Dunn learned she was pregnant from a date rape and her mind quickly turned to her two young children, she told CNN. The single mother realized she did not have the financial means to support a third child with her income as a secretary.
“Roe v. Wade saved me and my two children,” Otis, Oregon resident said. “My life would have been so different if I hadn’t been able to have an abortion legally.”
“This is an earthquake that is happening in our society and it didn’t have to happen,” Dunn said Friday afternoon, reading the sentence on his laptop in his living room.
“It was enough to get sick,” he said. “The rights we’ve had, we won’t have them anymore, and that doesn’t stop there. It’s terrible.”
Roe v. Wade is “part of the broader history of personal freedom,” Dunn said, and a woman’s right to make decisions about her body remains her main political problem.
Dunn was an 18-year-old single woman when she had her first child, she said. She later married and had her son in 1970.
She had recently separated from her husband when she said she was raped in 1973 by a man she had dated a few times.
“When I found out she was pregnant, it was like, horrifying,” she recalled. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do? I can’t do this.'”
The decision weighed heavily on Dunn. How would you feed three children? How would you pay the rent? Could you keep your job full time? And could a babysitter be allowed?
“But for kid number three, I’m thinking I can barely do it with two. I can’t do that,” Dunn said. “It would be very shocking for my kids and very negative because I couldn’t feed them as well as I did or accommodate them as well as I did.”
The decision to terminate the pregnancy was the right one for her and her family, Dunn said, after considering her options. Even if he had had to have an illegal abortion, he said he would have done it.
“I was very grateful that it was at a time when I could legally have an abortion in a doctor’s office and that I was fine,” she said.
Dunn now cares about the next generations of people who may need to do the critical procedure, he said, including his own grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“I feel so bad,” she said, for the youngest women in the country.