“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.”
Grimes’
Credentials
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
Memberships, Publications and Certifications
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.
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