It started with a couple of emails. Now it can be up to 20 or more a day. Book reviewers, pod casters, free lance editors, publicists...if it has to do with publishing, they are soliciting me usually with a mass mailings starting "Dear Author"... followed by a pitch pretending they know me.
Rarely does one use my name. One must have thought I changed my name to Kenneth.
Here's a sloppy mailer.
Dear Donna Lane,
“Every third woman in America will have had an abortion during her life.” Dr. Grimes
Dr. David Grimes can say what it was like before Roe v. Wade far better than I can:
“The decades before Roe v. Wade were the bad ol’ days. It was horrible carnage—and every one of those deaths was preventable. These women weren’t dying of exotic diseases. They were dying of simple things like hemorrhage and infection, and any third-year medical student with adequate equipment could’ve easily handled it. But the reason those women were dying is because the country had not yet made the decision that these women’s lives are worth saving. It’s just one of the ugly manifestations of misogyny, and it needs to be understood as such. It was a profound disdain of women and their autonomy.”
“Back in the '50s and '60s, every major metropolitan hospital in the U.S. had a septic abortion ward. The most common reason for admission to gynecological services in America was complication of abortion. When I was a doctor at L.A. County hospital in 1986, my predecessors who’d trained there told me the septic abortion ward at that hospital was a 20-bed, U-shaped ward, and they had two private rooms. These private rooms were there so women could be alone with their families as they died from complications of illegal abortions, and those rooms were always full. When the California laws changed in 1967 and abortion became legal in the state, those wards emptied, closed, and were converted to other uses.”
By the time Dr. Grimes finished medical school in North Carolina, abortion had been made legal in that state, though Roe v. Wade had not been issued. However, when he started his training it was not, and he saw patients who had had illegal abortions. Many faced death.
His words: “One patient was called to the emergency room when I was on call, and she reportedly had a fever of 106 or 107 degrees. I thought that was an error, because I had never seen folks with fever that high, except folks with heat stroke. I discovered it wasn’t an error—the patient was desperately ill, and when I did the pelvic exam, I found a red, rubber catheter protruding from the woman’s cervix. It had been put in place by a technician the next town over. She was a well-known illegal abortion provider who was still practicing in the early days after Roe v. Wade.”
Throughout his career, which spanned four decades, Grimes did abortions; he was dedicated to teaching medical students and doctors safe methods. It wasn’t his dedication to abortion, it was his dedication to giving the woman the right to choose.
Pro-life people can show pictures of fetuses. One anti-choice film has an animation of a baby in the uterus being pulled apart, horrible at best.
There are no winners in this issue. The baby will die in an abortion. In an illegal abortion, the mother has a far greater chance of dying also. If the mother gives birth, the baby may be loved. It may be put up for adoption into a loving family.
Or the mother may not have the resources to give the child the type of life all children should have. The adoptive parents may be abusive; it happens more than often than we want to admit.
The reasons for making that difficult decision to have an abortion do not go away.
An unwanted pregnancy seldom has a happy ending. There are no good choices and as much as everyone wishes for a happy-ever-after ending, there are few.
Dr. Grimes spoke plainly when he described other abortions gone wrong. “They were inserted into the uterus and taped in place, and they would cause infection, which would then induce an abortion. The more invasive the illegal abortion technique of putting things in the uterus, the more successful and the more dangerous it was.”
He talked about “a young student from the University of North Carolina. She came in near death; she was in septic shock. She had virtually no blood pressure, and when I examined her, I found a dead fetal foot at about 17 weeks gestation protruding through her cervix. The circumstances were suspicious. But I didn’t press the issue; it wasn’t my job to be the inquisitor. We quickly emptied her uterus, gave her antibiotics, and saved her life as well, and sent her home.”
She was one of the lucky ones.
Dr. Grimes said, “Every third woman in America will have had an abortion during her life.” He added that poor women, who lack access to contraception, are more at risk of needing abortion.
He disputes that government not paying for abortion costs money, $2 to $10 in future societal costs.
He says abortion has reduced:
The number of shotgun weddings
Unwanted babies placed
for adoption
Birth defects
Prohibition of abortion will be as effective as prohibition of alcohol by the eighteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Dr. Grimes said that the “question confronting our nation today is simply what women will be forced to pay for their abortions…in terms of dollars, disease, degradation, and for some death. As Santayana observed, society must learn from its experiences; if not, we remain savages. If we lose our collective memory of the bad old days and turn back the clock on women in America, as happened in Romania, we do so at great peril.”
Dr. Grimes is an internationally known abortion scholar. His credentials include:
Work with the World Health
Organization (WHO)
Research on abortion
nationally and internationally
Clinical trials of mifepristone, the drug used for medical
abortion
398+ articles in peer-reviewed journals
Editor of the first two editions of the National Abortion
Federation Textbook
Education
Harvard University, undergraduate degree in Biology
University of North Carolina Morehead
Fellow
Emory University, Faculty
University of Southern
California, faculty
University of North
Carolina, faculty
Awards
National Institutes of Health T32 training grant,
principal investigator
Commendation Medal from the U.S. Public Health
Service
The Christopher Tietze Award from the National Abortion Federation
Alan Guttmacher Award from the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals
Distinguished Service Award from the American College
of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
Issue of the Year Award 1994 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
Institute of Medicine
of the National Academies of Science
Honorary Fellow of the
Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists UK
American Board of Obstetrics and
Gynecology
American Board of Preventive Medicine
Taught research methods
to doctors/scientists in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Egypt, India and
Kenya.
Chaired and a member of the World Health Organizations Data Safety and Monitoring
Boards.
Berlex Foundation/Excellence Foundation trained 2,000+ US obstetricians and gynecologists
Published 398 peer-reviewed articles, 50 textbook
chapters, 11 books
Served on the boards of The
Lancet, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Obstetrical and Gynecology Survey, and Contraception.
When we travel we don't buy much maybe a cup for my daughter's collection or T shirt with the name of where we were. One thing we do buy from every place we go is a magnet which we place on our frigo (fridge).
Last week we had to replace our frigo and I wanted a smallish one and the only thing it did was when I opened the door it revealed food kept at a cool temperature. No ice maker. Ice cream freezing space, though was a necessity.
Since I can walk in minutes to my village shops, even if I forget to buy a carrot, a five minute errand (if I don't stop to talk with a friend) is all it takes.
For the frigo exchange, we had to remove over 100 magnets from all over Europe. We decided to organize them when we put them back.
Those shown above are raised magnets. The Scottish one, far top left, even plays bagpipes.
We then put the circles together and the hearts on one side. We have only a few with sayings, including a favorite from the now defunct Newseum in Washington D.C. Since Rick and I have both been journalists, "Not tonight Dear, I have a deadline," is a favorite.
Both of us had to admit that there were some magnets that we had no memory where we bought them making guesses such as a Mary Cassatt from a painting of a mother and child. Paris is good guess.
It looks like we might have enjoyed it anyway.
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