Agnes Strauss Wolf, a spry 82-year-old Northern Virginia resident, is finally sharing her secret after 50 years. Yet each time she travels down the dark alley in her memory to “the most degrading, horrible experience of my life,” she must steel herself against the inevitable anger and tears that follow.
It was at “the lowest point of my life” when Mrs. Wolf ventured to “a seedy part of New York City’s Lower East Side,” entered a brownstone, and paid “a doctor” $1,000 cash for an illegal abortion. The procedure, for which she was not even given a pain reliever, took less than a half hour. Since she was instructed to go alone, her husband, now 92, waited on a nearby corner.
Years earlier, she had had trouble conceiving. But when the couple found themselves the parents of four children under 8 and pregnant again (“a fluke, given my history”), the Wolfs made that “painful decision, one of the hardest we ever made.”
“We honestly felt we could not responsibly handle a larger family,” Mrs. Wolf said. “I thought I was doing society a favor.
“We never dreamed we would find ourselves going to see the same renowned doctor, who we had consulted on our fertility problem, with the exact opposite problem: obtaining an abortion,” Mrs. Wolf said.
“It never occurred to me, a respectable married woman, that it would be illegal for [my fertility doctor] to help us, but when he did not say a word but slipped me a piece of paper with a number on it and said, ’You’ll be OK,’ I got the chilling idea.” Not only were abortions illegal in the 1950s, contraceptive devices were inaccessible. Ironically, the Wolfs were guinea pigs for pioneering fertility procedures. She had miscarried several times before each of their three sons was born “miraculously.” Then the couple adopted her terminally ill sister-in-law’s daughter.
Yet, “you feel so violated,” she said, but added that many women far less fortunate than she suffered more serious consequences, including death. Overcome with emotion and anger, she started to cry and said, “I should have been able to make that choice [to have a safe, legal abortion], not the government.”
Regaining her composure, the spry octogenarian said, “I vowed then and there that I would do all in my power, I’d lay my life down in the streets, whatever, to see that other women would never have to suffer such an experience, and that all women would be guaranteed the right to legal and safe abortion and family planning.” However, Aggie Wolf, who marched in the first pro-choice rally in 1989 after she privately told her children of her experience, will not be among the hundreds of thousands of women and men expected to participate in Sunday’s “March for Women’s Lives” on the Mall because of a prior commitment.
“If she was here, she’d be leading the pack,” said her son, Dr. Steve Wolf, a D.C. neurologist working with indigent patients.
Dr. Wolf and his wife will lead a family delegation of siblings, in-laws, children, relatives, friends, “and even the family dog, ’K-9s for choice,’” to the Mall for Sunday’s rally.
“In case anybody gets the wrong idea, my wife’s family is predominantly Republican, while my side is predominantly Democrat, but we agree on this issue — that this is one area where the government shouldn’t be dictating women’s lives.” Dr. Wolf is proud his mother is telling her “sobering” story publicly. Younger women and men, who take their personal liberties for granted, need to be reminded of what it was like to take “considerable risk with your own life when trying to make a personal choice” before the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.
“Those who talk about the sanctity of life need to think about putting women’s lives on the line,” Dr. Wolf said.
The March for Women’s Lives sponsors — including the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and, for the first time, the Black Women’s Health Imperative and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health — stress that the purpose of this event transcends the reproductive-rights issue of abortion. This year’s rally — the first of its kind in more than a decade — will focus on accessible health care for all women, family planning, sex education and medically accurate information about reproductive health, all of which is designed to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Jatrice Martel-Gaiter, president of the regional Planned Parenthood chapter, said the march “is not just about abortion, it’s about reproductive health and these services are in jeopardy for women in this region.”
Mrs. Wolf, a Los Angeles native and 1943 Vassar College graduate who married a Navy man she met while working as one of the first female congressional-hearing investigators during World War II, remains active in political and civic activities. She fears that conservative legislation, such as the ban on “partial-birth” abortion and Virginia’s newly enacted fetal-homicide bill, will erode women’s reproductive rights and force a resurgence of illegal abortions.
“I have seen both sides: the desire and frustration to have a baby [and] what people go through when they don’t,” she said.
As we celebrate women’s progress toward equal rights, Mrs. Wolf warned, “This progress is facing the gravest challenge since we won the right to vote in 1920, the very real threat that a Republican administration and Congress will take away our fundamental right to control our own bodies.”
Like many pro-choice activists, Mrs. Wolf said “abortion should be rare; it’s not something you walk into gladly.” She told her own daughter, “Just remember, you have control over your body, and if you don’t want to do something, nobody on God’s green earth can make you, and the one thing you don’t want to do is bring an unwanted child into the world.”
Aggie Wolf may not be marching in Washington on Sunday, but if all goes according to her plan, she’ll be wearing her “March for Women’s Lives” T-shirt, carrying a sign, distributing literature and leading a smaller march as she sheds healing and enlightening tears on her long-held secret.
“I hope you’ll remember my story and promise yourselves and your daughters and granddaughters that you will never, ever let this happen again,” she said.
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