. There were still a great many women with unplanned or unexpected pregnancies who had their babies because their options were so limited. The stories and the women are real, some are relatives, some are friends but this was their life before Roe.
Thoren and her husband lived and farmed in Oppland Norway, it was their dream to come to America. Her husband’s younger brother had been sent ahead to homestead 160 acres in Nebraska. He had written them about how fertile the land was and how they needed to come ahead as he had built a small sod house. In 1873 the passage to America had been significantly shortened by the advent of the steam engine, months were now shortened to a little more than a week. With great expectations, they booked passage for themselves and their seven children.
Thoren was pregnant with her eighth child and while the timing as less than optimum they felt they could make the trip safely, arriving in plenty of time for their new baby to be born in Nebraska, an American citizen. Like most immigrants they were in steerage, the deck sandwiched between the main deck and the cargo hold. It was crowded with other immigrants, mostly Norwegian like themselves.
On April 3, 1873, the Norwegian owned steamship St Olaf left Bergen with 500 immigrants in steerage, among them Thoren and her family, headed for New York. Thoren’s family was split into two compartments next to each other, she had the younger children. Their meals were served on tables set along the passageway her husband brought back meals for her and the younger ones.
On day four, in mid-Atlantic, Thoren went into labor. It was too early at seven months, she took to bed in hopes the labor would stop. Among the immigrants were several midwives and Thoren’s husband found one to help her. Shortly before supper, the child who would be forever known as “Little Olaf” was born. He was impossibly small but eager to live. The midwife helped Thoren fashion a sling so she could carry Little Olaf next to her skin, under her clothes to keep him warm. The next morning the ship’s surgeon came down to steerage to check Thoren and the baby. Thoren was fine and her milk was coming in, Little Olaf was trying to nurse but the doctor held little hope for his survival.
They landed in New York and took the Rail Road all the way to Lincoln Nebraska where her brother in law met them. Little Olaf spent his one month birthday in his cradle (made by his uncle) in the soddy on their own land in Nebraska.
Little Olaf survived and in his own way he thrived. He was blind and probably had cerebral palsy, he never spoke and was very undersized for his age. In a family picture taken 1878 the year before Little Olaf died, he was in basket type chair and looked to be a toddler, his arms and legs drawn up. What we know about Little Olaf’s short life is his siblings adored him, his mother was devoted to him and we know from family letters his life was happy. Little Olaf died early in 1879 and Thoren had another child at Christmas time that year. She went on to have four more. They lived through the hoards of locusts and droughts, thrived and never forgot Little Olaf.
Clara lived on a large wheat farm in the Red River Valley, in 1889 she was 13 and beginning to turn into a young lady. Late in August, the combining crews came down from Manitoba to harvest the wheat. It was quite a sight to see, the combines stretching in a line in a field being pulled by big teams of mules. It was a busy time, cooking for the thrashing crews. She enjoyed serving the crews, learning about life in Manitoba. She struck up a real friendship with a boy in the crew who was helping with the mules. He was 15 and traveled all over with the combines.
They had promised to write, but of course, that didn’t happen and when it was discovered she was pregnant a few months later there was no way to contact him. Clara’s father only wanted the boy to beat him for despoiling his daughter, not for marriage. Clara was too young to be a mother or wife. Clara herself didn't want a baby, she was old enough to remember her when younger siblings were born and the whole process terrified her.
There was a family meeting, there were very few choices, of course, they would try what they could to abort the baby but that was not a sure thing. It was decided with winter coming on and the family sticking close to home they might be able to convince people Clara’s mother had had the baby, leaving Clara still a wholesome young woman.
Clara was due the end of May, it was fortunate her grandmother was a midwife. Clara’s water broke and she started labor on the 30th, it was unseasonably cold and rainy. 48 hours later with the baby in a breech position, in this case, knees first and after spending the previous 24 hours trying the painful procedure of repositioning the baby Clara’s life was ebbing away, Her grandmother was at the limits of her knowledge and felt Clara needed to get to the hospital in Grand Forks 2 hours away by buggy.
Clara and her baby wrapped warmly on the back seat of the buggy, her mother and grandmother close by, slipped away before they reached the hospital. Even if they had been in time, there was no help there for Clara or her baby. The family returned to the farm, quietly buried Clara and her baby in the family plot. Her father said a few words but there was no funeral, no headstone for more than 20 years, the shame and grief were so great.
Childbirth was a brutal business well into the 20th century. My children were born in 1965 and 1968, there was no epidurals or pain killers of any kind. It wasn’t until my last baby anyone was talking about Lamaze. It isn’t that these procedures weren’t known, it is that not every hospital or doctor used them routinely and unless you lived in a large city or where there was a hospital specializing in women’s needs it is unlikely you would get the most current treatment. Cesareans without anesthetics were common until near the turn of the century. Even if pain killers were used, the new mother had to get past the very real possibility of infection. If women actually thought about all the implications and dangers of having a child we may have died out as a species.
My great grandmother Helen was a baby-making machine, she had twelve living children, right in the middle, she had a little boy with blond curly hair who was too big to be born. Helen married at age 12 and had her first baby at 13 and her last 37. She also had the “sugar disease” and diabetes wasn’t understood in 1905. Her diabetes certainly contributed to the large baby.
Helen's predicament wasn't rare, many women carried babies they were unable to birth for a variety of reasons, size being one and poor nutrition growing up which left their birth canal too small. It was common enough there was a procedure and instrument designed just for it.
Craniotomy had been practiced for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years. This unhappy procedure involved the destruction (by instruments such as the crotchet) of the fetal skull and the piecemeal extraction of the entire fetus from the vagina. Although this was a gruesome operation, it entailed far lower risk to the mother than attempts to remove the fetus through an abdominal incision.
In some cases, it was horrific if the baby presented other than head first. This was all done without anesthesia because women were expected to feel pain in childbirth it was their punishment for Eve eating the apple. Helen had a regular midwife who knew her well enough to know when it was time to call the doctor. My grandmother was 3 and had vivid memories of the screams from the main floor bedroom and the doctor rushing into the house. The doctor quickly determined that the baby’s head was way too big for Helen to deliver and he used the crotchet. With the head reduced in size, the next hurdle was the shoulders, also too big so he was forced to break the baby's shoulders. After he managed to wrap the baby up in such a way it looked presentable and its unfortunate journey into the world wasn't immediately apparent. Helen kept one of his blond curls in a locket. He wasn’t named but he was never forgotten either. Helen went on to have six more children.
My best friend’s mother Margaret was born in 1918, she was adopted. She knew very little about her birth family, other than they were poor. Years later we were going through a box of papers that had actually belonged to Margaret’s adopted mother and in those papers, we found the story of her adoption.
Margaret’s mother Chloe was 24 with three little boys. Her husband had a job and they lived in a small town about 60 miles away. Chloe got the Spanish Flu, but she was also pregnant and close to her delivery date. It was believed the flu came from her brother who recently returned from WWI, coming through Ft Riley Kansas the flu epicenter in the US. Chloe was hospitalized and it became clear she wasn’t going to recover, the doctor suggested a cesarian section in an effort to save the baby. Chloe’s husband agreed. Margaret was born near full-term and named Chloe after her mother who passed away the next day.
With three motherless boys at home, Chloe’s husband thought it best to adopt out the baby. He ran an ad in the paper of the largest town in the state. Margaret’s parents answered the ad and their attorney drew up the papers. There was a letter from her father among the papers, one we are sure she never saw. It expressed his grief about losing her mother, how she was wanted but he couldn’t take care of her and wished her to have the best possible life. As it turned out she did have so many advantages he could never have given her.
In an unexpected revelation, we found after Margaret married, her birth brother Lowell was her neighbor for many years and neither of them knew. She even met her birth father and never knew it. Looking back Margaret greatly resembled Lowell, but it never occurred to anyone, Margaret knew she was adopted but Lowell had been told his little sister died with his mother.
We expect men to be sexual, but women were too. My grandmother was a “wild child” and her six sisters weren’t afraid to explore their sexuality either. She was born in 1902, my grandfather was nine years older. When he returned from WWI in 1918 he found work on her family farm and later moved to a neighboring farm. What happened between 1918 and 1921 when they married is murky at best. Grandpa had been hospitalized for shell shock (PTSD) in 1919 but returned and this may have been when they got together. In 1920 he was hospitalized again for TB and was gone for nearly eight months. When he returned that spring grandmother was near term with my mother, I don’t think the pregnancy was a shock or surprise because the first thing they did was get married, March 18, 1921. My mother was born on March 21, 1921.
While life wasn’t easy grandpa took his responsibilities seriously. He also made sure grandma was having babies every three years not every year and they stopped after three. I believe the surest expression of his love for grandma is he didn't expose her to the real dangers of constant pregnancies. It was the beginning of the modern family, her sisters also spaced their children.
Maud and Dewey married in 1910 and she immediately got pregnant. The pregnancy didn’t go well and their baby came early and was stillborn. They wanted children, a family and as an elementary school teacher, it was particularly painful to Maud. They had been told it was unlikely Maud could have another child, but they prayed and tried and finally after nearly 25 years Maud was pregnant for the second time. At 45 Maud was at the upper age for motherhood and today would be a high-risk pregnancy. In 1934 obstetrics was still grouped with surgery and mothers went to their regular doctor who called the obstetrician/surgeon to deliver the baby.
Maud went into labor that summer, right on time. Dewey took her to the hospital where they expected it to take some time, similar to a first baby. Her regular doctor visited early and decided it would be that evening at the soonest, call him when she got close and he would check and send for the obstetrician. Maud’s labor went fast and there was no one there to deliver the baby, well there was, any one of the nurses could have but didn’t. Instead, they held her legs together to keep the baby from being born. Eventually, the obstetrician got there but it was too late, Maud had lost so much blood and the baby was dead. Maud died the next morning.
Barbaric and as dangerous as it is, holding a mother’s legs together to prevent birth was a common practice. Women routinely died of blood loss, stroke and organ failure in a long line of preventable causes.
By the 40s things were looking up for women. Planned Parenthood had expanded to hundreds of locations throughout the country. WWII led to more growth, as women out of necessity entered the workforce and became the heads of households. In cities and towns where they didn’t have an office, they tried to find at least one doctor who would provide family planning and birth control on a sliding scale. The armed forces also made condoms available, not for birth control but to stop the spread of venereal diseases which were rampant. None the less there was a boom in war babies being born out of wedlock, in part because birth control was legally unavailable to single women. In Australia young women purposely got pregnant thinking it would be a ticket to the USA.
In 1940 my friends Eldon and Zoe were living in a big house across from the local hospital, they rented rooms to the nurses. They had no children and the nurses became Zoe’s brood. Eldon had an interesting story, being one of the children on the Orphan Trains that flowed from the East Coast to heartland farm communities for more than seventy-five years. He was seven years old when he was "relocated", brought to a small town theatre to be "auctioned" off for farm help. History says he was an orphan and they were looking for foster families, Eldon will tell you that wasn't true. He was the last child left, no one wanted him, small dirty. looking like a trapped animal. There was a family there who had come hoping to find a girl about the same age as their daughter, there were none, but they kept watching this little boy who tugged at their hearts. In the end, they took him home, not to a farm but to a big fancy house in town.
Eldon’s new parents were older than most, their children were grown with the exception of Zoe who was five, a mid-life surprise and only daughter. Eldon and Zoe were close enough in age they became constant companions and by the time Eldon had been there a few years, he was happily announcing he was going to grow up and marry Zoe, who apparently approved of the plan. Eldon worked at his father’s Diamond REO dealership in high school, learning the business. When he returned from college, he took over the business, his father retired and he and Zoe married.
They never had children although it was something that represented family to them, the Orphan Trains hadn’t been to their town in a long time. The weather Christmas eve 1940 was cold but not too cold, big snowflakes were falling. The nurses who roomed with them were all working, the hospital was virtually empty, an unusual occurrence even in a small town. About 11 PM a young woman stumbled into the front lobby and collapsed. The nurses ran to assist her and found her in advanced labor and there was nothing to do but literally deliver the baby right there on the floor of the lobby.
She smiled when she saw her baby and asked them to take good care of him and passed away. The nurses had a real dilemma on their hands, the young mother had no identification, not even her clothes gave any clue to where she might have come from. Then there was the baby, they seemed to come to the same solution simultaneously, take the baby to Eldon and Zoe. In the end, the birth certificate was registered late, made out with Eldon and Zoe listed as parents. Illegal yes, but in those days a great many births never got registered at all. The young mother who was never identified was buried at the expense of the county and life went on.
Eldon bought a marker for the anonymous grave that said: “Beloved Mother died December 24, 1940”. Eldon and Zoe thought the baby was meant to be theirs, certainly, a gift from God. The little boy was the greatest joy in their lives and grew up to make his parents proud.
1950 our neighbor was assaulted by someone of a different race, the rapist was never found. They were a nice young family with a daughter my age and two younger boys. They were active in their church, she taught Sunday School. After the assault, the church was a source of strength and understanding for them. I imagine when she found out she was pregnant she thought it was her husband’s. When the baby, a little girl was born she didn't look like either parent or any of their other children, she was the result of the rape. To their credit, the child caused no issues in their little family but did in their church.
It didn’t take long for the whisper campaign to start, and it quickly devolved to her cheating on her husband and the rape was a lie. One wonders what kind of people would do something like that, but then they couldn’t deal with dark skin in their midst. Within a year they were driven not only out of the church but out of town.
I chuckle when people wish for the return of the “good old days”, as a woman and a mother I’ll take a hard pass thank you.
100 Years Before Roe/abortion