I’m standing with One hundred people, mostly women, on the Pawcatuck Bridge in Westerly, RI, holding clever signs and cheering when drivers honk their horns in pro-choice solidarity. I can’t believe I’m still doing this after fifty years.

“Honk for Choice!” I shout as cars approach the bridge from both directions. I pump my hands as if to be blowing a car horn to make sure drivers know what I’m asking. Every blow of the horn yields a cheer from the crowd and fist pumps in the air. I turn to look at my two girlfriends, both of whom are crying. “Why are you crying?” I ask. “It’s just so emotional,” they reply. Rachel and Sue are my dearest friends and we go way back. Rachel to high school and Sue to my first job out of college when I was nineteen. They too have been fighting for these rights for a long time and like all of us, they’re tired and disheartened. They are amazed at my energy. “You’re incredible keeping the crowd pumped up with your shouts to the cars, getting them to honk.” Honestly, I don’t know what else to do with my anger but to scream and holler.

 If men could get pregnant, abortions would be available at Home Depot.

Fifty years ago, I skipped school with Rachel to get birth control at Planned Parenthood in Boston. Rachel and I met my senior year of high school. We were fast friends and non-conformists. We didn’t shave our legs, we hated gym class, took yoga together from a woman who lived in our neighborhood and talked about sex with boys.

We grew up in the era after The Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s when talk about contraception, the pill, premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation became more acceptable. Popular magazines like Seventeen published cover stories as early as 1971, when I was a high school freshman, with titles like “Answers to Your Most-Asked Questions on Birth Control” and “When You’re Single and Pregnant.” After my first time with my then boyfriend, I knew I didn’t want to get pregnant. I wanted to get the pill and Rachel had a plan.

I’d have to make an appointment at the Planned Parenthood clinic for just the right day, when our class schedule was lighter. We’d leave our houses in the morning, ostensibly to head to school, but then drive to the Riverside Green line station and hop the subway into the city. I felt at once sneaky and grown up. A girlish adventure with an adult objective. I’d been told by my stepmother that I wouldn’t need a gynecological exam until I was married. At the time, the message went way over my head, until I figured out that “married” was code for having sex. Yet here I was, having sex at seventeen and getting my first gynecological exam and my first prescription for the pill. I left the Planned Parenthood office transformed, giddy that I had pulled it off and feeling mature for protecting myself.

My college years were marked by an awakening to the feminist movement. I moved into the ninth floor of what was considered one of the most leftist buildings on campus. The fourth floor was called Liberation Corridor. It was radical soup of LGBTQ couples who shared rooms, Che Guevara socialists, and African American students who sponsored debates about racism on campus. Through seminars in the common lounges in our building, I became friendly with several fellow students who lived on Liberation Corridor. I read Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, debated with men about the subjugation of women and walked in Take Back the Night marches to call for an end to rape on campus.

 Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.

In 1976 we marched on Washington to protest the passage of The Hyde Amendment, the first of many attempts to roll back the impact of Roe V. Wade. The amendment prohibits the Federal government from funding abortions. Immediately poor women on Medicaid no longer had access to safe and legal abortions. And women of color, being disproportionately poor and less likely to be able to pay for an abortion, suddenly had few if any options to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. To this day, poor women, have less access to abortion care than women with private insurance.

I was majoring in economics and women’s studies at the time, and quickly put two-and-two together. Laws aimed at controlling women’s access to abortion—forcing them to carry unwanted pregnancies—have a huge economic impact on women’s ability to rise above poverty because of a lack of child care, the extraordinary costs of raising a child and limits on the type of work that is available to new mothers. Women had to be able to control their own bodies, I concluded. They had to be able to choose when and if they would have children or forever be relegated to second class status in society. My consciousness was fully raised. There was no going back. 

 Abortion – A Right Not a Privilege.

By 1980, just two years after graduating from college, I was working as a paralegal for a subsidized housing agency in Springfield, Massachusetts and I had begun volunteering for MORAL, the Massachusetts Organization to Repeal Abortion Laws (which later became MassChoice and then teamed up with NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League). I was also dating a guy I met through a mutual friend. He lived in New York City and we would visit every other weekend. We were a serious couple, but marriage was a long way off, if at all.

I stopped taking the pill because of the potential risks given the breast cancer history in my family. My mom died at forty from the disease. We resorted to the “pull out” method while I waited for my appointment to get a diaphragm. It was 1982. I was twenty-six.

 “I’m late,” I told my boyfriend.

 “You’re going to get an abortion, right?” he asked, a little too quickly.

 I had just landed a really good job after spending several years in and out of work funded by grants that kept expiring. I had hopes of attending graduate school while working. Motherhood, much less single motherhood, was not in my plans. I knew he didn’t want the responsibility of a child, but he could have given me a minute to take stock. I expected a little more sensitivity for the choice I would have to make. Nonetheless, once I thought about it, the decision was clear. I wasn’t ready to have a baby. I didn’t want to put my life on hold and risk not being able to support myself or pursue my dreams of graduate school and much more. And unlike women living in Texas today, I was fortunate, I had a choice. Texas recently made it illegal for any woman to have an abortion after after six weeks, before most even realize they’re pregnant. Had I been living in Texas and this law were in place, I would have been out of luck. By the time I figured out I was pregnant, I was seven weeks along. No viable life outside the womb and no life inside jail.

Although it was an easy decision, it was not an easy procedure. When it was over, I was brought to the recovery room where other women were resting and many were crying quietly. It was a somber place. It’s not where any of us expected or wanted to be.

Around this time, the “Right to Life” movement caught fire, catalyzed by decision in Roe V. Wade several years earlier. Legislative victories put anti-choice candidates in state offices nationwide. Leaders at MORAL had developed their own grassroots strategy to get pro-choice activists involved in the legislative process and support the election of pro-choice candidates. They invited me, and dozens of others, to get elected as a delegate to the 1983 Massachusetts State Democratic Convention as a Whip. It would be my job to work my precinct on the floor of the convention to ensure a pro-choice Party platform that would commit any legislative candidates to run on a pro-choice ticket.

The first step was to become an elected delegate to the convention. In February of that year, in the basement of a church near my apartment in Springfield, a group of stalwart elders ran the Democratic delegate election proceedings. They were delighted to see a young woman interested in politics and willingly voted me into the convention.  I didn’t tell them I was on a mission to turn their Italian Catholic precinct pro-choice.

In August, after months of training to be a whip on the floor of the convention hall, I found myself standing in the Springfield convention center, lanyard and badge around my neck, looking at the 30+ empty seats that would be my arena over the next several hours. The metal folding chairs were piled with pamphlets and postcards pitching candidates and issues galore. Delegate votes, it turns out, are what everyone wants and delegates get courted by all manner of lobbyists over the three days of the convention. I felt ready and committed. I was eager make this happen.

I went to work as my precinct delegates arrived. “How do you do? Isn’t this exciting? This is my first convention. How about you?” I warmed up my colleagues, many of whom had been to numerous conventions. Eventually I would learn their position on abortion rights and with the tally in hand, I’d pass the count to my MORAL runner. She would take the numbers to a central place where the lead strategists would return messages as to how to proceed. I had work to do. With a number of “undecideds” in my precinct, I had the opportunity to turn the tide in our favor. More conversations, more tallies to the runner.

Hours passed and the platform vote was coming up soon. I needed just three more “yes” votes to make the difference. I focused on the “undecideds.” Persuasion, persuasion. “Do you have daughters? How old are they? What do you dream for their future? What if they got pregnant before college? What if they were assaulted and became pregnant? What choice would you want them to have?” There was no yelling, we were civil and our discussions were honest and earnest. I didn’t stop asking questions until I was certain a vote had been changed. By the time of the platform vote, our precinct had turned. Not by a lot, but by enough. The Democratic Party Platform would be pro-choice and any candidates who wanted to run as Democrats would be as well.

 I’m Pro-Choice and I Vote!

A man in a black pickup truck slows to a stop, backing up traffic behind him. “You’re murderers!” he shouts from his rolled down window.

“Move along!” I shout back.

He keeps yelling at us. Within seconds, a chorus of jeers and cheers rises up all around me. One hundred women drown him out for as long as it takes to convince him to drive off. And the cars behind him honk in support all the way over the bridge.

She’s beautiful when she’s angry.

On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision in favor of Norma McCorvey ("Jane Roe") which held that women in the United States have a fundamental right to choose whether or not to have abortions without excessive government restriction, and struck down Texas's abortion ban as unconstitutional.

Déjà vu. It’s 2022, Texas is back at it and the Supreme Court will decide whether to overturn Roe next June when it takes up a Mississippi case that would ban all abortions after fifteen weeks.

 I’m really frightened.

 I am witnessing everything I’ve fought for disintegrate. If we lose, if we succumb to legislative actions around the country and if our Supreme Court strikes down Roe V. Wade, women will be sent back decades, put back “in their place.”  I cannot bear to see that happen. My life would be so different if I hadn’t had the choice to have my two sons when I did. I love them more than anything. But I had them when I was ready. When I could provide and care for them and help support our family so our kids could grow up to be productive citizens and loving friends and all the things a mother hopes for her children. That’s all I want for women everywhere.

Already, Christian evangelicals have set up a maternity ranch in Texas for struggling women who need a place to live during their pregnancy and through the first year of their newborn’s life. A reminder of the dystopian city of Gilead from the Handmaid’s Tale. There, women had no choice but to bear unwanted pregnancies while being fed and cared for in the homes of their oppressors. Is this the world women can expect as thirty-nine other states look to pass legislation similar to the Texas law? In this moment, women’s right to self-determination depends on the decision of a handful of conservative Supreme Court justices and the largely white, male-dominated conservative legislatures in states around the country. Damn right I’m mad. Damn right.

In November of 2021 I became a grandmother to a baby girl named Diana for the hero warrior Wonder Woman. She is imbued with the hopes and dreams of her parents, and the legacy of her grandmother’s battle scars. And I will keep fighting for her, and for all women, for as long as it takes.

-Andi Pollinger

Andi Pollinger is sixty-five years old with a lot to say. She began writing letters to her father as a young girl and expanded her repertoire to personal essays over time. Her published essays on Medium date back to 2019 when she took a road trip across America with her twenty-five-year-old son in a 1992 refurbished van. Her personal essays have run the gamut from dating after thirty-two years of marriage, surviving breast cancer and recounting a city’s racist response to a murder hoax in Boston in 1989.