The Choice to Write

Forty-eight years ago, in a Midwestern city in southeast Wisconsin, a teenage girl's life began a forever ripple of change. I know I felt it, I was that girl!

Having just graduated from high school, I learned I was pregnant. I was seventeen years old and fully convinced I was ready to marry and to raise the family that was already started. My boyfriend felt otherwise. As the summer of 1970 unfolded, my dreams plummeted from the lofty peak I had envisioned to a deep valley of lonely desperation. The drop was not a sudden one; it was a painful skid down a rocky slope. By the time I reached the bottom, I was battered and beaten.

Such was the painful beginning of a story that has spanned nearly five decades and four generations of souls.

My soon-to-be-published memoir, Choiceless is an intimate account of a teenage pregnancy at a time in history when unmarried, pregnant girls disappeared for weeks or months at a time in a veil of secrecy and shame. Where did they go? How did they feel? What became of them? What became of their children?