Women’s Darkest Hour : Before ‘Roe,’ Unwed Pregnancy Was Brutalizing

“Dear President Johnson, I know that you are busy but this letter is the most important to me in my life. I am 14 but please don’t think bad of me. Mr. Johnson, I would really hope that you can help me.”

In the years before Roe vs. Wade, many hundreds of women like this Texas girl wrote to the White House begging for assistance. Each one described herself as pregnant and alone, utterly without resources; all were reaching out in desperation to faraway figures of trust and guidance.

The voices in these letters remind us that the struggle to preserve Roe vs. Wade is not only a fight to protect reproductive freedom. Illegitimate pregnancy justified and reinforced society’s right to exercise other forms of domination over women.

“My father does not know and shall not know of it. I would rather die than ever have to tell him . . . He drinks quite often and would beat my mother and myself if he knew.”

The men in the lives of these girls and women often took it as their right to be physically and emotionally abusive to women; illegitimate pregnancy compounded those rights. A young woman three months pregnant wrote to the government in 1959 about a boy who had ruthlessly urged her to drink, although “I am not the drinking kind,” and then he raped her. “I won’t even think of telling him (about the pregnancy) because I know he doesn’t care. It won’t be the first time he’s got a girl pregnant. I will be the third one.”

A young woman from Pennsylvania wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt because of her reputation for kindness in helping “those who are in need.” She explained, “I thought I would be married by now, but now the man has disappeared and I don’t know where. I found out he already has a wife and son. So I have no one to turn to for help.” Another, from Richmond, Va., wrote to President Truman in the late 1940s: “He promised me if I would have intercourse with him he would marry me so I did and got pregnant . . . and now he won’t marry me and won’t help me . . . is there any way you can make him marry me? . . . A friend saw him last night with another woman.”

The government did not ignore these pleas for help. The responses offered information, principally about maternity homes where a girl could go until the baby was born. That may have been helpful for whites. But maternity homes in the United States generally excluded black women. For them, illegitimate pregnancy was cause for a doubling of domination, on grounds of race as well as sex.

A young woman from the South wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, “Madam, if there is a maternity home that a colored girl can birth her child in peace, will you please let me know. I don’t care if it happens to be in Chicago because down here in Mississippi I don’t have a possible chance to get help because my face is Black.”

Another, writing from Baltimore, was frustrated by the first reply she received from a government official, which told her about a nearby maternity home. The next time she was explicit: “Perhaps I better tell you now that I am a Negro girl and the home only accepts white girls. . . . Isn’t there any place at all for unwed Negro girls? If there isn’t, I will just kill myself. There is no other way.”

Black women disproportionately suffered the abuse of the welfare system as well. From Philadelphia, “an unmarried girl expecting a baby” wrote to President Truman, telling him that the municipal court, the public assistance agency and the public hospital had all refused to help her. “I want to know if you could write them . . . because I need help bad and cannot work because I am not well and every time I go to (a public agency) they tell me to find (the father) and I don’t know where he is and can’t find him . . . Please write them right away and see that they help me because that is their job, public assistance for the public.”

A single black woman in Virginia who was near delivery, homeless and had gone for four days without food, was told by the welfare office that because she had been married, there was nothing they could do for her. She ended her letter to the White House: “So let me know at once if you can help me for I am in trouble, Lord.”

Single, pregnant women in the pre-Roe vs. Wade era were not only denied the right to safe, legal abortions. They also were denied the right to keep their babies, especially if they were white. Illegitimate pregnancy was the chief source of babies for “proper” married couples who wanted to adopt. Society felt no compunction about coercing young women to give their babies to others, demonstrating a willingness and ability to use women as breeders.

One unwed mother wrote that a welfare worker in Minnesota said she could not keep her baby, “that the baby should be brought up by both a mother and father.” In frustration and anger, the articulate young woman wrote to President Truman: “With tears in my eyes and sorrow in my heart I’m trying to defend the rights and privileges which every citizen in the United States is supposed to enjoy under our Constitution (but are) denied me and my baby. . . . The Welfare Department refuses to give me my baby without sufficient cause or explanation. . . . I have never done any wrong and just because I had a baby under such circumstances the welfare agency has no right to condemn me and to demand my child be placed (for adoption). My baby is all I have. I am certain that the President of the United States of which my baby and I are citizens will not let me down. Therefore I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

One doubts, in reading these letters, that many of the girls and women who wrote so urgently and desperately were helped substantially by government officials. They were vulnerable on too many fronts, even if real aid had been offered. Their letters demonstrate that the denial of rights is easy in a society that has constructed a subordinate place for women.

The denial of reproductive freedom functioned in the past as the retaining wall in the house of discrimination. It might again.