From Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles
People hurt by illegal abortions include the children left behind. A film made in 1992 recounts the story of four children whose mothers died from an illegal abortion. Over the next couple of weeks, I will publish four chapters that tell these stories from my book. This book was sent to pro-life organizations and judges including the Supreme Court.Linn Duvall Hartwell’s Story
A black-and-white photo of
three little girls with bobbed hair in the style of the 1920s is on the screen.
One of them is Linn Duvall Hartwell.
We do not
know how old she was when her mother, Clara, died in 1925 of an illegal
abortion. We can glean some information by simple math.
The film was made in 1992. Linn took
viewers on a tour of her old neighborhood. She tells the audience she hadn’t
been back for fifty years, making her around 69.
Linn has
huge glasses and curly gray hair. She looked like a cookie-baking grandmother
with a lap ready to cuddle any child.
The
director used Linn’s voice over movies of Pittsburgh in the 1920s. A few
Model-T type cars and street cars move back and forth down city streets. Pedestrians walk at a slightly faster pace than normal.
The camera
switches to Linn riding down Princess Avenue, where she grew up. Her childhood
home was a modest yellow-brick, two-story house. All the homes on the street
were either wooden or brick houses with porches. They almost touch. It would be
easy to imagine parents sitting on those porches after dinner as children
played ball in the small yards or on the street during a summer evening.
Linn was one of five children
living there with her
parents and grandparents.
A photo of her father shows a balding
man dressed in a suit and tie. She described her father as a
“wordsmith,” saying he’d been Editor for the Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh
Gazette.
A profile
photo of Clara shows a beautiful woman,
her long hair piled on her head. She had what they call a button nose.
Her mother
was a singer and sang on the radio, the first woman to do so, Linn said. The
song? “If I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I’d fly.”
Ironic.
Linn
doesn’t know whose idea the abortion was. Did her grandmother say you can’t
have another child? There isn’t room. With five children and four adults
in the house, that possibility is realistic.
Linn believed her mother must have been desperate to run
the risk of losing her life.
The children
were at Clara’s
deathbed. “You’re the mother now,”
Clara said to her ten-year old daughter Eleanor, Linn’s
older sister.
Linn was an adult
before her grandmother said that her mother had died from an abortion.
The camera
follows Linn walking through the cemetery where her mother is buried until they
come to a small, simple stone with the name, date of birth and date of Clara’s
death carved. “If you hadn’t been there I would have lain down on the ground
and wept,” she tells the camera.
A lifetime later there is still pain. “Very unnecessary and even though it was this long ago, it Shouldn't have happened to women."
Botched illegal abortions continue today as laws controlling women's body increase. Women with resources can go elsewhere. Women with less income do it themselves. Doctors who see patients with medical problems and need a portion are afraid to give women the care they need.
American women have gone backward in time.
More can be read about prize winning film directors/producers Janet Goldwater, Barbara Attie and Diane Pontius. https://abortionfilms.org/en/show/3484/mutterlos-das-vermachtnis-des-verlustes-illegaler-/ and at www.attiegoldwater.com
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