Saturday, March 3, 2007

On Location 9/28/2006

[Originally posted on goofyblog on 09.28.06]

When I was 20, I was living in a residence hotel in San Francisco on Pine across the street from the Bank of America building with my girlfriend, Janice. We had been there a week when the manager asked us to leave. Why? We had been honest and told him we were not married. This should not have surprised me. All my coupled-up friends had that same difficulty when trying to rent an apartment in Berkeley and San Francisco. Most of them dealt with it by wearing phony wedding rings and lying. I didn’t think that would be an issue in a weekly hotel, but it was.
That was in 1969. In the next 5 years, that issue disappeared completely from the social horizon in the Bay Area and in other parts of the country. It was as if somehow the whole issue of couples living together had suddenly become none of anybody’s business, which is what it should’ve been always anyway. Everybody just moved on.

Or did they?
In 1966, my first girlfriend in Berkeley told me about something relatively new: birth control pills. It meant we had the freedom to have sexual relations without the onus of potential pregnancy and having to consider getting an illegal abortion. I was astonished and greatly relieved. She told me that anyone could get them at Planned Parenthood. Indeed, the times were changing.

Or were they?
A year later, a good friend of mine, Cathy, called me over to her dorm room at the new co-ed housing off-campus. She answered her door, her face red from crying. She was pregnant, but she wasn’t ready. It had been an accidental pregnancy and she was in her second year studies. Becoming a mother at this stage felt to her like the end of her ambitions and dreams. The father hadn’t been able to deal and had backed out. I agreed to go with her to Mexico so she could get an abortion. Illegal abortions were being done somewhere in the Bay Area, but we didn’t know who and where. Before I could leave with her, her boyfriend decided he needed to do the right thing—he went with her to Mexico.

In the next 5 years, abortion in California first became quasi-legal (similar to current California medical marijuana law: the pregnant woman had to go to a doctor and explain that having a child at that particular point in her life would cause significant psychological damage. The doctor was then allowed to prescribe a legal abortion.). Within a year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, granting nationwide legality. I breathed another sigh of relief. A woman’s right to choose when to have a family or more family was just basic common sense. So glad that issue was settled!

Or was it…

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