After the birth of her third child, my grandmother Angela, a devout Irish Catholic, went to her gynecologist and said she wanted to be fitted with a diaphragm.
“But Mrs. Hinckle, you’re a Catholic,” he said sternly.
“Yes,” she smiled. “I’d like a Catholic diaphragm, please.”
Angela always told me she didn’t believe that God was a bean counter. And diaphragms—birth control—were beans.
Millie, my other grandmother, was also Catholic. A first-generation Italian American who married a Frenchman who almost broke off their engagement to become a priest. She had soured on the church after the nuns at a Catholic nursing school in San Francisco in the 1930s had turned her away for being “too dark.” She happily attended the Episcopalian nursing school instead. She became a surgical nurse on one of Santa Rosa’s first open-heart-surgery teams but gave up that career after the first of her four children was born.
I did what every 1980s pregnant college student did—looked at the back of the Village Voice. “Pregnant? We can help.”
When her daughter, my mother, was in college, she helped my mother’s friends in need find qualified doctors in Washington State to perform safe abortions before the procedure became widely accessible in California with the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Pia, my Italian great-grandmother, a faithful Catholic from the old country, told my mother that in regard to birth control, “God helps those who help themselves.”
“The vagina has to breathe,” Millie, a lifelong and passionate Republican, would famously say to me and my girl cousins if she noticed anyone wearing underwear beneath their nightgown during sleepovers. When we got older, she educated us all about the importance of birth control and sexual health, ideally within marriage because “Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?”
My parents were Christmas and Easter Catholics who believed in birth control, or family planning, as it was also known. Abortion in my family was considered a sad last resort, medically, socially, and financially necessary at times. Something that should be legal and a matter left to a woman’s own
