What happened to Evelyn?

What happened to Marsha?

These questions still come up among my friends from high school 55 years later. Both disappeared from our high school class after they became pregnant.

The question of how their teenage pregnancies impacted their lives is increasingly on my mind, living in Missouri after the fall of Roe.

I’m a historian who has written extensively about women’s history. I’ve long understood the importance of reproductive choice to women’s ability to support their families and to participate fully in society. And yet, it wasn’t until this spring, as I collected signatures to get the measure that could restore reproductive freedom in Missouri on the November ballot, that I truly faced what it means to have lost choice.

I was moved to tears by men and women who said they signed the petition to protect their daughters and granddaughters, bringing to mind the specter of a new generation of Evelyns and Marshas derailed or disappeared by unintended pregnancies.

Many people of my baby boom generation knew women — often young teens — who had illegal or “back-alley” abortions. We also knew girls sent away to homes for “unwed mothers.”

The oral histories and memoirs of women who relinquished children, in both anti-abortion and pro-choice literature, recollect a range of emotions about the choices, the shame and judgements they faced. Many were counseled that keeping their babies would “ruin” their opportunities, and some were uninformed about the finality of the decision they were making.

Although exact records of the number of children relinquished through adoption are hard to come by, between three and four million babies are estimated to have been surrendered to adoption in the United States between the end of World War II and 1973. That is, between 33,000 and 89,000 babies per year.

Memoirs on all sides of the abortion debate recount the decision to have an abortion or relinquish a child. All sides but one: the young fathers of these babies, if they even knew about the pregnancies or births, are rarely reflected in the literature.  Social control was imposed entirely on women, with little attention paid to policing young men’s sexual behavior or reproductive decisions.

In the 1960s, momentum for social change and a new information environment was growing, along with the consciousness of feminism. In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the right of married couples to use birth control in Griswold v. Connecticut. In 1972, only a year before Roe, the Court finally recognized that single people also have a right to contraception in Eisenstadt v. Baird.

By the time I entered college, it had become more possible to avoid unintended pregnancy. But it took the ruling in Roe that a person had a right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term to truly give us autonomy over our lives and bodies.

For 50 years from 1973 to 2022, the right to choose was protected by law. No longer. Missouri outlawed abortion minutes after the Dobbs decision came down. News reports since have published frightening examples from across the country — and in Missouri — of women denied health care in emergency situations because of medical practitioners’ fear of prosecution, lawsuits, and loss of medical licenses.

Recently several of my young colleagues — all of them women under 40 — have asked me for career and life advice. They are feeling despair about the future, and whether they can choose to stay here in Missouri where they cannot receive full and dependable health care.

Some feel they have been professionally disrespected by other colleagues for expressing their fears about their health and wellbeing. In such a socially antagonistic environment, how can we hope to retain promising talent in our state.

But I understand their fears because I remember the frightening, old days. I’m outraged that they have lost the rights my generation won, and I am joining the fight to get those rights back.

This year, Missouri voters may have the chance to restore choice at the ballot box in November. I will vote to protect the Evelyns, Marshas and countless women and children currently denied medical care and control over their lives in this state.

(Frances Levine is the former president of the Missouri Historical Society and was interim president for the opening year of the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum. She holds a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Colorado-Boulder and a M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology with a specialization in ethnohistory and historical archaeology from Southern Methodist University in Dallas).