Penny missed only one menstrual period

This article follows up my previous article titled Purple Language About Abortion in the Dialogue.

Penny Johnson met Robbie Gould in June 1963, while both of them were doing summer jobs at the Kellerman's resort hotel. Penny quickly began going steady, and she became pregnant at about the end of June. She missed one menstrual period in July. Her nausea convinced her in about the first week of August that she was pregnant.

The Houseman family arrived at the Kellerman resort on August 10. So, the Dirty Dancing story begins just a few days after Penny has decided that she is pregnant.

==========

If Penny had missed two menstrual periods, she would have suffered much more trouble getting an illegal abortion.

==========

During the 1960s, essayist Eleanor Cooney missed a third period and tried to get an illegal abortion but was rejected by two abortionists. In her article titled The Way It Was, published in Mother Jones magazine, she explained that she was rejected for the following reason:

After three months, he said, the placenta and the blood vessels that feed it grow too complex to simply be scraped out. To do so would be to just about guarantee a hemorrhage.

She described the first rejection as follows:

By the middle of September [the article specifies only that this happened during the 1960s], I’d missed two periods and my cigarettes were tasting peculiar. I was bound for freshman year at college in Boston, though, so I just ignored the facts and went off to school. It took a third missed period and almost throwing up in the backseat of a car packed with kids to penetrate my adolescent thick headedness.

I had a savvy friend in New York, Kat, who only dated rich older men. I figured she’d be the one to call. Soon a long ride on buses and trains took me out to a house in a Boston suburb. The doctor’s wife answered the door. There was no waiting room, no magazines, no other patients. The house was completely ordinary, perhaps a touch run-down. She showed me into a room off the front hall and vanished.

Except for a small sink, the office was just a regular room, a parlor, with green walls and venetian blinds and a worn rug on the floor. A tall, battered, glass-doored porcelain cabinet stood in a corner. Through the glass, I could see on the shelves a dusty disorderly jumble of stethoscopes, hypodermics, bottles, little rubber hammers, basins, forceps, clamps, speculums, wads of cotton. There were rust stains in the sink and a tired old examining table.

The doctor, a little nervous man with glasses and a bald head, came in. I explained my problem. I have to examine you, he said. And he said: Everything has to be clean, very clean. He went to the sink and washed and washed his hands.

He finished and stood there without saying anything. His eyes were sort of glittering behind his glasses, and he acted as if I was supposed to know what to do next. I glanced around for a gown, but he was looking impatient, so I just took off my underwear and climbed onto the table.

He didn’t bother with a glove. He poked around a while, then told me that I’d waited too long, I was too far gone, it would be too risky for him, and that would be $25.

I was back out on the suburban street, the door shut firmly behind me.

She described the second rejection as follows:

Kat told me to come to New York and bring $500. ... I took a train [to Jersey City] and walked 10 blocks to a street of old brownstones, some of them with their windows boarded up. There had been no calling ahead for an “appointment”; you were supposed to just show up.

This doctor had a waiting room, with dark walls and a very high ceiling, the front room of the brownstone. It was full of people, facing each other along opposite walls, sitting in old, cracked, brown leather parlor chairs with stand-up ashtrays here and there, like in a bus station. A set of tall sliding wooden doors stood closed between that room and the next. Everyone was smoking, including me. The air was blue. ....

The doctor had a trace of some sort of European accent. German, I guessed. He was about a foot shorter than I was, and behaved with obsequious deference, as if I had dropped in for an afternoon sherry. He gestured toward the examining table with a courtly flourish. I sat between the leg supports while he stood close and asked questions: Last period, how many times had I had sex, was I married, how many men had I had sex with, did they have large or small penises, were they circumcised, what positions, did I like it?

He moved the floor lamp closer. I put my legs in the apparatus and looked up at the chandelier.

He didn’t bother with a glove, either. He thrust several fingers in, hard, so I could feel the scrape of his nails.

Ouch! I said politely.

Ouch, he mocked. Never mind your ouch. He pushed his fingers in harder and pressed down on my belly with his other hand.

You are very far along, he said. It will be a very difficult procedure. Come back tomorrow. Be here at seven o’clock in the evening. Give me one hundred dollars now because this will be difficult. You can pay the rest when you come back. Bring cash. Five hundred more. ....

This time, there was no one in the waiting room. .... The doctor locked the door behind us.

The doctor stood next to me, leaned on me heavily, and rubbed his two hands up my thigh, all the way up, so that his fingertips collided with my crotch. I understood then that he’d known perfectly well on my last visit that he wasn’t going to go through with it. ...

Then he said: You are too far gone. I cannot do it. ....

You are a beautiful girl, a beautiful girl, he breathed moistly onto my face as his hands slid up and down, up and down. It is too late. Take my advice. Have the baby. Have the baby. ....

Get married, he said. Have the baby.

What about my hundred dollars? I asked.

Get out of here, the doctor said, and turned his back.

Eventually Cooney got her abortion from a doctor who injected a saline solution into her amniotic sac to cause a miscarriage.

So, if Penny had missed three periods, she probably would not have been able to obtain an ordinary dilation-and-curettage abortion.

======

A scholarly article published in 1964, titled The Indications for Dilation and Curettage, reports that this method for the purpose of abortion was usually limited to the first eight weeks of pregnancy (i.e. before the second missed period).

When is dilatation and curettage indicated in cases of abortion? .... One must base one's decision to follow such a course on several factors, but the most important is the length of gestation. The separation and expulsion of a conceptus is much more likely to be complete and accompanied by minimal blood loss, infection, etc., when the pregnancy terminates in the first eight weeks. ...

We prefer to treat in the hospital most abortions that occur after eight weeks' gestation. .... Hospital stay will be shortened and readmission for persistent or recurrent bleeding will be reduced to a minimum by early active intervention ....

In such cases [after eight weeks], it is our preference to use digital curettage if at all possible without the actual use of a curette. The use of the latter entails a nicety of technique -- not in the possession of all -- to clear the uterus of its contents without inflicting unnecessary trauma to the myometrium. It is next to impossible to do damage with the gloved finger. and, in addition, it is possible by direct palpation to feel the inside of the uterus, recognize genital abnormalities and detach adherent secundines effectively. ...

In general, medical doctors thought in the early 1960s that an abortion became more difficult after the pregnancy had passed eight weeks. In other words, after two menstrual periods were missed, an abortion should be done only in a hospital.

A mere curette might not clear the uterus adequately. If fetal blood vessels had formed too extensively inside the uterus, then the procedure would cause too much bleeding.

Any blood loss which is more than the normal menstrual loss for that individual, and which persists at that increased level for longer than two to four hours, requires hospital care and active intervention, even in the early abortion. The two cardinal indications for curettage are the passage of tissue and uncontrolled bleeding.

======

All the above considerations agree with a conclusion that Penny missed only one menstrual period, in July.