This is one of the stories in Coat Hangars and Knitting Needles, about abortion in America before Roe v Wade. To go back is inhumane.
During the Vietnam War an iconic photo showed nine-year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked away from napalm bombs taken June 8, 1972.
They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words. As a writer, I know it is true.
The pro-life movement uses photos of fetuses to make the point: babies are being killed.
Not used as often, but still seen on posters for pro-choice protests is an equally discomforting if not shocking photo of Gerri Santoro on the floor, next to the bed in the Norwich Motel. She is stark naked, in the position of a frog, blood coming out of her vagina. Her head is turned to the right. Her right hand is covered with what might be a pair of pants. Her purse if in the lower right-hand corner of the photo.
She is dead.
She bled to death after her boyfriend failed to abort her June 8, 1964. The medical examiner called it an air embolism from an unskilled surgical procedure. Geri Santoro was 28, married, the mother of two daughters, Joannie and Judy.
She might have passed into oblivion if Ms Magazine in April 1973 had not printed that photo along with a story about abortion. According to Roberta Brandes Gratz, at Ms., they thought the woman was anonymous.
Leona, her sister and a Ms subscriber, recognized her sister. Her first reaction was upset but over the years her opinion changed. In 1993 she participated in a pro-life march carrying that photo with the words “This was my sister.” Photos of Gerri as a smiling, healthy woman were on the other side of the sign.
Leona also participated in a documentary called Leona’s Sister Gerri, made by Jane Gillooy
in 1995 about Gerri. Her daughters, brother and best friend, Joyce Garboni, also
appeared. (Note: I cried as I watched the movie. There's the trailer. If you are feeling brave, look at the photo of Gerri https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbkwRGpAjEQ
Gerri was one of five girls in a fifteen-child family. They lived on a farm in Connecticut. Leona described her sister as a kid who loved to climbed trees. A brother remembered how Gerri rushed thru morning chores to be able to get to the bathroom first and have enough hot water.
Joyce Garboni was her best friend from the day they met on the school bus. They worked nights at a factory making condensers for radios, which gave Joyce enough money to buy a 1949 Dodge. The girls would cut classes, go to the car, change from the school dress code requiring skirts into jeans. Often, they went to the Windham Diner.
Joyce planned to marry in September, after graduation. Gerri kept saying, she would beat her friend to the altar even though she didn’t have a boyfriend. Then she met Sebastian Santoro (Sam) at a bus stop. They married September 18, 1954 one week before Joyce did.
The saying marry in haste, repent in leisure, applied to the marriage. What Gerri didn’t repent were her two girls, Joannie and Judy.
Sam had been put in an orphanage along with his brother when his widowed mother could not cope with four children. She kept her daughters, which may have explained his dislike of women, shown by his actions of beating Gerri. Joannie and Judy often had a belt applied to their behinds, far too much by, according to Gerri’s brother.
Joyce told how negative he was about everything and a bigot, liking no one.
He worked in a meat room and was subject to terrible headaches, which Gerri used to explain his attitudes.
Sam thought moving to the better climate in California would help his headaches. Although Gerri was reluctant, she gave in driving herself and her daughters across country after Sam had settled there. Joannie remembers her mother making the trip fun.
California did not improve the situation.
Joannie told about hearing her mother’s screams from the bedroom and when she went in to help, she saw her father with his hands around her mother’s neck. When he saw Joannie, he told her they were playing a game, an excuse that she heard more than once. Her mother seemed to go along with it, although Joannie wasn’t convinced.
Coming home from school in the spring of 1963, Joannie found the car packed and the two girls and Gerri returned to Connecticut without saying goodbye to their father. She remembers how much she loved the bedroom in her grandparents’ farm house where they lived without their father. She loved how her mother came in mornings and rolled up the shade, the flowers, the smell of the grass.
Judy’s memories of that time were how her mother always smelled of Juicy Fruit gum.
Gerri found work at the Mansfield Training School where she met Clyde Dixon. They became lovers. Joyce understood why. He was everything Sam wasn’t, a talker, pleasant. He was also married.
Gerri found herself pregnant. She asked Joyce if her husband could get her some ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and was used thru the ages by midwives and doctors for abortions.
Joyce did not believe that the ergot was for a pregnant “friend” of Gerri’s. Over the next few weeks she debated confronting Gerri. The day she decided to do it, she went to Gerri’s house and found her friend not well. When Gerri told her that the “friend” was no longer pregnant, Joyce dropped the subject.
No one knows if Gerri was ill from the ergot and still did not abort the baby.
Time was running out. Sam had written a letter saying he was coming home and he wanted to take the girls to the beach for two weeks. Gerri expressed fear that if he found out she was pregnant by another man, he would kill her.
Clyde Dixon talked with a Dr. Milton Morgan, who told him how to do an abortion and loaned Dixon the instruments. They would do it June 8, 1964.
Joanie remembers her mother leaving and she begged to go with her. When her mother said “no” Joannie hid under a blanket in the backseat of the car. Her mother saw her and sent her back into the house.
No one knows where Dixon abandoned Gerri. Was it when she started to bleed out of control? Was it after she died?
Leona, who was at her brother’s that night came home to be told that Gerri had called her and was crying, but said she would call back later. She never did.
The girls remember being told that their mother had died, she’d been in a car accident. Joannie said it didn’t make sense because the car was in perfect condition. The story changed to being hit while walking. Only later did they put it all together. Joannie originally reacted negatively to the treatment of her “beautiful” mom, but later became active in the pro-choice movement marching in pro-life events.
Judy admits having an abortion as a teenager. She says she believes abortions are wrong and she will have to answer for what she did. At the same time, she is not willing to make the choice for any other woman.
The film shows Gerri as a loving mom. The girls talk about her always making their Halloween costumes. Joannie says, she does the same thing today.
Clyde Dixon spent a year in prison and returned to his wife and family. He died in 1979.
Sebastian (Sam) died in 1978.
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