As a young woman in the early seventies, I knew a few girls in high school who found themselves pregnant and yearning to find a way to "get rid of it", dreaming of legal abortions, or even a way to find an illegal one. And of course, the rest of us were just glad not to be in their shoes. Some of these girls went away to live with relatives or went off to private schools, while others dropped out of school, got married and became mothers at 17 years of age. One peculiar event was when a friend who was in a motherly way, quietly and seemingly secretly, went away to another state, with only her parents and the soon to be father and got married. Several months later when their new family member was about to arrive, she went to a private hospital several towns over, when there was a perfectly good community hospital right down the street. It was as if the actual wedding and birth events were kept a secret that no one would know how this happened. Or maybe it was that the parents could pretend it wasn't happening.
             We were in the middle of the 'sexual revolution', actually having started in 1953 with the publication of researcher Alfred Kinsey' s Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, and then spurred on with the newly launched Hugh Hefner publication, Playboy Magazine. In the 60's chemistry (the birth control pill) and ideology (free love) campaigned to make premarital, hassle-free, non-judgmental sex in vogue. But in suburban northeast Ohio, being pregnant and unwed was still a social stigma.
             Then in 1973 the historic court decision of Roe v. Wade seemed like a monumental step for women's rights. After all, as a young, modern thinking woman, I believed that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body. It's not really a baby, just a little accident, just a bunch of cells, a fetus. So now we were really becoming enlightened, and that unplanned, unexpected, unwan...