I grew up Catholic. I went to Catholic school and Catholic mass every Sunday in our suburban neighborhood with the same friends and families for most of my youth. My education was rich with meaningful ritual, warm incense and holy water. As a kid all of it felt comforting and mysterious and made me feel like I was part of something very important. But as soon as I started public high school, I suspected I had missed some very important and useful information about life.
In 7th grade at Holy Cross, the girls were separated from the boys for sex ed, which lasted less than an hour. We sat at our desks – the ones with the flip-up tops you could put your things in – and learned about reproduction. NOVA’s 1983 “the Miracle of Life” was the extent of our sex ed curriculum, but apparently we could only watch parts of it. The teacher stood alert next to the TV with the remote, skipping the entire beginning where the narrator explains human evolution and the section about how bodies become aroused. The part about the male reproductive system was spotty to me when I recently re-watched it so I suspect she may have fast-forwarded through some of that as well. Or, it’s possible watching a camera navigate a jungle of underwater flesh tunnels is just a little disorienting for a 12 year old. Still, I remember it being titillating for all of us girls listening to the narrator say “penis” and “vagina” right in the middle of the school day with our teacher standing right there.
So, by the time I got to high school (surrounded by hundreds more teenagers and way more cute boys than I was used to) my understanding of reproduction was a little lacking, consisting of an other-worldly interior perspective of the human body. I knew that, somehow, a bunch of sperm cells would arrive somewhere inside a woman’s body and have a feverish race to her egg cell, but only one of them gets in and the rest of them immediately keel over and die, their little bodies strewn all over the craggy, blood-filled tissue inside of the woman. But then a beautiful baby starts to grow! And after 9 months of this miracle growing inside the woman, there is a terrifying scene of her in agonizing pain at the hospital, giving birth to a beautiful baby!
“But didn’t your parents teach you the birds and the bees” you ask? They didn’t need to because sex wouldn’t happen for me until marriage, of course! So why talk about it before then? And at that point I could just enjoy figuring it out with my spouse – ooh la la.
Like my 7th grade teacher, let’s fast-forward – this time to the summer after 9th grade. I’m in my boyfriend’s car, not married, doing oral sex for the first time and…. SURPRISE! What the heck is that?!? Spit it out! Open the door! Spit it out! Spit it out! Woah. And ick. And ohhhhhhh, I see now…..kind of.
Fast-forward again, now to freshman year of college. I’d been having sex for about a year now and heard something about the “rhythm method.” So one weekend my boyfriend doesn’t pull out. And about a month later, I randomly puke in my friend’s driveway after dinner. Shit.
I immediately knew I wanted an abortion. My boyfriend and I collected some money and went to the clinic together. There was a short counseling session where I was presented with my options and was then given an ultrasound so I could see that there was, indeed, a baby growing inside me. Ugh. But the actual procedure was simple and quick, and everybody helping out was kind and gentle. I had no regrets about my decision. I did, however, carry a deep shame inside of me for years because I’d so clearly been taught that my decision was shameful.