Abortion Abroad

Written by an anonymous author

Miami University

We think this episode is unique since the entire experience is told from the man’s point of view. And that’s a voice and perspective about this subject that’s rarely heard.

In this heartfelt true story, a young couple, each from different parts of America, form an intimate relationship while studying overseas. When they suddenly learn she is pregnant, the two must make a life-altering decision 6,000 miles from home.

Published July 30, 2025

HOST:  Today on campus, it’s 1985. Only, we’re not in America, we’re in Tokyo, Japan.

In today’s episode, a young couple, each from different parts of America, form an intimate relationship while studying overseas. When they suddenly learn she is pregnant, the two must make a life-altering decision 6,000 miles from home.

We think this true story is unique. We’ve already published a touching episode on a college abortion, beautifully written and narrated by Marie Newman.  But today’s story is unique for the fact that the entire experience is told from a man’s point of view. And that’s a voice rarely heard.

[ Marching band music ]

This is Once, In College. I’m Pete Griffith.

The man who shared this story asked to remain anonymous. Not because he doesn’t want anyone to know who he is, but because he wants to protect the identity of the woman he once loved. It’s been 40 years, but to this day, he still does not know whether she has shared her experience with anyone, or would ever want to.

The first time he told me what happened was over the phone. I knew the conversation was going to be heavy, so I set up a call for late in the evening when our families were out of the house or in bed. I remember sitting on my carpeted stairs halfway down to the basement, with the door shut behind me.

I didn’t want to forget or misrepresent any of the details. So, before we started talking, he allowed me to record our conversation.

Two months after the call, and three drafts later, I still couldn’t find a way to present it any better than how he told it over the phone. So in the end, we decided to simply read the transcript, in its entirety, cutting out all my dialogue.

[ Bells from campus tower ]

Class is about to begin. Here are his memories, of a scary event, once, in college.

[ appropriate music ]

NARRATOR:  My junior year in college was 1985-86, the year the Bears won the Super Bowl. We in Chicago will always go back to that event as a reference point for the 80s, no matter how far in the future we go. It feels like it’ll be another 85 years before they win another one, but anyway, 1985-86 was the year the Bears won the Superbowl and the year I spent a semester studying abroad. I was at Miami University and found a foreign study program that I liked just outside Tokyo. The credits would all transfer, so I went. I just went on my own.

For the first part of the year there, I just was experiencing Japan and learning the language. I studied Japanese for a couple years before I left, but I was in Oxford. Ohio. And you really can’t learn Japanese in Oxford, Ohio. So the first semester I spent there became an intensive immersion in Japanese.

I was in a small group of people who took the same course and all we did was study Japanese. But as the year went on, I broadened my social base and met a bunch of other people from some California schools and became very close friends to some of them. Including a Japanese American woman.

She was a Berkeley student studying in Japan. Her father happened to be assigned to Tokyo at the same time with a huge American company. So her parents were living there at an ex pat apartment. That apartment was beautiful.  So she and I were in the same program at the same school.

I started dating this woman, and we got very close. The larger group whittled down to the four of us and we all became even closer. The four of us would hang out together all the time and, you know, do what young people do. We were active in a lot of different things, traveling a lot, exploring this amazing country.

She was a first generation Japanese American, so her language skills were amazing. I was working on mine, which was always interesting and it caused her to laugh in a whole different pitch when I would get things wrong. Which caused me to laugh back.

She and I would see each other for quite a while.

Japan is an island nation so it’s an insular country. It’s very hard to really breakthrough the surface, especially at that time. There was a whole outsider culture that was deeply seeded and they had a name for a foreigner like myself that was kind of derogatory.

We would ride together on a train coming home late at night after being out partying and Japanese businessman would see me holding hands with a Japanese looking woman and try to get us to stop holding hands. It was sometimes amusing, sometimes really obnoxious.

I was away in Singapore when I called her. It was springtime I remember, because I was traveling with another friend who joined me on a spring break trip to visit Thailand and Singapore. In the middle of that trip, I wanted to call my girlfriend to tell her about it all and that we were going on to Hong Kong.

Back then, to make an international call, especially in Singapore, you had to find an international booth. It was like a special phone booth. So when I called her, it wasn’t a casual thing to begin with, like texting each other. This was in 1985. And so when I made the call, I was standing at an open telephone booth at a Singapore airport.

It wasn’t too long into the call that I learned that she was pregnant.

I remember a million emotions flying around. You just you see that this is your life and it may be stretching out in front of you. You wanna do what you think you should do. We both wanted to come back to Japan after we graduated or do something with our second language. This would’ve changed everything.

So here we were. Her language ability was fluent. Mine was not. We were 21 years old and terrified. Right? I mean your life can take a major turn with something like that and so we talked about it.

She was terrified, but the one thing that we both knew we didn’t want to do was be parents in our early twenties. Because that was actually scarier than anything else. We were idiots at that age. When you’re 20, you’re barely out of your diapers. And you know, we could hardly take care of ourselves, so the idea of taking care of another life was horrifying, and the fact that we were midway through our undergraduate careers was weighing on us.

She knew she wanted to do it. So, we made this decision to abort the fetus quickly. It didn’t take long for us to agree that this is what we wanted to do. She already knew what she wanted to do and I just agreed with her and it wasn’t like we debated it much.

So here we were in Japan and her parents were living there, so you would think she at least, would had support. But she couldn’t go to them with this.

There was a lot of stigma from where she came from. This would have been… outrageous.. to them. Part of it was that she was raised Catholic. It was really scary.

Still, we were young and dumb and a little reckless obviously. I felt very responsible for this. There’s only one way that this happens and so we went through this together. Completely together. In fact, the only time that we were separated was during the procedure.

So I found another international phone booth to talk to my father about it. At the time, I didn’t have any money. I was living on a shoestring, trying to teach English as much as possible to get some spending money. So my father lent us the money to get this done and we did.

But my father, he was a remarkable guy, and I miss them terribly. His reaction afterwards was one, I’ll never forget it, for as long as I live. He said to me, “Now you have to help both of you discover, rediscover, that intimacy is a good thing. And that you should not be scared of it.”  Yeah, he was an amazing guy.

Yeah, my father had a tremendous depth and sensitivity and as a lawyer, he was always thinking about what’s the next three steps not just what you’re doing right now. And so that was that was his advice to me as his son.

It didn’t take her a long time to find a reputable place for us to go. In Japan, it’s relatively easy to get an abortion and she found a place to do that. So instead of going to Hong Kong on spring break, I came back to Tokyo and the two of us went to this clinic. It was early in the pregnancy. It was not a mid or late term ordeal, but it was still scary as hell.

We went to the clinic she chose in Tokyo. It was not a hospital, it was a clinic. I remember going into almost a walk-up type of a building. It wasn’t like going into an office building seven stories high and taking an elevator. But it was a doctor’s office.

I have a very distinct memory of that day. A lot of it is kinda lost with time, but there’s one thing that I will always remember.

Afterwards, when we were both in a room together, a very little sweet kind of room for recovery, I remember she was lying on a western bed. It may have been a futon, maybe with a small frame. I’ll never forget this – it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever said, given the context.

So here we are and she is in bed resting. It’s all over and in a little bit, we’re gonna leave there and just get on a train and go back to the other side of Tokyo, back to school, when a nurse brings in a little tray and leaves it by the window. It’s full of tea and these little cookies, wafers, crackers, kind of thing and so she’s drinking the tea and she takes a bite of the one of these crumpet type things and I take a bite of one and… it was delicious. They were so good.

So I said to her. “My God, these are awesome. We should come back here.”  Like it was a restaurant. And she laughed in that whole different pitch again. It just broke all the tension.

That was all I was looking to do. Just kind of use a little humor to break the tension, and every week after we giggled about that for a long time. I remember that just so distinctly.

There wasn’t any stigma at all there for an abortion. No stigma at all. They were lovely and they were caring and took care of us. They certainly had a process, and we were not there for an overly long time. But there, there was no stigma. Not at the clinic.

I cared very much about her. We kept on dating through our senior years in college. Then our programs with school ended. We each went back to our respective undergraduate colleges here in America, but I continued to see her. I went out to her campus a couple of times during my senior year. And because her family was still in Japan, she came to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving.

Just before graduation, I went out west to stay with her while I was looking at graduate schools. It was during that trip that we ended up breaking up.

I decided I was going back to Japan for a program there and she was staying and gonna work for a tech firm here. That company back then, it was a start-up, a relatively young company. Now it’s (phew) now it’s a monster. I was gonna be, you know, thousands of miles away in Japan, and she was gonna be in America, in the Bay Area, both of us working extremely hard and long hours you know. It just didn’t make sense. It just kind of became the end.

At my orientation in Tokyo, she happened to be there visiting her parents. I met her for dinner and that was probably the last time we saw each other in person.

After that, as the years passed by, we lost touch with each other. Every once in a while, because of now you know, Facebook and social media stuff, every once in a while we’d just check in on each other.

I have not talked to her for years and it’s a bit, you know, it’s a big deal. I don’t know how many people she’s ever told. I don’t even know if she ever got married.

I’m pretty sure I told my wife all this while we were dating, before we were engaged. That experience was probably the one of the scariest moments of my young life for sure. Probably in my entire life. But it’s also something that if you’re getting serious with somebody, you should talk about it. At least that’s just the way I think about it.

When I had children, and I have three, each of them midway through their college careers traveled and studied at least a semester abroad. And each time, before they left, I told them about my story and talked to them before they want abroad about my story and that it was important that they be careful about what they’re doing and who they’re doing it with, and because the consequences can be enormous.

But the most important thing was, in being honest with my kids about my own experience, I wanted them to feel like they could always be that honest with me. That we should always have that kind of open line of communication.

I told my oldest her first second semester of her junior year before she left to Hungary. I know she was, surprised, to know that, but she’s also my super progressive daughter. All three of my kids are rather progressive, but she’s like the standard bearer and so I think she felt like that was kind of an empowering story for her.

I just wanted her to know that look, neither her mother or I were naïve to think that she wasn’t sexually active and that these things actually do happen. These are not just stories.

In telling her this, because it happened to her dad, and if I had the potential of completely and entirely torpedoing my life and having something like that change everything, that you have to be careful.

Life will always teach you a lesson.

[ appropriate music ]

HOST:  Today’s episode was produced by Rob Wallace and myself.

We want to thank the person who shared this event and his journey through it all with us. It’s rare that you get a man’s perspective of an experience that, as he put it, ‘one of the scariest moments of his life’. His recollections and insights remind us that there are good things that can come out of any situation.

Did you have an event or experience in college that shaped the rest of your life?  We’d love to talk with you about it. We‘re looking to share other significant experiences that may have occurred outside of a class or lecture, but still taught us some of life’s most meaningful lessons.

If you had any reaction to our episode or our podcast, let us know. The feedback helps us shape and structure what we do here.

Until then, I’m Pete Griffith, back next week with more stories like this, all from a time Once, In College.

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