Gail DiMaggio lives in Concord.
A friend of mine encouraged me to write about reproductive rights. “You’re old enough to remember,” he said. She has a point. Of course, young people have never experienced what women faced before Roe. And for many people my age, the old stories have lost their emotional edge. But I remember what happened to Julie.
In 1967, when I was a senior at the University of Connecticut, Julie lived two doors down from me in a “co-op dormitory.” She remembers that Julie liked to poke fun at that and everything else. She changed the kitchen duty list to “dishwasher maid,” likened scrambled eggs to joint compound, and added a Texas phrase (she’s from El Paso) to her French recitation. At the same time, she was brilliant, graduating from high school in three years, and surprisingly fluent in three languages. She wasn’t beautiful in her conventional ways, but there was so much brilliance inside her. So many lives.
In January, she fell in love with a Coast Guard cadet, a first class officer three years her senior. Julie fell in love at full throttle. She said she “treasured” everything about him: his hair, his eyes, his bad French accent. And when the year ended and he left the ship, Julie spent her final weeks grieving as she packed her things for Texas. She too was showing her full sadness.
By September, I was married and a first-grade teacher, but I didn’t even try to contact Julie until I got a note from my roommate saying we were going to have a “prayer service.” It took more than a dozen phone calls to track down the story, which you probably already understood. Julie left campus pregnant, and she met a man who performed a so-called “back alley abortion” in a seedy hotel in El Paso, and she bled to death.
I think some people will react like, “Well, she shouldn’t have done that.” I think we all agree. Her friends, teachers, family. And I can’t explain why she didn’t tell one of us, at least her mother, about it other than a combination of shame and despair. Perhaps she panicked, thinking that this pregnancy would mean the end of everything she had worked hard for. Of course, she may have been right.
she was 18 years old. She wasn’t smart yet, she didn’t know anything, and she wasn’t particularly brave. She was exactly Julie, with her big laugh, sparkling eyes, perfect French, and passionate confusion. That Julie. Something that will never come back.
