Kay

In 1969, I gave birth to a beautiful daughter who, we soon found out, had Tay-Sachs disease, a degenerative disorder of the white cells which is uniformly fatal by the age of five. It is also an autosomal genetic disease, so both my husband and I were, unbeknownst to us, carriers of the trait, but our daughter had inherited it from us both, which was a death sentence for her.

“My husband and I desperately wanted to have children, technology had given us a way, and now people were going to say we could not use it?”

At that time, there was no known test, but one was being developed, and by the time she was diagnosed around her first birthday, it was available. This meant although there was nothing that could be done for her, we could avail ourselves of prenatal testing and selectively have future children with a chance at survival.

That was what we opted for. I was fortunate enough to have two healthy, normal pregnancies after that, but first I had to come to terms with being willing to terminate an affected pregnancy in case we got bad news.

In those days, the test was performed after amniocentesis, which was done at about 16 weeks of pregnancy, and then it took about 3 more weeks until cells were cultured and grown in the lab and the Tay-Sachs assay could be done. The wait was excruciating. Women who then terminated a pregnancy because of Tay-Sachs did so late in the second trimester.

Shortly after my second pregnancy, Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. But immediately the anti-choice movement which calls itself Right to Life bounded onto the scene.

In May of 1974, then Sen. James Buckley (R-NY) introduced an amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would have outlawed all abortion in the United States. Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, and he was persuaded to hold hearings before bringing the amendment to the Senate floor.

In June, while I was 8 months pregnant with my third child, I testified at his hearings to explain why women like me needed to have the option to terminate an affected pregnancy in order to have children of our own. The whole idea of Right to Life was so distasteful to me. My husband and I desperately wanted to have children, technology had given us a way, and now people were going to say we could not use it? We were appalled.

So on June 4, 1974, I went to the Senate to fight for my rights as a woman, as a parent, as an American, and I helped educate Sen. Bayh about why it is essential for women to have the option to terminate a pregnancy. In writing my testimony, I learned that I was truly pro-choice, and that it was not just my own heartbreaking situation that merited this freedom, but all women were entitled to dominion over their own bodies and reproductive choices. Their problems were as real to them as mine was to me.