Growing up I definitely wanted to be a lawyer. It was all I could think of or speak about. I did go to law school for a year, I was at the University of Cape Town in the law programme. Once I started studying, I didn’t know if it was for me, especially learning about the industry and the sector, the opportunities – it just didn’t feel like a good fit.

I became a lawyer for selfish reasons. I thought I could do a lawyer’s job better than any other.

I knew I couldn't try to pursue an education when my parents wanted me to marry

Studying law was a real break from what they expected of me. It was a big deal to choose an alternative career to medicine, so I had to make a real go of it.

He wanted to be a lawyer, couldn't afford it, so he started dealing to go to college - good intention.

They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved — what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband — whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad

My brothers and sisters all hated me 'cause I was an only child.

When I was a kid, I got no respect. I told my mother I’m gonna run away from home. She said, “On your mark…

It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for everything I'd ever been taught was right. I got all A's and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new language simply to deal with the threats. I had good manners, and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide.

I was too embarrassed to leave the house, I even started to avoid my own family because I was scared they would judge me for how bad they’d got.”

I knew that it was only education that was to liberate me and my family from the grips of poverty.

Oh, had I received the education I desired, had I been bred to the profession of the law, I might have been a useful member of society, and instead of myself and my property being taken care of, I might have been a protector of the helpless, a pleader for the poor and unfortunate.

Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he's considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him?

When I was young, I wanted to be a great person. I also wanted to avoid things that happened to my parents. There and then, I made up my mind that if I ever get married, I won’t live apart; I won’t quarrel. Whatever is the problem I would stomach it.