Battles With Birth Control

        Pregnancy was a condition I tried to avoid, but my body would thwart me. The only truly, 100% successful form of birth control that I had experienced was The Pill. It protected me throughout my sexually active teenage years, but those were the early days of its use–late 1950s into the 1960s–and the hormone levels were so high they began to affect the pigmentation of my skin causing what was referred to as “the mask of pregnancy.” I looked like a racoon, darkly pigmented skin had formed around my eyes, so I quit using the hormone charged pill. My skin gradually regained its uniform tone. It remains to be seen if this will impact my health as I creep toward old age.
	When the pill was no longer an option, and my husband and I were newly married, we used condoms. That's when I first got pregnant and freaked, not surprising considering I was young and dealing with his two kids from a previous marriage, plus an abortion horror story. It happened in 1970 when abortion was illegal in Massachusetts. Thanks to having a dear friend who was a nurse in a hospital in Philadelphia who told me they that performed abortions for women in state who were judged to be in a precarious mental state of mind. She let me use her address and coached me to act like a lunatic in front of the entirely male board of doctors in that hospital who made those life altering judgements–resulting–after significant trauma and lying about my residence–in the outcome I had wanted. I survived, relatively unscathed, which is more than some of my friends can say.   
        After the abortion, I discovered diaphragms, got fitted for one and used it every time my husband and I had sex. It was awful. It took all the joy out of lovemaking. My struggles in the bathroom to insert the rubbery thing as it slipped through my fingers and boomeranged off the walls was frustrating to say the least, but the fear of pregnancy was a motivator, so we used the diaphragm. I got pregnant again. This time, it was too late to take any action and the story of the subsequent birth–admittedly joyful– of my perfect daughter–can be saved for another place and time. Apparantly I inserted the diaphragm incorrectly, putting it in backwards, but who knew? Those clever sperm knew.
	From then on, my husband and I resorted to condoms plus spermicides etc., and I watch my menstrual cycle to not have sex in my peak time. After my marriage dissolved, my husband and I shared custody of our much-loved daughter. I felt free to have multiple simultaneous relationships. I met my first lover, Robin, in the last months of my marriage and I got a little careless. My lust for him was so strong that in those most intense moments of orgasm my body said "I want to have your baby" but my brain knew this would not have been a great idea. We used spermicides and timing. With Bill, a fellow academic who I met on the job at the Art Institute of Boston, condoms were the method of choice. It was during this period that despite all my efforts to the contrary, I got pregnant again. Now I am 35-years-old, practicing visual artist, with a prestigious job in academia. The details of that are not relevant to the story I am telling here, but I’m sure many other feminist leaning women of my generation who became enlightened in the 1970s can relate. That I could not be sure who was responsible for this pregnancy (besides me) was problematic. I did not tell Robin about this predicament as he would have been a flight risk. I did tell Bill, he was the more sensitive, caring one and if he thought he was responsible, he would help me do whatever I needed, or wanted to do. He would also have been pleased if I had decided to have a baby that he thought was his. For me, that was out of the question. One of the worst tricks a woman can pull on a man is to sucker him into believing a baby might be his, just for financial and emotional support. Not love. Some have done it, but it's more difficult these days with DNA testing. Now women get caught. The repercussions ruin lives.
	I opted for another abortion. Then, the year was 1982, almost 10 years after Roe V Wade, and it was legal in Boston meaning I no longer had to lie or travel to another state or country to have what finally was determined to be a legal, medical procedure that a women could determine if she wanted it or not, even without a referral from her primary care physician. I made an appointment at a clinic on Huntington Ave, in downtown Boston, not far from the Museum of Fine Arts on the Fenway, where I often took my art students. It was very early in the pregnancy so they could do what is known as a suction aspiration abortion. It sounds exactly like what it is. A vacuum device is used to suck the small amount of growing tissue out of your body. Bill drove me to the clinic. 
 	Walking through the floor to ceiling glass doors of the street level entry way, my mind was focused on the task ahead. There were no protesters outside this clinic like there are outside most other clinics in the United States where the procedure is still performed today. Growing up with a lack of religious experience, and little parental affection, the morality of my decision in this reproductive arena never entered my consciousness. Emotionless, I’d been here before. 
The room was spotless. Glaringly bright, sun-filled, and airy, the atmosphere was surreal. The waiting room was packed with young woman of every color. At 35, I was one of the oldest. It felt like an assembly line. A female nursing assistant explained the procedure in detail, very matter of fact. You filled out some forms and waited. We were told it would only take a few minutes; we could rest a bit after the procedure, with little privacy in a group recovery room, and then go home. The men who were partially responsible for our various pregnancies did not have to be involved. Their permission was not required. It was solely our own to make. Bill waited outside in the car.
     We didn't even have to take off all our clothes. I was ushered into a large, mostly empty room with no art or framed anatomy charts on the walls and told just to remove my skirt and underpants and lay down on the shiny steel table in the center of the room. With my feet firmly in the stirrups at the foot of the table, knees spread, I never felt so vulnerable. The assistant laid a white sheet across my knees that also covered my lower body. I could not see what was going on. The male doctor, wearing a white coat, came in, all business. No chit-chat. No looking in the eye or addressing me by name. There would be no anesthesia. The clinic was geared for short term, outpatient procedures. They wanted us to go home as soon as possible, and anesthesia requires a longer recovery time, is an added expense and an added risk factor. The doctor warned, “you will feel some pain.” My muscles tensed. An unaccustomed feeling of fear coursed through my entire body. I had to fight the urge to get up and run. A large piece of metallic looking equipment was wheeled into the room. The doctor leaned towards it and a whirring sucking sound like some monstrous thing I’d never heard before flooded the room. Suddenly, the most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my entire life, way worse than childbirth itself, seared my body. I screamed. I thought I would die. It seemed to go on forever, then the whirring stopped, and the doctor said matter-of-factly like he’d just finished vacuuming the carpet, "All done, you can get up now." GET UP???????? I couldn't move. I thought I'd died and was now in purgatory. The nurse brought me some pads for the blood oozing out of what felt like a cavern carved out of my lower body and let me lie there a few minutes to pull myself together. She returned, urging me to get dressed and encouraged me to sit in the recovery room with the other girls. I carefully slid off the table, went to the bathroom to clean myself up, then hobbled over to what looked like an airport lounge. None of the girls looked too good. There was no talking, no interaction. We were each in a private world of pain of various kinds. Complex walls of guilt, fear, relief, and loneliness separated us. Luckily for me, kind, sweet Bill escorted me home. Many of the other women had to catch a bus or ride the subway home alone. 
        There was only one form of birth control left to try (abstinence was not on my radar screen), the intra-uterine device, or IUD. My history of failure with everything else was discouraging. There were several types of these contraptions, different shapes, and sizes. My primary care doctor (all the doctors in my life, including this one, have been male) explained the pros and cons. Or so I thought. He recommended a copper devise that according to him “was as close to 100% effective as you could get.” The beauty of this method was that there were no hormones fooling your body - no need to remember taking a pill, nothing to interrupt the passion of the moment. Once inserted in your uterus, it just sat there, preventing pregnancy, until you decided to have it removed. Sounded simple and straight forward enough. So, I went for it.
	Richard, a third partner I had added to my sexual repertoire, and I, were now sleeping together several times a week with the other nights divided between Bill and Robin. The pure pleasure I found in touching, smelling, and tasting the flesh of each of these men bound them to me and added to my sense of well-being. It was as necessary and natural to me as breathing, but I was still juggling schedules. The only one who knew everything about everybody else was Richard.
	My days now working as the Dean of Admissions at the Art Institute of Boston were hectic. The school had acquired a new building and my office was scheduled to move from Kenmore Square, a stone’s throw from historic Fenway Park to the new location a few blocks further away on Beacon Street. We had just graduated one of our largest classes ever, and applications for the fall were pouring in. Managing the personal and professional demands of my busy life required my full attention. I had also been sharing the parental duties of my much loved, now teenaged daughter, with my former husband.
	Change has always energized me. I look forward to the unknown. I had faith in the future, and what Richard always said was my irrational self-confidence in my ability to navigate the world as opportunities presented themselves. But this time something was drastically wrong. My appetite had disappeared. I was having frequent bouts of weakness and nausea. I went to see my doctor. At this point I had the best medical care of my life so far. I was a member of one of the earliest and most respected H.M.Os in the country–the Harvard Community Health Plan. My doctor ran a few tests, my blood pressure was a bit low, but he couldn't find anything wrong. Still, I had a nagging feeling something was not right. An admissions officer in any school of higher learning as I was bears a lot of the responsibility of filling those classrooms with deserving students. I loved my job. It was demanding and provided a much-needed distraction from worries about my health. Over the next few weeks, my condition worsened. But my ability to compartmentalize allowed me to ignore the symptoms.
	On a hot June morning, my assistant Julia, and I, are in my office packing boxes for our pending move. I'm so weak I must sit down. Julia turns to me and with some urgency says, “Cynthia, you look awful. Your complexion is green!” It's lunchtime. The hospital where my daughter had been born fifteen years earlier is just a short distance away from my office in Kenmore Square. I decide to walk there (being a city girl I don’t drive and never owned a car) and see if someone in emergency can check me out. Julia is dubious but I insist I can make it and promise to check in with her before the day is over. The walk takes me twice as long as I expected. My legs feel rubbery. Barely able to put one foot in front of the other, I approach the hospital in near delirium and feel my body letting go against the glass as the E.R. door swings open. Falling to the cold, tiled floor, my lights go out. When I open my eyes, I'm on a moving gurney hooked up to an I.V. and on the edge of consciousness. An anxious nurse hovering over me is saying words that float in front of me. “You are bleeding internally. We don't know where the blood is going. We need to operate immediately. Your blood pressure is so low we can’t believe you are alive.”
	Checking my medical history, they determine that I may have an ectopic pregnancy. It's the first time I'd ever heard the term. I'm fading in and out of consciousness but manage to scrawl my signature on some papers, basically saying if I die in the operating room, that's the breaks. Then again, its lights out. 
	I awaken in a darkened hospital room. As the fog of anesthesia lifts, Bill's frightened ashen face looks down on me. I smile. My assistant Julia was worried when I hadn't returned to the office. She went looking for Bill who teaches at the Art Institute (that’s how we met) and told him where I was headed. WTF HAPPENED???? The short answer was I nearly bled to death. Now I had a six-inch long incision slightly above the crest of my pubic area where they removed the growing fetus that had lodged itself in my fallopian tube. It almost killed me. As it grew, stuck in this inappropriate place, blood started leaking. Several pints of blood oozed into my body’s cavities but amazingly did not exit my body. The doctors had to flush all this blood out, a big internal clean-up, and replace it with new blood. A lot of new blood. The doctor told me if I had not been in the hospital lobby when I collapsed, I'd have died.
	The hospital ward I'm in is full of women with various gynecological problems. Half of them are ectopic pregnancies. They ALL involved I.U.Ds.  I'm enraged. Why was I not told of this danger? All these women, - we survived - but how many have died? The doctors tell me ectopic pregnancies associated with I.U.Ds are not uncommon. NOT UNCOMMON!!!!!! I had no idea. We women have been routinely lied to by the very medical profession that is supposed to “do no harm.” It is a hallmark of human history right up to the present day. We women continue to be guinea pigs.  
	I needed to get up and see if I could walk or I'd explode with anger. Bill put his arm around me. I leaned on him. We slowly walked together down the hall. Coming out of the elevator as we hobbled by was a familiar face. Robin. He'd found me too. Same source. He called my office. Julia told him where to find me. His face and voice were full of concern. It's as though he didn’t even see Bill. Maybe he thought Bill was a doctor or a relative I’d failed to mention. He kissed me, put his arm around me on my left side. Bill was on my right. I leaned on them both as they helped me back to bed.  It was the first time Bill and Robin met. Neither knew the other existed. I didn’t have the energy to worry about what they were thinking. What else could possibly happen?
	How about Richard showing up? Well, he did, just as I was being led back to my hospital bed by two gallant men. Here we were, all one big happy family. An uncontrolled euphoria settled over me. There was no other option. The last barrier to the truth of my juggled, compartmentalized relationships had come tumbling down. Everyone seemed glad I’d survived. It had only been a few hours since some fast-acting doctors saved my life. It was now evening. Visiting hours were over. The three men in my life who had lovingly supported me now shook hands and gradually drifted off after reiterating they were all “there for me” if needed. 
	The doctor came by and explained, for the first time, in great detail, just how close to death I had been. The sheer volume of blood, sloshing around in my innards amazed the operating team. They couldn't figure out why none of it leaked out the most obvious orifice. It didn't. I would have noticed and acted a hell of a lot sooner. “Do you intend to have any more children?” he asked. I hesitate. It's 1984. I am 39 years old. 
	        "No, not really." 
        He suggests they tie my one remaining tube. They have a place in the schedule the next morning. After a moment, tinged by emotional exhaustion but charged with relief, I agree. One very big chapter of my life is over. 

Armed with an MFA from Boston University Cynthia plowed her way through several productive careers in the arts including instructor in drawing and painting, Dean of Admissions at The Art Institute of Boston, founder of ARTWORKS Consulting, and president of Documentary Educational Resources - a nonprofit film distribution company. She now claims to be a writer.