I was able to walk into a pharmacy in 19fucking72

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38. I was being blackmailed for years

I too come from a Catholic background.

My mother became pregnant with a high-risk pregnancy in 1959. My father was one of the first men in America that had a vasectomy. After the procedure, he never went back to get checked to see if it had worked. Well surprise! It didn't. My mother wanted an abortion and begged my father to find money for one. He went to my very Catholic grandmother and all she did was cry and cry and cry.

Hence, my younger brother (who is now deceased due to cancer) was born. He had a myriad of problems that haunted him his entire life. It took all of the money the family had to care for him.

He died the year after my mother did in 2004. I was so glad she went first as I know she would have thought that she had jeopardized the entire livelihood of the family for one person that was now dying/dead.

As for birth control, I remember her saying, "We use the "don't touch me" approach". That didn't work very well did it?

As for taking the pill, she acted as if she was against it due to her Catholicism. What a huge joke!

I became pregnant accidentally in the late '70's. Yes, it happens all of the time even with birth control! I had to list a relative to get an abortion at that time and all I had was my older Republican brother. For years he told my parents he had the "dirt" on me. They wondered what I had done. I finally told them before they died that I had an abortion. I never told them who the father was (it was my late husband). I remember my mother said, "Oh is that all it is? I thought you'd committed a crime or something!". She was not shocked and both of my parents thought I made the right decision being I was only 22 years old and in very poor health at that time and had no way to care or support a child and my boyfriend (who became my husband) wanted nothing to do with it. So the pregnancy was terminated and I was greatly relieved! Today I have very little to do with this same brother. He is a despicable fool and I hate him for what he did to me, to shame me when I needed support.

I couldn't take pill as it gave me high blood pressure so I had to result to draconian measures like using a diaphragm. God do those things ever suck! Do they still exist? Do women still use this method today?

Not everyone could nor can take the pill. I guess there really aren't many new birth control methods out there today some 40+ years later.

You've come a long way baby is really a huge pile o'crap IMO!

As for my alleged "forgiveness" for the abortion I had I realized all I needed to know when my father died. He had a picture of me he carried in his wallet and I was pregnant at that time (very early on, like six weeks). After he died my mother gave me his wallet for some reason. That picture was no longer in his wallet. Where did it go? Why did she throw it away? Was she not being truthful with me? Did she really understand? To this day, I still do not know.

What a sad life I have had in retrospect. I have no regrets about having an abortion but damn my late husband for not being willing to get a vasectomy. He refused to get one and said, "They do not work". What a selfish man he was in too many ways! We had one too many huge arguments about this whole thing over the years. At the end of his very long life, he refused to accept responsibility for this and this plague on our relationship. "Don't touch me" indeed.