Coat Hangers, etc.

Chapter 1 of Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles: 

Tragedies of Abortion in America Before Roe v. Wade

A Victorian Woman Speaks

My grandmother, Florence Stockbridge Sargent, Dar to everyone who knew her, was the perfect Victorian lady. Even in the early1960s she would never leave the house without her hat, gloves and corset.

I couldn’t imagine her having sex, and that is not a grandchild’s lack of imagination. She bragged that her husband had never seen her naked, but they must have had sex at least three times because she had three children.

She repeated the story of helping at the birth of her nephew, Lawrence. Her sister-in-law was in agony.

“You are next Mrs. Sargent,” the doctor was reported to have said.

“Not until I forget tonight,” my grandmother claims to have replied.

She must have forgotten. My Uncle Gordon was born in 1910, his sister Lois in 1915.She died during her first year in my grandmother’s arms, cause unknown, but she had failed to flourish.

My mother was the replacement child in 1917.

Anxious to preserve my purity, my grandmother cautioned me on the proper distance on the dance floor with a boy. After I had dated my future husband for several months while a sophomore in high school, she asked if he’d ever kissed me. When I nodded, she asked, “On the mouth?” I did not go into our petting sessions in his 1950 green Chevrolet.

Thus, when my grandmother referred to the “knitting needle” method of birth control, I was shocked not that she said it, but with the same way she would have said, “It’s time for bed,” or “What will we have for dinner tonight?”

Sex was somehow not all right, but abortion, when necessary was. My teen brain didn’t understand.

The mores of the time, was that good girls didn’t have sex. Part of it in our middle-class existence was described by Marilyn French, that a virgin had a chance to attract a better husband if she had a “factory-fresh hymen.”

Good girls did have sex and good girls did get pregnant, more because even though oral contraceptives were approved in 1960, doctors were not allowed to prescribe them by law to unmarried women. They also could not talk about older methods such as diaphragms and rhythm.

Women told and retold an unfunny joke “Question: What do you call a woman who practices rhythm? Answer: Mother.”

Information about Intrauterine Devices (IUDs), which had been around for centuries had been improved until failure rates hovered about 0.8% with copper devices and even less 0.2% with the hormone levonorgestrel. These too, were off limits to married women.

Before I married I knew better to try our family Dr. Halligan who’d seen me thru childhood diseases and poison ivy. He resembled an aging Irish Leprechaun and when he walked into the room, his patient automatically felt better.

I did try Dr. Land. Even a Woolworth’s wedding ring did not fool him. The law served its purpose: I stayed pure until I was married.

As we went thru the sixties and into the seventies, I had friends struggle to find someone to provide birth control to unmarried women. They were braver than I was and when they were caught, tried methods from riding horseback to throwing themselves downstairs. They resorted to do-it-yourself chemical methods to seeking an abortionist that might or might not kill them.

The other alternative was to marry. We planned one friend’s wedding when we were at university. She could not face an abortion, more from fear than conviction. About an hour before the wedding, she got her period and cancelled the wedding much to her and the groom-to-be’s relief.

Much has improved over the years. Birth control is available as is abortion. Yet many years later, the right of a woman to control her body is under threat once again.

Abortion is a horrible choice. Women who have had abortions do not make that decision easily. Some of have confided, “My child would be ten now.” Yet asked if they would do it again under the same circumstances, a large percentage would.

This book looks at what it would be like to go back to the bad old days, when the solution to an unwanted pregnancy (especially if birth control is harder to get) would be like.

One thing is certain. If abortion is not available legally, a woman who wants an abortion will find a way to do it illegally or to herself. The only thing that is not certain, will it be safe or will it kill her too?