Pre-Roe v. Wade: What abortion was really like.

Tomorrow at a House hearing on reproductive rights, three members of the House will testify about their pre-Roe abortions. That is, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash, will explain to the mostly male attendees about women’s reproductive lives prior to the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in 1973, Roe v. Wade. I’ve been there. I’m old enough to have gone through the experience, perhaps with a bit more luck than some other women, but with the same fear, secrecy, cost, and distress. In 1967 I was 23 years old, and had decided to end an intimate relationship with an older man who was purportedly divorced. Dear readers, he was not, but that’s nothing unusual in the male sexual lexicon of lies. My contraception failed following what I believed to be my last encounter with the man, and I anxiously consulted a prominent, ageing Fifth Avenue ob-gyn who had purportedly marched with Margaret Sanger. The doctor examined me, took some tests, and proclaimed me not to be pregnant. My monthly bleeding continued, much lighter than usual. And this was confusing, and apparently fairly common. The weeks went by. I became nauseated. I demanded that the doctor reexamine me, and she finally agreed that, yes, I was pregnant. And getting more pregnant every day. She declined to help me find an abortionist. My erstwhile boyfriend tried to call a variety of purported illegal abortionists for an appointment, but he was deemed suspicious because of his gender (he could have been with law enforcement) and was hence unable to schedule a procedure for me. My girlfriend gave me the name and telephone number of a preeminent ob-gyn in Union City, New Jersey, who performed abortions, and I scheduled an appointment, taking a bus to his office. He confirmed my pregnancy and scheduled me for a Saturday morning abortion in his office. That is, the doctor had a routine ob-gyn practice Monday through Friday and then performed abortions every Saturday morning, seven or eight each week. I remember the cost—$350—which was provided in cash by my boyfriend. And I remember asking to be the first patient that morning because I had a plane to catch to spend the afternoon with my parents looking for housing on the campus of a university where I was about to begin graduate studies. The doctor gave me a shot to numb the pain (it didn’t) and warned me not to make a sound that could frighten the other pregnant women waiting in the next room for their turn. Then followed twenty minutes of hell, cramps, and other uterine pain accompanying a procedure known as a dilation and curettage (D&C), whereby the uterus is scraped clean of its contents. I swore silently that I would never let another man touch me again as the interminable tremendously painful abortion procedure continued. The doctor indicated I was too far along for a D&C, but once it had been begun, he had to complete the procedure. The Fifth Avenue doctor was wrong about the duration of my pregnancy and I had been right all along. When it was over and the doctor escorted me to a recovery room, he asked if I were a nurse since I had not cried out during the painful procedure. I told him I was not. I guess many of the women, even younger than I, tended to scream and otherwise react audibly to the pain of the procedure. But I had girded my loins, so to speak, and used all my concentration to focus on the perfidy of men in general in order to remain silent. The doctor gave me a prescription for penicillin and instructed me to telephone him within a week to tell him if I had any negative aftereffects from the abortion. I did not have any aftereffects although I eventually had multiple miscarriages before finally having a child just before I turned 40. I don’t believe the miscarriages were related to the illegal abortion. But I will never know. The doctor in Union City is surely dead after all these years, and I wonder at my good fortune in locating a concerned, competent, caring doctor to give me another chance at a life that was yet to unfold before me over the decades. I could have been butchered. I could have been rendered sterile. I could have been left for dead. That doctor and thousands of others through the years prior to Roe deserve a medal for their courage in helping women choose whether or not to bear a child. The men who currently legislate reproductive laws that control women’s bodies are misogynists in the extreme by comparison.

Has the State of Texas Devised a Foolproof Way

to Overturn Roe v. Wade?

 

Tonight the Texas legislature’s latest anti-abortion statute is about to go into effect.

 

It will award to any person a bounty of $10,000 plus attorney’s fees who reports to Texas legal authorities the performance of an abortion on any woman who is six weeks or more pregnant.

 

The reporter need not be associated with the woman who has such an abortion.

 

The mother of the fetus need not actually be aware that she is at least six weeks pregnant or that she was pregnant at all.

 

The reporter need not show any relationship to the proposed mother of the unborn child, i.e., need not be the father of the aborted child, the husband of the woman having the abortion, the physician who performs the abortion (heretofore legally), any person affiliated with the medical office of said physician or other abortion provider, or any person connected with law enforcement such as it may be. That reporter need not even be a resident of Texas.

 

In other words, anti-abortion zealots who have no connection of any kind to a woman who is desperate to have an early abortion—whether or not she is even certain she is pregnant, since many women do not know they have conceived for a time period well past six weeks following impregnation—now have an incentive to hunt down and report any female person in the State of Texas who has had or wishes to have what has been a legal abortion pursuant to Roe v. Wade until this very hour.

 

Some fanatical person, not necessarily a resident of Texas, who carries signs, harasses pregnant women seeking pregnancy advice, and publicizes the names and other personal data about abortion providers—often to hunt them down and humiliate them, and sometimes to murder them—will have the blessing of the state of Texas to go after them with their legal guns drawn.

 

And the women of Texas will be caught in this trap by professional abortion mercenaries whose motive is to impose their notion of who may or may not legally abort a fetus by seeking payment from the public till—aided by similarly minded legal counsel—according to their twisted notions of the legality or illegality of abortion in the state of Texas.

 

For this we have the legislators of the Lone Star State and its Governor Greg Abbott to thank, men (almost exclusively) imbued with the zeal of the fanatical, many awash in evangelical religious justification, and all of them intent on controlling the reproductive lives of Texas women.

 

Counsel who oppose such an obviously unconstitutional  statute are attempting to persuade the federal courts to issue a late-night injunction against the effective date, methods, and philosophy of such a statute, but such efforts will be occurring down to the wire and will no doubt be followed by subsequent efforts to oppose them.

 

So what does this all mean? What does it signify long after the 1973 Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion during such time as a fetus is too small and undeveloped to be viable, to live outside the womb should it be born early? With certain exceptions even to that standard such as a pregnancy caused by rape and/or danger to the life of the mother or the child?

 

WOMEN OF AMERICA, STAND UP AND BE COUNTED AMONG THOSE WHO HAVE UNDERGONE ILLEGAL ABORTIONS AND TELL THE AMERICAN PUBLIC WHAT LIES AHEAD IN THE EVENT SUCH A STATUTE IS UPHELD BY THE COURTS AS APPROPRIATE AND, IN THIS DAY AND AGE, “LEGAL” by the Bush/Trump conservative Supreme Court.

 

Even with the advent of medical abortions, which may not run afoul of an outrageous statute such as that proposed by Texas—and without traditional legal standing by a party seeking a financial bounty for preventing innocent women from exercising their right to control their decision whether or not to bear a child—it is no secret that the average pregnancy is not diagnosed until well after the sixth week of pregnancy. A variety of reasons underlie this state of events, including regularity of menstruation, type of pregnancy symptoms, sophistication of the mother in understanding the significance of symptoms of very early pregnancy, access to a qualified medical opinion, availability of pregnancy testing, and the like.

 

What is really behind such an outrageous purported statute is the long sought-after control of the Christian evangelical movement in America of the bodies of American women, their ability to interpret Scripture in such a manner as to dominate and determine which children may be born and which may not.

 

It is a statute that American women must oppose with all their zeal, protests, public marches, financial assistance, lobbying, and outrage. It is a statute drafted by the ignoramuses of this world—mostly male but not entirely—who have inserted themselves into the most intimate of decisions ever made in the lives of women . . . whether to beget or bear a child.