Coat Hangers Before Roe

 

“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.