I was a second child born in the 1940s, before the end of World War II. My parents were farmers in northern Maine on what had been my paternal grandparents’ land. I was a happy child without a care. Primary school was a two-room school house a short walk from my home. High school was an adjustment making decisions on classes, activities and friends.

In my senior year a female classmate became very ill with the flu —  or so we were told. It was a time when adults, parents and teachers didn’t talk about sex and sex education was not taught in the schools.

Forty-nine years later I learned my classmate had been pregnant and had either a miscarriage or abortion during her long absence.

As teenagers we were kept naïve and ignorant about pregnancy while bearing the responsibility for being pregnant. Few pregnant teenagers had safe support or counseling. There were safe doctors if the teenager had a rare support system, backyard butchers if not.

Adolescent and young women would ingest dangerous fluids or take other desperate measures to abort. This was a scary time of imposed ignorance on teenagers. Especially for girls! The silence of the time was deafening. I’ll never know if my classmate lost the pregnancy to disease or abortion.

The anti-abortionists want us to return to that time of silence and ignorance. They want to undo Roe v. Wade’s reasonable compromise and force their religious views on others. They will not stop there but go on to imposing reproductive ignorance and falsehoods on our children. This is perilous to our democracy.

The self-proclaimed right-to-lifers do not own the bodies and lives of young women.

Patricia L. Connors

Hallowell