Prologue from Coat Hangars and Knitting Needles

 

I wrote this book a few years back, before Roe was overturned. The research and writing took me a year and then I sent it to every pro-life person I could think of.

“Almost half of American women have terminated at least one pregnancy, and millions more Americans of both sexes have helped them, as partners, parents, health-care workers, counselors, friends.” Katha Pollitt, The Atlantic, May 1997.

Across every culture and throughout time, women who have missed a menstrual period and felt they couldn’t have a child, sought abortions.

Making abortion illegal is useless. It will continue no matter how many laws are passed. Women who do not want a baby, for any number of reasons, will find a way to end their pregnancy. Legal or illegal, it doesn’t matter.

The more I researched the topic of American abortions prior to 1973, I realized the topic is almost endless. I’ve searched scholarly studies, newspaper articles, TV programs, websites, court documents and first-person accounts and interviews.

For every woman who has decided to have an abortion, there is a back story.

The idea that overturning Roe v. Wade will stop abortion is as irrational as saying by next Monday there will be a second sun in the sky.

I would like to have this book read by every legislator and every person who thinks outlawing abortion is the answer. Our energies need to be focused instead on making it easier to prevent unwanted pregnancies, a far better solution.

Prologue

Every Woman

From the beginning of time, whenever a woman realizes her period is late there is a reaction.

For some it will be hope and delight for:

·         A baby

·         A little boy to carry on the family name or

·         A little girl who she can dress up

For others it will be panic, fear:

·         She already has more children than she can support financially and/or physically

·         Her parents will disown her

·         It is not her husband’s child

·         It will ruin her chances for an education or job

·         There is an inherited disease in her family

·         She has been told by a doctor another child will be fatal for her

·         There is a genetic disease in the family

·         She was raped

·         She is not sure who the father is

·         Her husband is having an affair and might leave at any time

·         She believed her boyfriend, who said he would love and marry her, only for him to disappear when he learned of her pregnancy

I could list hundreds of reasons that the lack of a period would create panic.

For all women, who suspect then confirm that they are indeed pregnant, life is forever changed.

“If I have the child,” goes through the mind, a drumbeat marching to the beat of what if, what if, what if…

Mothers are supposed to be warm, wonderful creatures and all knowing. It’s a myth. Even the best mothers sometimes have trouble coping.

When the woman whose period is late even if she loves children, wanted those she already has or wants them in the future, she knows now isn’t the time.

She won’t be able to give the child what it needs. It will destroy her planned life, a life which may already be a struggle. This reflects reality, not some idealized made-for-television movie where everyone lives happily ever after.

She thinks she might go away, have the baby, give it up for adoption. Some do. Some don’t.

Some women have the baby and learn to love it. Others resent the child throughout its life and the child suffers psychological or physical abuse.

They do not want to see their children go hungry and never have a chance at a decent life because the resources just aren’t there.

Those women, finding no good alternatives, decide the best way is to terminate the pregnancy. Thus, it was, is and always will be.

Throughout history there are records of plants and solutions that are good for aborting fetuses. A friend, a doctor or maybe an amateur who sees abortions as a great business, may dig the baby out of her with or without sterile methods.

If that doesn’t work, as my grandmother said, there is always the knitting needle trick.

For centuries in many cultures, it was only after “quickening” the moment when the pregnant woman feels the baby move for the first time, that it was considered an abortion. Before the baby’s movements were felt, termination was considered a restoration of the menses.

I won’t claim to know when life begins.

During the late 19^th and a good part of the 20^th century, women who wanted to abort a baby sought help any way they could.

Some doctors provided the service under clean conditions.

Unscrupulous men and women just did it, on newspaper, table tops, rugs, whatever, jabbing instruments sterile or not into women’s vaginas.

Infections spread. Hospitals received women with a regularity that they kept wards of 20 to 30 beds. Some women were saved, more were not. We don’t know how many died outside hospitals.

There are no exact figures of how many women sought abortions prior to 1973. If the service run by ministers and rabbis or the collective Jane are any indication, it could run into the millions.

There has always been abortion on demand for those women who do not feel they can have a baby, either by do-it-yourself with drugs or by instrument self-inflicted or assisted. There always will be abortion on demand.

The only difference will be when abortion is illegal, how many women will die too?

For those women who do abort and live, life goes on but never as before.

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