"The whole thing was a nightmare, just an incredible hassle. In a sense, it was really surrealistic. I can't believe it really happened. But all of a sudden something reminds me and it blows my mind. Three days in London and it was all over. But it's not all over. I can't get it out of my head."

Marty got pregnant this summer. She was looking much better when I saw her last week, and I told her so. "That's because I've lost weight," she said, patting her stomach. She talked about her trip to London. "Tim and I flew in Thursday night. Friday I saw my doctor and the two psychiatrists. It was strange-they asked me questions like did I have any previous history of mental illness and did I get along with my parents and all. I said that I'd been through the usual number of hassles but that I was basically pretty stable. They gave me the OK anyway, and I checked into the nursing home Saturday morning."

"It was really nice there, clean, and I had a semi-private room. I got talking to the girl next to me, who was there for the same reason. Around 11 a nurse came in and gave me a pill she said would make me groggy. I remember crawling into a wheel chair, really enjoying the fogginess. But then they gave me a shot and I was gone. I woke up about seven hours later, there was a nurse sort of wandering around the room, and I said, "When am I going in?" "You've already been in," she said. I thought she was joking-I didn't remember anything. They let me stay that night and we flew home the next morning, Sunday."

"It was such an amazing trip. I remembered all the shit we had gone through trying to get one over here. We called Houston, New York, Florida, San Juan, everywhere, and it was the same answer. Most places said that I needed an appointment a month or two in advance and Christ, I couldn't wait that long. Tim and I went to Philadelphia, but we took one look at the doctor's office and walked out. The doctor would have done the operation using local anaesthesia, and I couldn't face that."

"All the people we talked to over here, all the doctors anyway, made us feel lousy. They were hustlers, and I was scared to death of letting them touch me. If I had gone to San Juan, I would have had to go alone to some greasy hotel and meet someone there who would lead me blind-folded to the doctor's office. I couldn't have stood that either. The whole experience was a mind blower anyway, and this back office stuff made it worse."

I told her that she had had me fooled for most of the summer. "I know," she said. "That's one of the reasons I decided not to have it done in Boston. I was talking to a friend and he told me if I walked into a psychiatrist's office here looking even relatively self-assured, I would get turned down. I wasn't going to lie and say I was about to commit suicide. And I didn't have any record of mental illness. Besides, I heard that there was a chance that they might contact my parents, and I couldn't risk that. They didn't ask for parental consent in London, Just a letter from my doctor here."

We talked for a while about the summer and about school. Then Marty got back on the subject. "You know, Tim and I have been talking about getting married. But he's said to me that if I marry someone else, I should be really careful about telling him that I've been through this. My friends have said that anyone who would hold it against me would be an incredible hypocrite. But I can't help thinking, who will have me?"

II

A 1957 Planned Parenthood conference report estimated that there are between 200,000 and 1,200,000 abortions performed yearly in the United States. Most specialists accept the latter figure as accurate. According to an article by O. J. Sikes, M. P. H., in "Sexology," one million of the twelve hundred thousand are performed illegally.

In about one out of four illegal abortions, practically all of which are done without the proper hospital precautions, the woman requires hospitalization due to hemorrhaging or infection. The Association for the Study of Abortion reports that two women die every day as the result of an illegal abortion.

"An abortion performed in a good hospital by a qualified physician under sanitary conditions is statistically as safe as having one's tonsil's removed," writes Sikes. The operation, done correctly, usually takes about 15 to 20 minutes. The most common procedure (called a D and C-dilatation and curettage) removes the fetus by a simple scraping of the womb. In England, doctors use the newly developed vacuum aspirator, which pulls the fetus out like a vacuum cleaner. Both methods are effective until the woman is in her twelfth week of pregnancy.

After the twelfth week a more complicated operation is required, and many Boston hospitals and abortionists refuse to perform the necessary surgery. In England, abortions are performed up to the twenty-second week, but the operation after the sixteenth week resembles a small Caesarian. Abortions in Puerto Rico (which are illegal) are generally not done after the tenth week.

Prices for hospital abortions vary greatly in the Boston area, usually from $300 to $600. In England the cost runs from $350 for an abortion done in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy to about $450 for one done in the sixteenth week. Including air fare (about $400) and travel expense, the total cost comes close to $1000.

III

Boston's Planned Parenthood office is located on the corner of Berkeley and Boylston Streets, right across from Bonwit Teller. I parked where the sign said "Customer Parking Only" and walked across the street. The elevator operator stopped at the fourth floor without my asking him to. He was used to the traffic.

The office was sparsely furnished, and all the table and desk surfaces were covered with papers on family planning, instruction folders explaining the proper use of the pill, and magazine articles on legal and illegal sexual positions. A new secretary was trying to master the art of hold buttons and transferred calls. A black girl sat smoking a cigarette. I concentrated on not looking pregnant.

When I finally spoke to Betsy Sable, a recently married Smith graduate whose official title was Family Planning Counselor, she seemed relieved to talk about abortion objectively. We talked about the history of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. The organization started in 1930 as the Massachusetts Birth Control Clinic, operating clinics for married women whose health required contraception. Complaints were lodged in 1937, and in 1939 the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that the clinics would have to close, as birth control had been declared illegal in an 1879 statute.