BEFORE ROE v. WADE
Do the math. Five major city hospitals in one city had 20 botched abortions in a day which means 100 failed illegal abortions in just one city in one day. Take the major cities: Boston, New York, Washington D.C., Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago… an estimated 800 botched abortions in these areas alone.
If lawmakers think they will stop abortion by outlawing it,
they are hallucinating. From the beginning of time, women who wanted/needed
abortion would find an abortionist or do it themselves. If any lawmaker
is tempted to vote to limit abortion, please watch this film before
you do. When Abortion was Illegal:
Untold Stories https://vimeo.com/24924296
This
27-minute, 38-second Academy Award-nominated documentary combines personal
testimonies of women who had illegal abortions, doctors, nurses, psychologists and researchers. It delves into the history of abortion
limitation in the U.S. and why.
The film
emphasizes that until the mid-1800s abortions were legal and available in the
United States and if not approved at least accepted by both states and churches
if it happened before quickening.
Beginning
in 1847, the newly formed American Medical Association began campaigning to
professionalize medicine by outlawing what it labelled quackery. Included in
this ban were midwives and herbalists who had provided abortion and maternity
care in their communities for centuries.
During the
second half of the 19th century, Victorian society began to condemn
women seeking abortions as selfish, immoral
and shirking the duties of motherhood, the film said,
until it was impossible for a
woman to get a safe abortion or birth control information.
Dr. Armstrong, a family physician, confirmed what I found from other doctors from the period about the number of botched abortions. He said, “I went to medical school in NYC in the 50s when abortions were illegal. Every day the city hospital that my medical school staffed would have 20 to 30 women coming in, infected and bleeding, dying from abortions they induced themselves. The coat hanger trick was used…”
Exact Statistics Are Impossible
No official national statistics for illegal abortions are available for obvious reasons. They are done in secret. There are only estimates. Dr. Armstrong’s hospital was just one of many in New York City. Other hospitals in other cities such as Philadelphia General kept 20 beds for women with botched abortions.
Do the math.
Five major city hospitals with 20 botched abortions a day means 100 failed
illegal abortions in just one city in one day. Take the major cities:
Boston, New York, Washington
D.C., Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago…
an estimated 800 botched abortions in these areas
alone.
If those
numbers were for botched abortion how many abortions happened each day that did
not fail?
The film
did not go into statistics after Roe v.
Wade, but the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported some 51
million-plus abortions from 1971 to 2013. The case-fatality rate for known
legal induced abortion for 1993 to 1997 was 0.6 deaths per 100,000 legal
abortions, according to an in-depth CDC report on abortion.
If abortion
becomes illegal again,
women will once again seek the backrooms, the motels, the
shacks, the coat hangers and knitting needles.
One statement in the film about the inevitability of abortion was spoken by a white-haired woman, well-dressed, sitting in a comfortable chair: “A woman who is unhappily pregnant will risk her life to stop that particular pregnancy and later in her life when conditions change will happily risk her life to have a baby.” A very realistic statement.
Life before Birth Control and Roe v. Wade
As a young woman in the
sixties and early seventies, I knew that about half my friends had unwanted pregnancies. Those were the days before
Eisenstadt v. Baird removed the prohibition of giving unmarried women birth control
information.
Of my
friends that admitted unwanted pregnancies, some had abortions, some shotgun
marriages, most of which, but not all, were unsuccessful. Others disappeared for a few months for a variety of not-so-believable
reasons. I wonder how many of my other friends didn’t share pregnancy
information with me. Sociologically, we represented middle-class girls growing
up in a very Republican Massachusetts town.
The woman,
who said the desperation of a pregnant woman means she will find a way to
abort, explained how she was married at 17. After
giving birth to a sickly
baby girl, her doctor told her another pregnancy would be
fatal.
Three months
later she was pregnant. The doctor lectured
her: “Didn’t I tell
you not to get pregnant?”
She replied that he didn’t tell her how not to. Ignorance about reproduction
was rampant.
Thanks to
friends, she located a woman who
lived in a shack to perform the abortion. She had to sell much of what she
owned to raise the $50 fee. She felt she had no
choice: the risk of an abortion death was less than the risk
of dying and leaving her baby daughter without a mother.
The abortionist put a piece
of slippery elm in her uterus and sent her home. She developed
an infection and suffered great pain. Returning to the shack, the woman was
upset to see her, but cleaned her up. Then she hugged her and asked, “Honey,
did you think it was that easy to be
a woman?” and told her never to come back. Despite the horror, she remembers the hug as kindness.
The personal
stories in the film When Abortion
was Illegal run
the gamut about
why women want abortions. One woman and her boyfriend
were talking about getting married,
having babies, even discussing names for
those babies. However, when
she told him she was pregnant, he
asked whose baby it was. The relationship ended. She could not imagine
with the mores of the time being an
unwed mother. She used the phone book to find a sympathetic doctor. Many decades later, she
still feels like a criminal. Women deserted by men was and is a common reason
for abortion.
Another
woman, who had had an abortion at an early age, found herself pregnant after
being raped by an older man. She
couldn’t face a second abortion. The first had been in a “dirty” motel room and was done by a “dirty”
woman, according to the woman who had the abortion.
She went to a home for unwed mothers, which had begun to flourish.
(Florence Crittenden* and the Salvation Army operated these homes across the
country during the 20th century.)
The woman said that she made a mistake
by seeing her baby before
giving the child up. To pay off some of her expenses, she
stayed at the home, working in the nursery among babies that weren’t hers. She
said it was not right for a young woman to have to go through a pregnancy and then leave her baby behind.
Evelyn
looks as if she stepped off the society pages of a major newspaper, her white
hair pulled back and her blue eyes flashing.
She described how after her own abortion
she helped locate safe abortions for other women, even though she knew
it was illegal. She felt the danger of
going to prison was less than the risk of death to the pregnant woman.
The film
depicts black-and-white sketches of Victorian women on their deathbeds with a
man sitting next to each. Often women who were in danger of dying from an
illegal abortion had to give a
deathbed testimony against their husband, lover and/or the
abortionist before they could receive medical treatment. Actresses
read some of these deathbed statements. I can imagine the pain, the fear.
“I, Maria, (last
name not clear)
believing I am about to die, make this ante mortem statement. I became acquainted with John Shockwell. I had sexual intercourse with him and in the month of May I
noticed I was pregnant…”
“I, Flora Alice Grimes, about
to die, make this statement on the second
day of July 1896. James Dunn, a retail merchant, gave me a packet of
calamine. I took two doses.”
“I, Loretta Parsons, am about to die…”
In the mid-20th century,
Terry, a researcher, reported that she found many physicians were supportive of abortion, feeling it
should be made safe for women. They were afraid to do it themselves, partially from fear
of censure or other
punishment. Another fear was
that if word got out that they would do abortions, they would be inundated with
requests.
They were
right. Terry talked about Dr. Curtis Boyd, (See Chapter 21) who began with a
few abortions in 1965. He found himself getting referrals from all over the
country, many from ministers. Over the next eight years he performed thousands
of illegal procedures.
Dr. Boyd
said, “I began to realize how difficult it was to obtain the service and how
desperately women needed it and wanted it and to what they lengths they would
go to obtain to regularly risking their lives… that didn’t matter. Women risked
their lives every day to get an abortion somewhere in this country…I knew I
could lose my license, go to prison.”
He spoke of
the need for two-way trust. The
women needed to trust him to provide a safe treatment and he needed
to trust the women, many who came from great distances, to not go to the authorities.
For those that didn’t have a Dr. Boyd and others
like him, a registered nurse,
Mary, told of women coming in to the hospital with a
“temperature of 105, bleeding, totally infected. We had some die in shock
because they did not
tell the truth.”
They were afraid the information would be turned over
to the police.
Who were those women? Mary said that often “it was just plain housewives that couldn’t afford to have another baby.”
A Dr. Paulsen talked
about two girls
who went to Tijuana; one came back and died,
another came back and had to have a hysterectomy. “I was outraged at how
women were being treated.” His anger was not just at the abortionist but at the
men, be they boyfriends, casual lovers or husbands.
Dorothy Fadiman, who made the film, had her own abortion story. “When I was a college student, I became unintentionally pregnant. I had no savings, no committed partner and my family was 3,000 miles away. I could neither find nor afford a skilled provider. Abortion was illegal in California in 1962, so I paid $600 cash to a stranger, a person whose face I never saw. I was blindfolded throughout the procedure. Soon afterward, I began to hemorrhage and ended up on the intensive care ward of Stanford hospital with a fever of 105 and septicemia, a blood infection that had killed so many women who risked the back alleys or aborted themselves. I kept my story to myself and remained silent for thirty years.”
Awards
When Abortion
was Illegal: Untold Stories won other prizes besides its Academy Awards nomination:
Emmy, Academy of Television
Arts & Sciences
Gold Hugo, Chicago
International Film Festival
Gold Apple, National
Educational Film/Video Festival
Bronze, C. Columbus
International Film/Video Festival
Featured Selection, Seattle
Human Rights Film
Festival
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