I've told this story before. And I will keep telling it as long as too many don't understand why a woman would make this choice.
I had a great aunt I didn't know existed until I spotted her grave market one Memorial Day weekend. Her grave is near my mon's dad and her name was the same as mom's mother, Edith. Old cemetary, lots of big old trees.
It was the middle of the Depression. She already had three kids under six, and pregnant again. They were dirt poor and lived in a very small town about forty miles south east of Eugene, Oregon. near Highway 58. It's part of the state system by the thirties, gravel surface. The road followed the middle fork of the Willamette Rive. Probably got washed out in spots every winter in the pre flood control dam era before the nineteen fifties and sixties.
Aunt Edith was pregnant again and she tried to self induce. She bled to death as the owner of the only car in Westfir tried to get her to a hospital.
This memory popped up while I was watching an episode of Dr. Finley on Prime liast night. Set in Scotland a few years after WWII. Rock ribbed, sternly upright, small town Scotland. How this young married woman ended up pregnan,t by a man not her husband, doesn't really matter. I
n London or even Edinburgh or Glasgow she might have been able to find someone. She tried to self induce. She was lifted up a knitting needle, about a size two from the looks of it, fell on the floor. She was at least lucky enought to have been found in time with a hospital and surgeions nearby. Whether the full damage could be repaired? Well the episode didn't go into that.
I only know there was an I wonder moment when I saw that knitting needle fall to the floor and I remembered my aunt and her grave in a small cemetary in what is nownwest Eugene.
My not so great great uncle? He got married again and had more kids. If I ever met the man I was too young to remember him.
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