When my mother found out she was pregnant with me, she probably went through the same agonizing checklist as any woman facing an unexpected pregnancy.
Could she and my dad afford it? They were in their late 20s with two little kids already, squeezed into a small apartment on Manhattan’s still-seedy Upper West Side. They had no extra money. My father was just starting an unstable career doing things like raising money to build wells on Indian reservations. My mom had quit her job teaching English at a private girls’ school after the second baby. They were too close to turning 30 to be hippies, but it was 1968 so they had shaggy hair and they drove a red Volkswagen bus around the city, and they went to protests, and they really, really believed that the world could become a better place.
