Renee Chelian, founder of Michigan’s Northland Family Planning Centers, told ‘Gander special correspondent Bonnie Fuller what it was like to have an illegal abortion in 1966.
Content warning: This story includes graphic descriptions of unregulated abortion and discussion of suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the US is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.
I was just 15 years old, and my boyfriend, Jimmy, was 16. We were in love.
But Jimmy broke up with me when I wouldn’t have sex with him. I was just devastated. So when we got back together, it just sort of happened that we started to have sex.
It was 1966. Birth control pills were still brand-new on the market, but I couldn’t get them. When Jimmy tried to buy condoms, pharmacies wouldn’t sell them to him because he was just 16.
Still, I just didn’t think that I would get pregnant. I was a teenager. Then I started missing periods, noticing that my stomach was getting poochier, and vomiting after eating. I was terrified.
I started wrapping sanitary napkins in the wastebasket so my mother wouldn’t know what had happened, but I didn’t know what else to do.
One day, I lay in my bathtub with a razor blade and thought, “If I cut my wrists, I’ll die, and that’ll be the end of it.”
I cut my thumb first to feel what it felt like. Then I realized that I couldn’t do this and have my parents find me in a blood-filled bathtub.
I’ll never forget how I felt that day. The desperation of having an unplanned pregnancy and no options can be so great.
Still, I couldn’t face my mother and tell her that I thought I was pregnant. It was only when she caught Jimmy and me together right after we had sex—and we looked like we had just had sex—that she asked me about my periods and whether I could be pregnant.
She took me to see her doctor, and he confirmed that I was pregnant.
My parents knew Jimmy’s father. He was a single dad doing the best he could, but he was also a state legislator, so he wasn’t around a lot because he had to be in Lansing. We lived in Highland Park, which was this small enclave of a city surrounded by Detroit.
My parents talked to Jimmy’s father, and they all decided that Jimmy and I would have to get married. They were going to send us away to live with some relatives in Ohio.
I was going to have to quit high school because, at the time, pregnant girls weren’t allowed in school. I had just finished 10th grade, and it was the summer before I was to start 11th grade—except that now I wouldn’t be able to go.
Then, one night when I was packing to go to Ohio, my parents came into my bedroom and asked if I wanted to have an abortion.
I didn’t know what that was. In those days, people didn’t talk about abortion publicly. But when my parents explained that it meant I wouldn’t be pregnant anymore and could go on with my life, I remember thinking that God had given me a second chance at life and I wasn’t going to pass that up.
I wanted that abortion, whatever it meant.
Two trips for an illegal abortion
Jimmy’s dad knew someone who could make the arrangements, and he paid the $3,000 it would cost. It was a huge amount of money at the time. My parents had only paid about $8,000 for their house.
My mother was about seven months pregnant with her fifth child—I was the oldest—so my father wouldn’t let her go with me. He was very worried, and I heard him tell my mother that if anything bad happened to me, he’d kill those people. And he meant it.
My dad worked on the assembly line at Ford Motor Co., but he was a kind of gangster-looking guy. He was strong and knew how to use his fists.
We drove to a parking lot, where we were blindfolded and put in another car. We had to slouch down. We were taken to a warehouse of some kind with grease stains on the floor, and then the blindfolds were taken off.
There were a lot of other women and girls there, and we all sat in folding chairs. I was too afraid to look up at their faces in case I did anything wrong and then maybe they wouldn’t do my abortion, so I just remember looking at everybody’s shoes.
I was given a drug that put me to sleep. When I woke up, someone there explained that I was farther along in my pregnancy than they thought, that they had packed my uterus with gauze and that I would go into labor and pass the pregnancy at home in a couple of days.
My mother fortunately confided in her primary care doctor about my abortion, and he put her in touch with an OB-GYN in our area. The OB-GYN risked his license to prescribe antibiotics for me. He told my mom to call him anytime if I ran a fever or developed any worrisome symptoms.
When I didn’t go into labor after about a week, my dad and I repeated the same routine. We met someone in a parking lot, were blindfolded again and were driven to a different warehouse.
I was put to sleep again. When I woke up, I was told that they had ruptured my membranes—the amniotic sac around the fetus—and that I would go into labor within 24 to 48 hours.
In our neighborhood, we lived in old houses that were tightly packed together, so when I started to go into labor, my mother closed all the windows in the house because she was afraid that I might scream.
We didn’t have air conditioning then, and it was hotter than hell. My dad took my three younger siblings out of the house for the day, and a nurse who worked for my mother’s doctor came over with some pills for the pain.
I was in labor all day and finally passed the fetus in the toilet. It was probably about 16 weeks along. My mother didn’t know what to do with the fetus, so she called Jimmy’s dad, and he arranged for someone to come and pick it up for $200.
‘We will never speak of this again’
I was absolutely exhausted after the ordeal and fell asleep, but when my dad came home, he came into my room, stroked my hair and gave me a kiss.
Then he told me, “We will never speak of this again. You can never tell anybody because no one will marry you if they know what happened, and we could all go to jail.”
My dad was a first-generation American whose parents came from Syria and Lebanon, and he had never done “girl things.” But my mom sent him out to buy sanitary napkins, something that must have sent him into a tizzy. He did it.
He also came back with a steak, grape juice, and anything else he thought would build up my blood, which was so touching to me.
We never did talk about my abortion again. At least, not for decades.
But my mom took me to the OB-GYN who had ordered the antibiotics for a checkup afterward, and he offered me a prescription for birth control pills.
However, I told him “no” because I wasn’t going to have sex again. I was so ashamed and embarrassed at what I had put my family through. I didn’t realize at the time how much I had put my life at risk, but my parents did, and they had been really scared.
Jimmy’s dad had sent him away to camp when the abortion was arranged so he wouldn’t be around, but he came to see me as soon as he got back. He was sobbing because he thought I was going to die.
It was a horribly traumatic event for him, too, and he ended up falling into a depression. I broke up with him because I was afraid I would be pressured into sex again, and I couldn’t put myself in that position again.
Trauma informs lifetime of abortion rights work
When the end of August came, I was able to go back to school and carry on a normal life. When I graduated at 17, I started to work in the office of the OB-GYN who had been so kind to me.
My dad forbade me from going to college, where he said I was going to learn to be a pot smoker. He told me that Arab girls got married and that if I didn’t find a husband, he’d help me find one.
Of course, he had bailed on an arranged marriage himself and had married my mother, who was an Irish Catholic.
Abortion had become legal in New York in 1970, and the OB-GYN I worked for decided to open a weekend clinic in Buffalo to perform abortions. He offered me $100 to work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with him. I was only earning $4 an hour, so it seemed like a lot of money, and I agreed.
We would leave at 5 a.m. Friday on a small private plane and fly home on Sunday night whenever we had finished.
When we arrived at the clinic, patients would already be waiting for us. They drove and flew in from several states and Canada. We had three procedure rooms, and we would see about 100 patients a day. That’s how much of a demand there was for legal abortions.
I would go from procedure room to procedure room and hold patients’ hands while the doctor gave them a shot of the painkiller Demerol. Then I would help groggy patients get dressed and take them to the person who came with them.
We worked with a married couple who had a taxi service, and they set up a room with sleeping bags at their home so patients who needed to rest before their flights or the drive home could sleep.
Sometimes I would bring patients back to my own hotel room to sleep overnight because they weren’t ready to drive themselves home.
All this time, the anti-Vietnam War movement and the women’s liberation movement were going on, and I was working so much that I felt like I was missing out on everything.
But then I realized that I was part of the women’s movement myself while I was taking care of these women who needed to have a safe abortion.
Just a few years later, in August 1976, after the Supreme Court had made abortion legal throughout the country with the Roe vs. Wade decision, my husband, Eddie, and I opened the first of my three Northland Family Planning Centers, offering abortion care in the Detroit area.
I was just 25 years old, but I truly felt like God had given me a second chance when I got an abortion at 15, and I was grateful for it. I never wanted another woman to have to have an abortion like mine.
Keeping illegal abortion in the past
I’m 75 now, and I’ve spent my entire life working in the abortion field. I didn’t set out to do that, but I’m not going to give up on this now. I have granddaughters.
The Trump administration is talking about banning telemedicine and abortion pills, as well as enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act, which will just drive abortions underground again.
Editor’s note: As of Oct. 22, 2026, the FDA is reviewing mifepristone’s safety, including the rule allowing it to be prescribed by telehealth and sent by mail, and expects to finish by March 2027. No new restrictions have been issued. The Justice Department has not announced enforcement of the Comstock Act, though anti-abortion groups have urged it to.
You may not know it, but someone you love has had an abortion, and we have to make sure they stay healthy and safe.
In these midterm elections, please vote for the candidates who will support abortion. It is healthcare.
READ MORE: Doulas are helping Michiganders have safe, supported abortions
