Out of the Dark

In 1971, Mary Gordon found herself among women brave enough to tell their abortion stories, Then she found the courage to share her own.

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It is the fall of 1971.I have just walked into a room in a church basement, where there is a meeting of NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the organization created two years earlier by Betty Friedan.

Although abortion had been legal in New York since 1970, it was still illegal in most states.

I've moved to Syracuse—the first time I have lived outside the New York metropolitan area. I’m feeling a bit unmoored, not yet at home in my MFA program, and missing the political engagement I had experienced as a college student at Barnard and Columbia.

When I see my fellow attendees, I know, as Dorothy knew that she was not in Kansas, that I’m not in New York City anymore. Only two of the women look like anyone I would have ever had practice speaking to. One must be, like me, a student: She’s wearing jeans and a peasant blouse. The other is a Black woman with a luxuriant Afro, a jade green turtle necklace, a black skirt, and boots. The others seem like strangers. I had not believed that I would ever be in a room with anyone who wore flesh-colored pantyhose, or who wore her hair in what was called a pixie cut, but here I am. Here we all are.

The meeting is called to order by a short, dark, wiry, fast-talking woman. Quickly, we get down to tactics, which involve organizing travel to Albany and to Washington. Despite the legalization of abortion in New York, antiabortionists are tirelessly picketing the state legislature with gruesome pictures of mangled fetuses. We sign up both for counter-protests and to speak to our local legislators in person. Pennsylvania, a close neighbor state, will be another target of our lobbying. And we will be on the alert for actions in DC, targeting the Supreme Court.