Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal has issued a ruling that will virtually end legal abortion in Poland. . . . The effect will be to further tighten Poland’s abortion law—already [one of] the strictest in the European Union . . .

Notes From Poland, October 22, 2020

A sad day for #WomensRights.

Dunja Mijatovic, Counsel of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights

Twitter, October 22, 2020

Pine Valley isn’t exactly the corner of Hollywood and Vine.

Erica Kane, All My Children, January 5, 1970

Daytime soap operas held all the answers.

In fifth grade, my friend Connie introduced me to daytime soap operas so I could learn about things of which I had no firsthand knowledge, things that Connie already understood—love triangles, how to successfully ruin the social and business reputations of others, dead people coming back to life as their previously unknown evil twin.

It was 1972, suburban Chicago. Connie was the youngest of four children, one brother in junior high and seventeen-year-old twin siblings comprised of a brother with long hair and gigantic stereo speakers and a glamorous sister with a short shag haircut and bright blue eyeshadow. Connie’s mother had a stage name—Lily, her real name was Linda—although I never knew where or what she was performing. I have no recollection of meeting her father. In my eyes, Connie knew everything about everything, and I, living my quiet suburban life with a doctor father, housewife mother, and bratty little brother, knew absolutely nothing.

I was thrilled when Connie and I became friends. Her family had moved into the neighborhood just before the start of that school year. Connie had missed math class one day with an orthodontist appointment, and after school I’d stopped by her house, kitty-corner from mine, with the notes she’d missed. Soon we were inseparable—Connie the unabashed leader of our twosome (except in math class), me her devoted follower. So when Connie announced that it was time for me to catch up to her in understanding how life worked, I was all in. Hence, the soap operas.

Back then, if you lived close enough to your elementary school and a parent would be home, you could walk home for lunch. I walked home most days, as my mother was always home, but that year, on the days when Connie’s mother wasn’t working, Connie and I would have lunch at her house. We’d eat our SpaghettiOs in front of the television, watching the dazzling denizens of Pine Valley, the make-believe suburb of All My Children, wreak havoc on each other every weekday from noon to 12:30 on Channel 7. I was hooked from the start—transfixed by steadfast Ruth and Joe Martin, ultrarich Phoebe Tyler, and, of course, Erica Kane, the beautiful, ambitious, scheming brunette leaping unshackled from beneath Pine Valley morals and expectations. Who knew there was so much life in other suburbs?

My mother wouldn’t let me watch soap operas at our house—too much adulthood too soon, she’d say. But soap opera storylines, while always life-threatening and dramatic, moved forward sluggishly, so I never seemed to fall too far behind in the action on the days I went to my home for lunch and watched cartoons with my brother.

***

In early 1973, following the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, All My Children’s Erica Kane character had daytime television’s first legal abortion. Erica was married to Dr. Jeff Martin at the time, bored with domestic life and beginning to get work as a model. When she became pregnant, she decided to secretly terminate her pregnancy so that she wouldn’t gain weight and compromise her fledgling career. For almost twelve-year-old Connie and me, Erica’s decision made perfect sense.

Why have a baby when you could be a model?

There would be plenty of time for Erica to have babies later on. Luckily, that winter, Connie’s mother was frequently home at lunchtime, and we were able to see Erica’s controversial storyline play out over warming bowls of tomato soup and Goldfish crackers. Erica eventually suffered a near-fatal infection from the abortion—I guess the storywriters tried to appease incensed viewers in some way—but, like all popular soap opera characters, she managed to pull through.

***

Eight years later, I was home for summer break between my freshman and sophomore years of college when my grandmother, visiting us from New York, casually mentioned to me that she had had an abortion in Poland in 1946.

My grandmother and I were sitting at the kitchen table, eating lunch and discussing how striking shipyard workers in Poland had recently won trade union rights, a first among Eastern Bloc countries. Our conversation meandered back to the last time my grandmother had been in Poland, following the end of World War II. At that time, my eleven-year-old father, my grandmother, grandfather, and great-grandmother had returned to the city of Czortkow after surviving the Holocaust. I imagined them, as my grandmother spoke, finally free from persecution, but sickly, malnourished and disheartened, trying to reestablish their lives following the horrors of Nazism and almost a year spent hidden in a dark, cramped pigeon coop by a Polish farmer whose son my grandfather, a physician, had helped through a severe illness. After being back in Czortkow for a few months, my grandmother explained, she discovered she was pregnant.

This was news to me. As far as I knew, my father was an only child.

I looked across the table at my grandmother. Despite being unable to stand upright during those months in the pigeon coop, she had beautiful posture, sat perfectly straight in her chair, tall for a woman of her generation. A veined hand smoothed an errant strand of dyed-auburn hair.

“What happened to the baby?” I asked her.

“I went to the doctor and got cleaned out,” she said.

I almost choked on my turkey sandwich.

I searched my grandmother’s face for some emotion—sadness, remorse, relief—and found nothing. Her light blue eyes looked back into my darker blue ones with a calm indifference. As if she was about to ask me whether or not I’d be having dessert.

I wasn’t sure what she was telling me. English wasn’t her first language after all. Maybe she’d misspoke.

“You got cleaned out? You don’t mean you had an abortion, do you?”

She nodded.

I sat back in my chair, stunned. “Why did you do that?” I asked. “Was it dangerous for you to have more children after Dad?”

“No,” she said. “I just didn’t want any more children after your father. One was enough.”

Enough? I thought. Enough of what?

But before I could say anything else, and with no shift in her expression, my grandmother changed the subject and asked me my thoughts on Lech Walesa, the leader of the Polish shipyard workers.

***

My grandmother never spoke to me about her abortion again, and, sensing that it wasn’t something on which she wanted to elaborate, I never asked her any more about it. She died in 1995. A few years later, I asked my father about my grandmother’s abortion.

“It never happened,” he said, “she made it up.”

I wasn’t convinced. My father, while politically a moderate conservative, was staunchly anti-abortion and, on this topic, possibly an unreliable witness.

But over the years I’ve wondered: why did my grandmother choose to talk about her abortion on that day, at that moment? And what compelled her to share her story with me? She’d never been forthcoming about her World War II experiences; all I knew of my family’s Holocaust ordeal I learned from my father.

So what is it about my grandmother’s decision that continues to dig at me, give me pause?

I am pro-choice and always have been, from the moment I learned what an abortion is, thanks to Connie and Erica Kane. I will always defend a woman’s right to choose. So I defend my grandmother’s decision all those years ago. It was her body, her experience.

And yet my questions remain: Why would a woman who had lived through so much death and destruction choose to destroy a potential life? Why would she not see it as a conception of hope, helping in some small way to move forward in life, to regain some of what was irretrievably lost? And where was my grandfather in all of this? Did he have a say in the decision? Perhaps they made a practical decision together—perhaps there was little food or money for another child—as they soon would choose to leave Poland for a displaced person’s camp in Germany and eventually immigrate to the United States.

But that wasn’t the answer my grandmother gave me in 1981. I didn’t want any more children, she’d said. One was enough. Maybe she didn’t want to bring more life into a world filled with unspeakable horrors, many of which she had experienced firsthand. Or maybe she suffered a miscarriage and didn’t want to admit it. Maybe the stress of their reduced living conditions amid the rampant anti-Semitism of post-war Poland contributed to that miscarriage, and my grandmother wanted to defiantly proclaim the right to control her own destiny—claiming she’d chosen to terminate an unfortunately timed pregnancy—rather than admit to the ghost of Adolf Hitler that even in death he had managed to kill one more beloved Jewish child.

What would I have done, I wonder, under those same circumstances?

***

In 1990, I was pregnant with my first child. My grandmother was overjoyed; this would be her first great-grandchild. During my first trimester, my alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) level test results came back low, meaning that I might be carrying a child with Down syndrome. My obstetrician recommended having an amniocentesis, a needle extraction of amniotic fluid, to conclusively determine whether or not my unborn child had Down syndrome or some other chromosomal disorder. My husband and I were scared, scared of what the test results might mean for our child and our family, and scared of the test itself with its inherent risk of miscarriage. Ultimately, we agreed to the test. While we shared our dilemma with immediate family, I chose not to burden my grandmother, who by this time was suffering from angina. I didn’t want to add any stress to her already compromised heart.

The two weeks I waited for those test results were grim, filled with introspection. Was I blindly following my doctor’s advice to have the amniocentesis? Why did I want the information it would yield? What would I do with the information once I had it? Would I choose to abort my pregnancy because a test revealed that something about this child was genetically different? How would I be able to make that choice?

How had my grandmother been able to make her choice in 1946?

I didn’t know the answer to any of those questions.

Ultimately, my amniocentesis showed no disorders, no Down syndrome. I didn’t need to decide what to do or not to do. I didn’t have to choose.

***

I’ll never know what happened to my grandmother in 1946. What I do know is that if my grandmother terminated a pregnancy in Poland that year, without having been the victim of rape or incest or having her health threatened by the pregnancy, she would have been considered a criminal. Polish law in 1946 allowed for abortions only under those limited circumstances. In fact, before 1932, abortions had been banned in Poland without any exceptions.

And in October 2020, I watched on television as protesters across Poland filled the streets of Warsaw and many other cities in response to their Constitutional Tribunal’s imposition of a near-total ban on abortion, including abortion of pregnancies with fetal defects. The law took effect on January 27, 2021, sparking another enormous round of countrywide demonstrations.

Watching the impassioned women and men on my television screen marching masked, but raising voices, fists, and banners demanding women’s reproductive rights, I realized that pregnant Polish women who today receive the same AFP results I had in 1990, now have no legal choice but to carry their pregnancy to term regardless of any amniocentesis outcome. While I didn’t know what choice I’d make in 1990, I couldn’t have imagined not having a choice. In 1990, I had a choice.

I went to the doctor, my grandmother had told me. I can only speculate as to how she was able to arrange an abortion in 1946. Educated and married to a physician, I assume she’d have known the dangers inherent in unauthorized medical procedures, especially gynecological ones. My grandfather would certainly have known. But which doctor could a Jewish woman turn to for an illegal abortion back then? What Polish clinic or hospital would have allowed the procedure? Who could my grandmother and grandfather have trusted to help them? To help keep them safe?

I imagine Polish women today asking themselves the same questions.

My best guess about my grandparents is that my grandmother was treated by a doctor, perhaps a former colleague of my grandfather, who was sympathetic to the plight of Polish Jews attempting to make new lives for themselves after the war. Or, possibly, by a doctor who felt something much less benevolent.

***

Recently foraging the internet, I wandered into an article exploring the depiction of TV abortions in the US over the past fifty years. Skimming through the piece, I stopped at the paragraph describing the 1973 All My Children episodes and wondered: What would Erica Kane have done if she hadn’t been able to legally choose?

In a surprising development—even by soap opera standards—it turned out that Erica didn’t really make the choice she thought she had made.

In 2005, more than thirty years after Erica’s abortion storyline, All My Children revisited their groundbreaking plot, adding the previously unknown twist that Erica’s aborted fetus had been successfully transplanted by the doctor performing the abortion into his infertile wife. The child, carried fully to term by the infertile wife and conveniently raised to adulthood in another location, returned to Erica’s town as a grown man and was eventually revealed to be her previously aborted son. Apparently, fans of All My Children were either entirely delighted or completely repulsed by this outrageous development.

I had stopped watching All My Children many years earlier and will admit to being both disgusted and intrigued by the implausible narrative. I am disgusted by the storyline which undermined and mocked the legitimacy and permanence of a woman’s right to choose, as well as the pioneering status of the 1973 story. I mean, seriously, even in the world of daytime soap operas, shouldn’t something as important as an abortion have been portrayed truthfully as an abortion?

And yet, I am intrigued by the plot, trying to imagine what my grandmother would have thought about it. Would she have thought back to her own abortion choice, wishing that such an astounding turn of events could be true? Or would she have felt relief, secure in her choice, knowing that she would never have to face such a horrific consequence?

Near the end of her life, as my grandmother aged and became less ambulatory, she made fewer trips outside her New York City apartment building and began watching many afternoon soap operas to pass the time. Her stories, she called them. By this time, I was living on the opposite coast with my husband and two young children. I wasn’t able to visit very often and, with kids in tow, never had the opportunity to sit and watch those stories with her.

I wish now that we could have. I wish I could have sat with my grandmother on her brown velvet couch, watching the soap opera characters’ tangled loves and lives on that small TV perched precariously on a flower-painted tray table. Watching her stories together might have sparked more intimate discussions between my grandmother and me, discussions that might have kindled more of my grandmother’s wartime memories, further illuminating for me the circumstances of her life in Poland after World War II and the choice to abort her pregnancy.

And I might have asked her what I was thinking that summer day at our kitchen table: If given the chance to relive the past, would she still make the same decision?

-Cynthia Gordon

Cynthia Joan Gordon received her MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University where she was the recipient of an Edward B. Kaufmann College of Liberal & Creative Arts Scholarship and taught undergraduate creative writing courses. She was longlisted for a 2021 A Public Space Writing Fellowship and selected as a finalist in the 2019 Epiphany Breakout 8 Contest. Her stories have appeared in the Palo Alto Weekly and Red Wheelbarrow magazine. She has a BA in English from Stanford University and a JD from Northwestern University School of Law.