Ione's story

I used my birth control incorrectly because I wasn’t taught how it worked and I was too self-conscious to ask the pharmacist. I took the wrong weeks at the wrong times and ended up pregnant.

Ellen's story

When I became pregnant as a college junior, in 1967, the closest legal abortion on demand was in Japan. A student nurse gave me a catheter, some antibiotics and the name of a sympathetic doctor I could use in an emergency.

I had an abortion a few years ago. My boyfriend, at the time, and I had recently gotten back together after being broken up for about a month while he thought about getting back together with his ex-wife.

I had an abortion in my early 20s. In the sub-culture where I lived at the time, it was sort of an unspoken assumption that getting pregnant would be dealt with via abortion.