And the guilt comes with you, not in the bag with the kotex and the pills, but in the emptiness in your stomach where the breakfast should be and in the death you believe is your womb; in the concern from the people you did tell and in the secrets you keep from the ones you didn't; in the arguments you hear amongst your classmates at meals; in the jokes and stories you see on television and in magazines; in the ghosts you find in the eyes of young children; in the blood that comes every month like a wound that won't heal now.

You finish your Harvard education and plan your future out and are set to be a useful person in the world. But still there's a black spot on your soul you never show to anyone except maybe once in a while someone, you care about most and could trust.

Abortion is not an issue that needs to be discussed in a political context at Harvard Radcliffe. Here at Harvard-Radcliffe, abortion is a story about a few months of fear, a few days of doubt, a few hours or minutes of pain, and years and years of shame and guilt and ghosts. It is about any woman who forgets to take her pill or use her diaphragm or when her period comes; who makes a mistake or suffers a freak of chance. It is not question of stupidity so much as of ignorance, an ignorance on the parts of those around the woman an ignorance about the very stuff of the process and operation she will have to go through an ignorance on her own part about her need for compassion and a voice to use against her own suffering, to free her from secrecy.

It is not important to know the real names of the Carlas and Sharons and Anns. It is important to know that they could be sitting next to you or living across the hall from you. It is also important to think that they could be you or your girlfriend.

There are many times that are not right for motherhood. For some people no time is ever the one for motherhood. But sometimes a woman's body will act against her, without her, and it is then that she must choose either to let it direct her or to take the way she had planned all along.

Because no one knows what abortion is, what the process involves, unless he or she has had to live it either as a partner or as a patient, compassion in the world at large and more particularly at Harvard-Radcliffe is limited if it can even be found at all. And that is because no one understands; no one has been told; no one wants to know.

The private anguish of cash woman cuts her off from any relief as she retreats further and further into her own shame, imposing a double exile; her own and the world's What is left these people who have chosen to continue rather than to interrupt and redirect their lives, is a bewilderment of absolute intensity. The incident goes deeper and deeper until there is only in their lives this sharp hart which is felt as a sadness that seems to have no cause, that haunts them, that gives them throughout a sense of somewhere having failed, of always being under-serving, of forever having a part, a permanent part, of themselves outside. Laura Rogerson `82