The Secret

 My first wife Connie was raised as a catholic and her mother railed against abortion. When we lost what would have been our second child, Connie's mother decided to come clean and tell her the truth. I have been promised to secrecy but everybody's dead now anyway except for a few in my generation. About 1943, Connie's mother became pregnant by her boyfriend, Bill Walling. Mary was a pregnant, unmarried catholic girl and desperate so she had an abortion. Then she became pregnant by Bill Walling a second time and they married and Mike Walling was born in 1944, a few days before my birthday. Mike and I were friends. For 35 years Mary kept that secret from everyone while preaching all the evils of abortion to her daughters. It is possible one of the sisters had an abortion but I don't know that. But Mary poisoned the minds of her daughters with religious rules that she had not followed herself and she never told the other sisters. I tell that story for one reason only. I wanted to point out the huge hypocrisy of many religious zealots who say one life while living another. Did Connie's mother's mother know about the abortion? I suspect she did because Mary and Bill didn't have the resources to accomplish it. But many war girlfriends became pregnant and were forced to have dangerous abortions because of the attitudes of society then and because a lot of these young fathers were shipped overseas and killed before they could get married.