Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004260463
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TRACY WIMMER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Everything Megan had read, heard and seen filled her thoughts.
There was no easy way out of this one. She had been self-directed before. She could be that way again: Tell the father. Finish exams. Tell her parents over Christmas break. Find strength in their support.
It almost worked.
"I guess you never really think about everything before you get pregnant," Megan says. "Sure, you can say you know, but you don't. You really don't know how many aspects of your life are going to change . . . whether some people will or will not be supportive. . . . You really don't know until you're in the situation."
The situation. Three years later she is still having to catch herself from calling her pregnancy "the situation."
Megan isn't the real name of this young woman, who attends a college in Southwest Virginia. She wanted to tell her story so that other women might know there are choices other than keeping a child, other than aborting him.
Megan is the kind of birth mother adoptive parents dream of. Her diction is perfect, her words well-chosen. She comes to the interview wearing blue silk socks, neatly pressed jeans, a simple sweater and a scarf.
She looks and talks like money. She is sincerely tearful, yet never angry.
Her circumstances were not unusual. Megan was a student at a nearby college. She and her boyfriend had been dating six months the first time they had sex. He was four years her senior, attractive and well on his way to a good career in another town. And she knew his family.
They used only a condom for birth control. And after skipping three periods - something that sometimes happened anyway because of her athletic training - Megan found out at a campus health clinic she was pregnant. So did a few other students who overheard.
Going into her fourth month of pregnancy, Megan saw a Roanoke physician who promised to hold her bills until she had time to tell her parents. Only two exams left before Christmas break, she figured that she could cushion the blow for them.
But the doctor sent them anyway. Soon she got a call from her parents at the dorm. It was 20 minutes of tears, screams, anger and shame, but when it was all over, Megan was still pregnant.
"It was horrible," she says solemnly, clenching a tissue.
Megan had never discussed birth control with her parents. A strict Catholic, Megan's mother never even entertained the idea her daughter was sexually active - which she became upon entering college.
"I don't think most parents even visualize their children as sexual beings," she said. "I think that is probably one of the hardest things for them to come to grips with. But they need to."
While Megan had her mind made up about adoption, she's convinced her boyfriend didn't.
"I think he really wanted me to have an abortion, but he never pressured me," Megan said. "Even if he had, abortion was just such an offensive option that I wouldn't. I am very, very opposed to it . . . I didn't feel like inconveniencing myself or whatever you want to call it was worth the life of the child. Why should she suffer for maybe not as responsible an action as I should have taken?
She paused.
"And neither one us were ready to become parents. And I didn't want to quit school."
Going home for Christmas break was hell, she said. Her father had nothing to do with her. Her mother didn't say a lot.
Megan's parents eventually allowed her boyfriend to visit for one hour during Christmas break, demanding that he pay her medical bills and tell his family. Megan was not allowed to tell her younger siblings. Furthermore, she was told if she planned on continuing her education with their financial help, she would have to finish out the academic year - pregnant or not.
It was a professor-turned-friend who told Megan about Catholic Charities of Southwestern Virginia, a Roanoke agency his own daughter had once used during a problem pregnancy.
Megan's mother went along on her first visit to the agency and was quickly introduced to Anne Carpenter, director of Catholic Charities for eight years. Carpenter was frank, telling Megan's mother keeping the pregnancy from Megan's siblings was ludicrous.
"Family secrets do nothing for a family growing together and facing a situation," Carpenter said. "What we were doing from our perspective was to help her achieve a better relationship with her family as a result of this.
"Sure. The counseling initially is around the pregnancy, but a lot of things we talked about had to do with Megan as a person - in regards to her feelings about herself, toward men, women and friends. In a pregnancy counseling program, you talk about the whole person."
Carpenter also told Megan that if she chose to live in the house for unwed mothers provided by the agency, she would be required to perform 20 hours of volunteer work each week, come to counseling sessions and take Lamaze classes.
So for the next five months, she sat listening to professors lecture, her thoughts alternating between their words and her child.
"Keeping your child is an option you realize all the way through," Megan said. "Ann and I discussed it early on that you should try to stick to your decisions because by the time your baby gets here, your emotions are so out of whack."
Her boyfriend quit calling shortly after Christmas; the only time she spoke to him was when she had to remind him to send money. Eventually she went on Medicaid. The friends she told were supportive, but the girls who overheard her initial conversation in the clinic made a game of talking and watching her pregnancy develop.
When summer came, she moved into the agency house she described as spacious and nice. The location is kept secret.
Two other women lived there with her. One became a close friend. The other was "a total nightmare," with personal hygiene problems and some learning disabilities.
"She basically liked to eat and sleep," Carpenter explained.
Megan stayed in shape throughout her pregnancy by race-walking five miles a day and swimming every morning. The day before she had her baby, she remembered trying the butterfly. She spent the afternoon with a friend and they talked until 4 a.m. When he left, she couldn't sleep. By 7 a.m., she called her Lamaze partner, fairly certain she was in labor. At 8:10 a.m., Megan gave birth to a baby girl.
A couple of friends from school were there. Her mother had planned to come, but didn't. That was OK. Megan was sure it would have been hard for her.
The baby stayed in her hospital room the entire first day of her life. Her girlfriends took photos, and she even called her ex-boyfriend, who by then had no desire to see his child.
But the celebration ended early. Megan got so depressed at the idea of giving up the child, she left the hospital a day early.
"I guess reality hit me," she said. "There was too much bonding going on. Too much."
Carpenter understood.
"For some of these young women, this is the only thing they have done in their lives that was right, that was noteworthy," Carpenter said. "Here you have in you this perfect, little specimen of life - something you made. And it's hard. And it's sad.
"But I've often told girls in the hospital that the baby doesn't know whether you held him for one day or three. Move on."
One of the biggest fears for a birth mother is not knowing what kind of parents her child will be placed with, Carpenter explained. In recent years, in order to attract more birth mothers, agencies have begun to give the birth mother more input.
Most important to Megan was the adoptive couple's ability to provide a good education. Carpenter said that stipulation was met, but Megan's questions kept coming. For months after the baby was placed, she continued visiting Carpenter for counseling.
Megan's made an effort to make sure people at her college know there are options beyond abortion, thinking that most single women react out of fear when pregnant, rather than insight.
Megan will soon graduate. She now looks forward to a job in another town. Her relationship with her parents is not close, but she does have a have a serious relationship - the friend who sat up with her until 4 a.m. the morning she delivered.
Still, thoughts of her daughter never completely escape Megan. She hopes the letter she left in her daughter's file will one day make sense to her child - if and when the adoptive parents let her see it.
"It wasn't that I didn't love her," Megan said. "And I didn't give her up. I just thought - I just believed it was the best thing for her, the best thing for me."
by CNB