…During the last two years, when I’ve told women I was writing about my pre-Roe abortion, stories poured out: Mine was in a dentist’s office; I had to go to Puerto Rico; mine was botched and I was so alone. That I’d prompted these revelations was surprise enough. More unnerving was that in almost every instance, the woman would lean forward: “You are the only person I’ve ever told,” she’d confide. “Only you will know,” a woman in her 50s whispered to me at a book signing last week.
Though friends who knew me in my 20s tell me I always seemed confident, it’s amazing to me that I was able to make such a decision on my own behalf before I even had a self. Now in my 70s, I realize that moment helped to form me, a woman who has made many decisions against the grain. I still seem confident to friends, but every time an important choice presents itself, I churn back to that long-ago lonely girl. How stunning now to join that mobilizing call where the importance of decisions like mine were acknowledged, where my life as a single working woman was not odd or unusual, where I was invited to shout as one of many.
Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News 
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