Paula Jean Page’s father was telling her a story. She was 30 and nursing her fourth child, who was just four days old, as Paula’s mother slept on the sofa.
Paula’s mother had been pregnant with their third child in 1953, he said, when their physician refused to see her because the family still owed medical bills from two previous births. Paula’s father, a carpenter, had no job and couldn’t pay the bills.
The only solution they saw was to abort the child, a procedure illegal in 1953. But her parents went to a place her father knew of in Maine. About eight or 10 ladies were already at the facility when her parents arrived as the last couple of the day.
Beds were on both walls of the facility, a medicinal, unfriendly, dark, oblong room. Women would come in, put on a gown, lie on a bed with no pillow, and await their turn for the procedure. The attendant would insert an instrument into the woman’s womb, intended to induce abortion within minutes, hours or sometimes days. Generally, the woman would wait at the clinic until the abortion occurred that day, and then go home.
‘And then you were born’
“The abortion hadn’t happened yet. So she said, ‘Mrs. Valley, you’ll have to go home and it’ll happen over the weekend, and then you’ll be all set,’” Paula recounted her father’s story. “Well, it didn’t happen over the weekend. And a few weeks later, she felt movement. “I thought he was telling a story about somebody else. And it didn’t hit me until he said, ‘And then you were born,’” Paula, now 72, told Baptist Press. “And I looked at him and I said, ‘This story is about me? How come nobody ever told me?’ He says, well, we never really found the right time. And I’m thinking, they probably didn’t want me to say, ‘Well, you didn’t want me anyway.’ Or ‘Your decision caused this deformed body that I’ve got’ and that sort of thing. I thought maybe they were trying to not hear those things from me.”
But Paula, who herself suffered four miscarriages before her first child was born, understood her parents’ dilemma. She knew, based on her own joy as a mother, her parents loved her and felt it was providence that she survived the abortion attempt.
Read more.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Diana Chandler and originally published by Baptist Press.
