MSFC Update - May 1998

Becky Bell:
A Mother's Story

Becky Bell lived with her parents, Karen and Bill, and brother in a small town near Indianapolis. Becky was a junior in high school in 1988 when she became pregnant. She sought an abortion at a women's health clinic but learned that, under Indiana law, she first had to obtain the consent of one parent. Afraid to disappoint her parents, Becky had an illegal abortion and died from complications one week later. This is Karen Bell's story.

Becky and I were very close. She was an easy child, gentle and innocent. I would worry sometimes about my son, Billy, but never about Becky. She loved horses, music, school and life itself. When Becky was 16, she began dating a friend of Billy's. She was crazy about him. He was a rebel and completely different from her, but that's who she loved.

Soon after Becky turned 17, I noticed that she seemed quieter than usual. One evening she asked to go to a party on the south side of town. I said, "Becky, I don't want you to go to the south side, it's not safe there." I had a feeling that something wasn't right, but my son said, "My God, Mom, let Becky go. You protect her too much, and she's been sad lately."

I let her go.

I was laying awake in bed waiting for her to come home. At 12:45 in the morning, I heard her trying to open the door. She was crying, and said, "Mom, it was a horrible party. I feel like I've got the flu like Dad." Beck never lied; I never doubted what she said. I told her to go to bed and she would feel better in the morning.

But she did not. After school on Monday, she still felt sick. By Wednesday she had a fever of 104 and a strange cough. I told her we were going to the doctor. She turned white. She said, "Mom, oh Mom, please, oh please, I don't want to go. Just give me some aspirin, I'll be okay, please, please."

She was nearly hysterical, so I respected her wishes. Later I realized that she feared the doctor would discover the abortion and tell us about it. And later he said that he would have.

On Friday, September 16, she said she would go to the doctor. She was so weak that my husband and I had to carry her to the car. The doctor sent us immediately to the hospital. We put her in the backseat and she asked me to sit next to her. I held her close.

The nuns and nurses at St. Vincent Hospital, where we have taken her for everything, kept asking Beck, "What have you done to yourself?" I heard the nurses say her veins had collapsed. They put oxygen on her, but Becky pulled the mask off. I leaned down and said, "Honey, tell Mom, tell me, honey." She said, "Mom, Dad, I love you, forgive me." And that was it. Her heart stopped.

They said that her lungs had literally come apart from infection, and they hooked her up to life support. We called our family to come to the hospital. Billy was away at college and couldn't make it in time. Late that night, with grandma, grandpa, and other relatives gathered, the doctor said, "We don't know if we can save the baby." And I thought, "The baby? My God, Becky was pregnant." At 11:29 that night, the doctors said that there was no hope and took her off life support.

Bill and I went home. I don't know where Billy went. I don't know where anybody went. There are no words to describe how Bill and I felt. We just kept saying, "Oh my God, my baby, oh my God."

The coroner performed an autopsy and called us. "Your Rebecca Suzanne died from an illegal, botched abortion; dirty instruments had been used." And Bill said "No, no, not Beck." I said, "No, no, no, not my Becky. Oh my God, not Beck."

I told Bill that I did not want people talking about Becky. We grew up in a small community. Everybody idolized us. We were the perfect couple -- the perfect family. I didn't want people to call her a whore. We agreed to say that Beck died of pneumonia. It wasn't a lie. The death certificate listed the cause of death as septic abortion with pneumonia.

Right before the funeral, the minister came over and knelt down in front of us. He said, "Why don't you tell the truth so you can hold your head up in the community? You can help other people. You can help yourself and avoid living a lie." I thought the truth would come out someday and so we agreed.

At the funeral, the minister said that Becky had been pregnant and had died as a result. I bowed my head. I couldn't look at anybody.

Billy asked if he could close the casket. He stood beside Beck and stroked her head. He said, "Beck, nobody will ever hurt you again." And that was it.

Bill and I didn't care whether we lived or not. I didn't know where Billy was half the time. One day, about six months later, Billy said to me, "You're not my mom anymore. You lay and you cry and the house is dark. You don't cook. No one comes over. What about me?" Our son needed us. It woke us up.

One day, we got a letter from Peter Jennings. He wanted us to be on the news to talk about Becky, who was the first teenager known to die because of a parental consent law. I said, "Bill, what's parental consent?" He didn't know either. That's when we started looking into what happened to Becky.

Bill and I talked to Becky's friends and learned that she had sought an abortion at Planned Parenthood. They told Becky that they would help her but that because she was a minor, she had to get a parent's permission to comply with Indiana law. If she couldn't talk to a parent, she could seek permission from a judge.

Becky told the counselor, "If I can't tell my mom and dad, how can I tell the judge?"

Planned Parenthood also told Becky that she could get a safe and legal abortion in Kentucky without telling her parents. But there was no way that Becky could get to Kentucky without us suspecting something.

Becky told the Planned Parenthood counselor that she had hoped that the boy who got her pregnant would marry her, but he didn't want her in his life anymore. After Becky died, some of his ex-girl-friends told us that the boy's standard line was that he was sterile because he had had the mumps. Those girls believed him, and Becky must have believed him.

Bill and I decided to speak out; we thought we could prevent other girls from dying. We appeared on 60 Minutes. The anti-choice crowd came after us. They followed us. There would be crowds of people with their fetuses in a bottle, and some would say that Becky didn't die the way we said she did. They loosened the lug nuts on our car. In Arkansas, they shot a hole in the building where we were speaking. They cared more about a fetus than about my daughter. I thought, "I'm not afraid of anybody, because my daughter is dead and you can't hurt me anymore."

People ask me what I would have done if Becky had told me the truth. I would have been mad, and I would have said, "Becky, you just ruined your life. What are the neighbors going to think?" That would have been my first reaction because that's who I am. But then I would have asked her, "Beck, do you want to get married? Have a baby? Have an abortion? What do you want? What can you live with, hon?" We would have worked it out. But I never got the chance.

Reprinted from Choices: Women Speak Out About Abortion, with permission of NARAL.