June 16, 2022 • 50 mins
In Part 2 of Abortion: The Body Politic, we step into the past, long before Roe, and trace the roots of today’s abortion’s debate to understand — if abortions have always happened and the majority of Americans have always believed they should be legally accessible — why is abortion such a contentious, even volatile, issue in this country. In this journey, a new narrative of reproductive resistance comes to the surface. Women, particularly Black, brown and indigenous, have always made choices that are best for their bodies, families, and lives — no matter the obstacles men have placed before them. In these stories of resistance we also hear first-hand accounts of surprising allies in underground abortion access, courage in the face of limited reproductive choices, and a relentless push for bodily autonomy. The illegal period before Roe is a mirror to our impending, post-Roe future. It’s vital that we pay attention.
More information on this episode’s guests and resources:
- Guttmacher Institute
- The Bixby Center for Reproductive Health
- Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights
- Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
- Boulder Abortion Clinic
Books and more:
- Reproductive Justice, by Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger
- When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973, by Leslie Reagan
- The Janes, available to stream now on HBO Max
- Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe V. Wade, by Daniel K. Williams
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's been very important to understand the conditions of reproductive
life that women lived before ROW and how little control
they had over their sexuality, their fertility, and their ensuing lives.
We went to a planned parenthood in d C and
(00:26):
they asked me if I was married, and unfortunately I
told them the truth and they said, we can't prescribe
birth control pills for you. I was sterilized by the
Dalkon shield. In ninety three, I developed acute p i
D pelic inflammatory disease and encountered a doctor who did
(00:52):
not want to remove the Dalcoon shield because it was
own eugenical thinking. He thought, well, you already had a baby,
so I'm not gonna take a dow con shill out.
It must be some kind std lab. So for six
months he kept misdiagnosing my problem as my stomach became
more and more distended, until I actually went into a
call after my fallopian tubes exploded and so taken to
(01:17):
the hospital in an ambulance. Woke up with all of
my reproductive organs we're missing. I'm Katie CURRCT and this
is abortion the Body Politic, Part two. Today we're stepping
into the past long before row to trace the roots
of today's abortion debate. The right to make decisions over
(01:40):
our own physical selves is the fundament of democracy. Feminist
icon Glorious steinhum You know, in the past, when women
expressed this, they have been declared to be witches. This
is how women got to be witches, you know, because
they actress medicine for other women, and so women would
(02:04):
go into their homes pregnant to come out unpregnant. And
this was perceived as witchery, not only in in Europe,
but to some extent in New England, in this in
this country too. Here's the thing about abortion, It has
always existed. As activists Loretta Ross points out, as long
(02:26):
as women have sex with men, they're always gonna want
to control their reproduction, whether it was cal dung back
in the ancient Roman times or lie was that got
created in more modern times. And the majority of the
country does not oppose abortion, that's historian Leslie Reagan. Majority
(02:46):
of the country does not want any of these kinds
of laws. Why then, is abortion such a contentious, even
volatile issue in this country. Ricky Solinger is a historian
and author focusing reproductive politics, certainly starting with the slavery regime,
(03:07):
which defined white women as distinct is essentially distinct from
Black women, and black women is essentially distinct from white women.
One can trace the different positions and the different consequences
of reproductive bodies depending on race. And here again is
(03:28):
Loretta Ross. My name's Loretta Ross, and I'm an associate
professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. That was one
of the twelve black women who created the theory and
practice of reproductive justice in June of nine. At the
beginning of the enslavement, most of the enslavors thought that
(03:53):
they could import sufficient women black, you know, people from Africa,
women and me in in order to enlarge their labor force.
But early in the eighteen hundreds, a law was passed
forbidding the importation of additional African slaves, and so that's
(04:14):
when the force breeding became the dominant strategy. One of
the things that frustrates me frequently is to the extent
that any of this reproductive oppression is covered. It's always
covered from the perspective of what was done to the
black community. Rarely do people cover it from the perspective
of what agency we exercise, what we did for ourselves,
(04:39):
and they missed the larger story of reproductive resistance in
our community. After the Civil War, that's when articles began
to appear in newspapers, white newspapers for the most part,
to saying that the black birth it was a problem,
(05:01):
but just until it was not, because when it wasn't
about free labor, then the same reproductive productivity was problem
with types even though the reproductive caretaking was not because
he still had mammies and things like that. So you
had this bifurcated kind of racist analysis that said that
(05:26):
black women were irresponsible when it came to taking care
of our own children. But we're very good, nanny said,
taken care of white ones. We're sorry. But interestingly enough,
from the perspective of black women, de Eb debosed at
a sociological study starting at the end of the nineteenth
(05:51):
century in the beginning of the twentie and he reported
that the black birth rate between the end of the
Civil War and when he publisher's research have been cut
in half from the days of slavery. And that was
also the time that my research discovered that to the
(06:11):
extent that we have perspectives from black women now that
were sometimes reported in black newspapers as well as black
women's organizations that they were talking amongst themselves about managing
their own fertility. They bought from Africa a lot of
midwifery knowledge, so they knew which plants and herbs could cause,
(06:35):
you know, an abortion. I think it was an eight two.
I saw a black feminist author who said, not all
women are designed to be mothers, and we need to
be able to control, you know, what happens to our
bodies and stuff. And of course this was two decades
before Margaret Singer came about. All I can do is
speculate from the bread crumbs of evidence that I found
(07:00):
is that they've wanted desperately to control their own fertility
after Dewy, you know, centuries of forth reading, and not
only multiple pregnancies, but also when you're already living in
miserable racial and economic conditions, you want the best future
(07:22):
for the children that you do have and keep. Abortion
was legal under common law in early America, but they
wouldn't have called it abortion. Really, we're talking about early
in pregnancy, up until the point of quickening, that was
legal under common law. I'm Professor Leslie Reagan. I'm a
(07:43):
professor in the Department of History at the University of
Illinois or Banish Champaigne. My book is When abortion was
a crime Women Medicine in law in the United States
eighteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy three. Quickening is the
moment when a woman can feel the fetus moving within her.
We might say, you could feel kicking. You know, it's
(08:04):
something you make, so it's kicking so and when that occurred,
then she knew, oh, there there's life within me, and
they would stop trying to end this pregnancy, because after
quickening was when if you ended a pregnancy, if you aborted,
that was what was against the law. The quickening, as
(08:25):
you can see, is defined by women themselves. We know
from domestic guide books and um advertisements, and because they
they would talk about it as their menstees were obstructed,
their body was out of equilibrium. It was always very
uh euphiized language like that. In the black newspapers of
(08:47):
the day that we're beginning to be published, there was
a product called pup p u f and the tagline
to puff was in your calendar worries, Well, what is
a woman worried about? The calendar? Right that area is missing.
(09:07):
There's domestic guide books produced to the seventeen hundreds and
the eighteen hundreds, than they're republished over and over and
over again, and they include information and recipes, that's how
to make teas and how to bring the messies back.
I think for all all races of women, we shared
this kind of information around our kitchen tables and had
(09:28):
conversations that we did that men weren't prevy too, because
we didn't think it was their business. That's what I've
seen consistently through you know, millennium. That's what women do.
We take care of business and we don't care what
the church says, what the state says, and what the
men in our lives say. We know who's gonna be
around for that baby and who's not. Kind of, you know,
(09:52):
it's a feature of our plumbing that we have a
much higher stake in these conversations than the sperm donors.
The thing to remember is that women's lives, up until
this point, we're part of the private sphere. But in
the eighteen fifties things started to change and men wanted
to control, even criminalize those private decisions. First, you have
(10:18):
you have a very small group of elite physicians pushing
for new legislation. Horatio store a specialist in gynecology and
obstetrics at Harvard Um in Massachusetts, is the person behind this,
and he begins to talk about how abortion is infanticide
(10:39):
and that when women think that they're getting their mensis
back before quickening, that they were all wrong, that this
this was really a life. So Storer really did something
when he started to name this early period when people
are trying to get their menscies back, named that as
an abortion. So he took something that was illegal, understood
(11:02):
to being moral, understood to be um, you know, taking
the life, uh, developing life, and applied that term to
this early period that had never been treated as the same.
Once slavery was legally in dead, then the forced breeding
(11:23):
that had been visited on black women suddenly got visited
on light women. And that's when you had the beginning
of the agitation for the legal restrictions on birth control,
information and abortions, ending up in the eighteen seventy three
Comstock Law, which Comstock, Anthony Comstock was the Postmaster General
(11:45):
and he's the one, yeah, all right, one of the
male service after doing birth control right, but he was
the one who uh campaign to make it illegal to
distribute information or devices. That led the birthday drill, which
of course was most successible to white women at that time.
(12:11):
So this is post Civil War, you know, the country
has changed. African Americans newly freed enslaved people are free.
They are supposed to have the vote, and for a
while black men do have the vote. So this is
part of the I think political underpinnings of why these
(12:34):
laws get passed. The other important part of this is
at that time women were organizing in various ways against
prostitution of calling out men. They were also trying to
get into medical school. So the same doctor storer and
the politicians are like, you should be doing your duty.
(12:54):
Women do not belong out trying to be involved in politics.
Six they should be having babies and raising them to
be the citizens of America. And and the doctors are
particularly threatened by the possibility of women becoming doctors taking
(13:16):
over their business frankly, and they resent their efforts to
get into medical school, to get into Harvard, to claim
higher education. So it's in the eighteen sixties and eighteen
seventies that the states make abortion illegal and criminalized it.
By eighteen eighty, every state has criminalized abortion from conception on.
(13:42):
My name was Lexi, and my abortion was amazing. UM.
I did not feel that way in the moment because
of all these stigma and barriers I experienced, But choosing
not to become a parent was the best decision I've
ever made for myself. I had an abortion, and when
I was in college, I was a junior attending U
(14:06):
mass University of Massachusetts. AMers actually let me. Let me
provide some background information. UM. I was born to a
young single mom um and raised by my grandparents. Love
them to death, but they are very old school, too,
elderly black people from the Deep South. UM, and I
(14:29):
was raising a very conservative household. UM. I also attended
Catholic school from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so I did
not I did not really have much knowledge or information
about my own body, any type of sexual health. So
(14:51):
when I did go to college and didn't know anything
about UM protection or really well informed UM knowledge about options.
If I were to be pregnant, I was really shook.
UM and I don't really know what to do, Like
I didn't know who to call, you know, my family,
(15:13):
like we've dealt with a lot of familial separation, so
you know, in incarcerations, Like my mom wasn't around. Um,
like I said my grandparents, that wasn't really an option
I was. I did not have a lot of money.
I was trying to finish school. My partner was very abusive,
and yeah, I actually initially intended to continue my pregnancy.
(15:36):
I was going to continue my pregnancy just because of
these things that I had heard about abortion, which weren't good,
the very false narratives, the stigmatizing language, the hush hush
around it. I found out in pregnant, I'm like, I
need to go there and not just sound there to
not just sound. And I was only about four weeks long,
(15:58):
which is pretty early to find out. And in the
following weeks, I became extremely sick, um bedridden, Like I
was telling my grandparents I had mono. I was trying
to like contact the school, trying not to like get
it like kicked out because I'm missing so much class,
while also like trying to avoid my abusive partner on campus.
(16:19):
And yeah, it was a mess. I was so sick.
I lost like thirty pounds in like a month and
a half. I did not know what was happening in
my body. I did call my ob joyant and they
were like, well, we can't see what's happening to you
is normal, and you have to be for ten weeks
before we book an appointment with you. And I'm like, what,
(16:42):
I'm an older singling before, and I've been there. I've
helped my mother give birth, like I have seen many
pregnancies in my family, and I I knew what was
happening to me was not normal. And even even if
these things come with pregnancy, if you're not helping me
get through them, who knows without surrounding support. I was like,
(17:04):
there's no way I can make it through it. And
in my mind, all I can think about is how
many black women and other women of color die at
the hands of this medical system that we have. And
all I could think when I called plant parenthood was
I will not die because of this pregnancy and because
no one will listen to me. So I did have
(17:28):
medication abortion, went to plan Parenthood, God pills, went home
and my best friend and then I woke up and
the pregnancy was over, and for the first time in
six weeks, I had eaten real food, and my best
friend had just went got like twelve inch chicken palm
grinder um, and I just I was like, I need that,
(17:50):
and physically like I was relieved, even if even if
I couldn't you know, grasp that at the time, because
when I went out the bath room and I saw
the pregnancy was over all, I like, it was just
the biggest sign of relief, immediately followed by a lot
of internalized shame and stigma and just hatred. But in
(18:13):
that moment, I am able to look back and say,
even regardless of everything that was, it was nothing but
relief in that moment that I knew I was not
going to be a parent because I had made this
decision to have an abortion. It did take me a
hot minute to be able to differentiate my abortion being
(18:35):
negative and all the external barriers and all the other
things around it being negative. It was really coming and
learning that, you know, it's the same white supremacist rhetoric
that tells me that I'm a murderer, I'm a sowful
(18:55):
person for having abortion. Okay, well that's the same The
same people would also call me a welfare queen if
I had continued my pregnancy and needed to help with
social services and probably want to have access to them,
so I would have probably just been homeless. You've been
an awful person for that, or the same white supremacy
that I continue my pregnancy. I have a child, I'm
(19:18):
raising this child, and you go and murder them in
the street for no reason. So learning really how nothing
black and brown Indigenous people and families do under white
supremacy is good enough really helped me realize that I
don't I don't need to follow any of that. The
reason I share my story is because historically black and
(19:43):
brown Indigenous people, you know, we've always been told and
dictated how to raise our families, what to do. We've
always been shadowed um and we're here to claim that
it's ours we're taking here and have a bad period
more right after this, in the first couple of decades
(20:14):
after abortion becomes illegal, abortions continue to happen. Again, here's
Leslie Reagan. So there's always an exception in the law,
and those those abortions that are done by doctors are
called therapeutic abortions. The Great Depression in the nineteen thirties
increases demand hugely. People who collected evans they could see
(20:36):
it they could see a rise in abortions and a
decline in family size. There are clinics that developed that
are open, that are well known um of people who
provide a who are specialists in abortion, and they have
an office with their name on the door. They have
business cards and people know who they are there. They
(20:58):
are people who provide excellent abortions. They're safe. It's it's
very safe. But there were also questionable and sometimes dangerous
options that emerged at the same time. So in New
York City, for example, historian Daniel Williams, there were some
abortion senicates which by theti were performing, according to some
(21:22):
claims at the time to two fifty thousand abortions per years.
It was of a thriving business, but they were connected
with organized crime. They employed non licensed physicians, a lot
of medical school dropouts and others who had a little
bit of medical training but not enough to practice legitimately.
And most of the time they could practice somewhat safe abortions,
but it varied, and of course women were taking their
(21:46):
lives into their hands going to some of those places,
the so called back alley butchers. Professor Carol Joffey is
a sociologist who has long studied abortion care, both physicians
as well as nonphysicians who were horrible, I mean, who
were who were medically inept. I mean, this is where
(22:09):
most of the injuries and deaths came from. In addition
to women attempting their own abortions, and these these guys,
and it really was all guys at the time. Uh,
we're also very ethically challenged. There are horrible stories of
demanding sexual favors, are stopping halfway through the abortion and
(22:32):
demanding more money. These butchers made an enormous impression on
the rest of the medical field, the rest of medicine
that had not been involved, uh in abortion care. And
remember the abortion providers before Row were tiny, tiny portion
of medicine as a whole. Um. They somehow equated abortion
(22:55):
provision with these very ethically and and medically challenged people.
And so beginning of the nineteen thirties, several doctors, especially
in New York, said that the law was not working
and rather than try to make abortion laws more stringent,
what they wanted to do was to make abortion legal
(23:19):
in certain circumstances. Rather than than continue to endanger more women,
what would be best for society will be best for
women's health would be to just admit that we can't
really control women's behavior with these laws. But Leslie Ringing
points out these doctors pushing for reform their outliers. At
(23:40):
least at this point, they are radicals. Uh politically, they're
They're very unusual. What happens instead is that abortion, despite
being illegal, becomes much more visible. I mean it starts
in the thirties, but really by methods of policing abortion change,
(24:03):
and these clinics that had been operating for ten twenty
thirty years openly suddenly are rated and closed by the
police and prosecutors. They now are going after the safe
practitioners who are who are also quite visible and deliberately
(24:27):
will time raids, you know, a group of police four
or five, six, seven, eight ten police burst in and
hopefully find specialist in the middle of a procedure, capture
that person, the doctor, the patient, and all of the
recovering patients, and collect all of the medical records and
(24:50):
gather all of it for evidence for prosecution for illegal abortion.
And this became the standard across the country, these police raids,
So it became harder to find a good provider, and
it became more expensive. Meanwhile, hospitals start cracking down to
(25:12):
the departments of obstetrics and gynecology start to create these
therapeutic abortion review boards um inside their own departments. So
these committees are set up and they end up deciding
what is a legal, legitimate abortion, what's legal and what isn't.
And it meant women they knew they had to get permission,
(25:34):
which of course means more delay. And you know, in
some of these cases I saw there were four or
five doctors who are on this committee, and every single
one of them had to personally determine how far along
her pregnancy was, so it's you know, coerced multiple gynecological exams.
(25:56):
It means doctors learn, oh, these cases will never get
by and they don't ringham. So that also fuels this
sense that that doctors have the hospitals that they need
to be careful. They don't want their reputations hurt by abortion.
It is no it's common, and yet it's highly stigmatized.
It's it's it's in the paper a lot associated with
(26:18):
death and crime and the mob, and and yet you
can't talk about it. And in response, the people who
provide abortions knowing now that this is what's happening, they
change their practices. It becomes much more clandestine, it goes underground.
It makes it very scary, and everyone is of course
(26:39):
aware of the potential of police and they realize that
they are breaking the law. So it really changes the
practice and availability of abortion. In the past, there was
much more um worry and agony and fear about whether
or not you were pregnant. Again here's glory a steinem
(27:01):
And if you were pregnant, it didn't wish to be
much more likelihood that you would have to somehow get
together the money and the time, often in secret, uh
to travel far away and get an abortion. That was
terrifically painful and time consuming and ridiculous, because that's not
(27:24):
a democracy. Either we have in a democracy at a
minimum decision making power over our own bodies, or we
are not living in a democracy. To lose that power,
if you're a man, you have to commit some horrible
crime and go to prison. You know. It's yet it
(27:45):
was applying to all to all women, no matter what
we did. How many institutions of society had to collaborate
in order to suppress women's sexual and reproductive autonomy and
(28:06):
support second class citizenship for women. Historian Ricky Solinger. So,
whether we're talking about the media, the ways that doctors
set up punishing abortion boards and hospitals, how doctors refused
to give prescriptions for contraception until after marriage, this is
(28:33):
a cautionary message for the future people who understood that
being able to control fertility is an absolute life necessity
for most women. There were many people all over the
country who capitalized on women's desperation. The reason that I
(28:53):
stress the importance of the project of criminal abortion and
how um many institutions were involved in bolstering and enforcing
the culture and the politics that degraded women's sexuality and
reproduction is because that has such implications for the future.
(29:18):
The thing that went on then in sixty six was
that there was nowhere to go for help. People had
no way of finding out where are you could get
an abortion. It was like a speak you. I didn't
even know who amongst the women girls that I knew
were sexually act I'm Lisa Kushner. I'm seventy five. I
(29:42):
had an abortion in nineteen sixty six when they were illegal.
I was living in New York at the time, I
didn't know anybody who I could ask. I had a
couple of relatives who were nurses, so I asked them,
but they didn't have any resources for me, and there
was a lot of like name around it, like could
(30:03):
I even ask about it. It was a real powerless
feeling and a sensation of like, I actually I thought
I would have to die doing an abortion on myself,
is what I thought would happen if I couldn't get, um,
you know, some kind of access, I was going to
(30:25):
have to die. I didn't occur to me at all
that that would be a reasonable option to go through
with a pregnancy. So um, in the age of pay
phones and not having cell phones, I made a thousands,
hundreds of phone calls to women that I didn't know,
but friends of friends of friends who may know somebody
(30:48):
who was an abortion. Finally, after like a couple of
weeks of making a lot of calls, somebody called me
back and I don't know her name, and she told
me every single thing about her abortion experience and all
the detailed everything to expect. And I feel like she
(31:10):
saved my life because it was just like a lifeline
through my future. And then I had a few weeks
to decide how I was going to get three hours
away to his another state. I couldn't figure out what
to do, but I eventually told my twin brother because
he had a cough and I figured he would have
(31:32):
to drive me. But he forced me to tell my parents,
and it was shocking to my poor parents. My mother
just flat me for the first time in her life,
and my father like rose. And this is where my
story is very different from the story of most women,
because they ended up helping me. They ended up helping
(31:55):
me go for this abortion that they went with me
to this uh dark office building in Newark, New Jersey.
We walked through the side entrance of this building, which
had an open door. The hallways were dark, and there
was a very little bit of light dating coming in
(32:17):
from a couple of windows. There were no lights on,
and we're looking for the numbers on the door first
to get to the right office. And we're going down
this hallway which was very long in my memory, who
sixty five to sixty seven that kind of thing, And
then you turn a corner and then there was whatever
the number was, and then opening the door looking into
(32:42):
this dark waiting room and a woman standing uh up
in a white uniform like a like a receipt, a
nurse's uniform. And this man, the abortionist. He was a
very slender, small person and he said he was from
the pill things. We were making small talk. I could
(33:04):
tell when he examined me that he had done it
before that he was not a you know, he wasn't fumbling.
He gave me directions, you know, on the table, and
you know, he was explaining what he was doing as
he was doing it, like a good practitioner. I didn't
know enough, you know, I knew nothing. It was my
second public exam. This procedure was also unusual because he
(33:28):
uh inserted a plug of medical seaweed in my services,
which allowed the services to open slowly, which was a
good technique at the time and probably still now. But
I had really bad cramps all night in a motel room,
and my poor parents were like comforting each other, and
I was like trying not to be freaked out. But
(33:51):
it worked out, Okay. I had this procedure a DNC
the next day and they took me. We went back
to that house and I was okay. I didn't an infection,
I didn't get raped, which was a circumstance of a
lot of women, and I didn't die, so I felt
very fortunate. When we come back, the police did not
(34:12):
do anything, the politicians did not do anything. Because of
the moral authority of these clergy people. They were left alone.
An unexpected lifeline for people needing abortions. In the nineteen sixties,
(34:40):
as abortion goes underground, support networks start to emerge around
the country to help women find safe, if not yet legal, abortions.
What a lot of people don't realize is that religious
leaders were helping to My name is the Reverend Barber
Girl Act. I was a counselor, a coordinator, and a
(35:04):
trainer with Clergy Consultation Service from nineteen seventy one to
nineteen seventies three in northeastern Pennsylvania. There is this long
history of women in all times and places choosing to
have abortions, not always UM safe ones and clergy were
(35:29):
often one of the places that people came. In nineteen
sixty seven, UM the Reverend Howard Moody at Judson Memorial
Church in New York City and a group of mainline
Protestant ministers in New York City and Jewish rabbis wrote
(35:51):
an article in the newspaper describing this service that they
were offering. They called it Clergy Consultations Service for Abortions,
and it was a service to provide women a place
two receive support and information to make the decisions that
(36:13):
they wanted and needed for a safe and legal abortion
in some cases because they were referring some women to
England or into Mexico and in some cases still legal
abortions in the places where they were living. We had
a brochure that was available in churches and I'm sure
(36:38):
in universities and other places on It was a telephone
number and basically an answering service, but one of us
was the phone answer for each week, one member of
the service and we would leave the person who would
(36:59):
receive the calls. We would meet in an office. We
would listen to the woman. We would listen to whatever
she was struggling with in her own decisional process. We
would provide information. If she chose an abortion, we had
an information sheet about how to make the appointment, what
(37:23):
it would cost, how to get there. We would encourage
them to call us afterwards and certainly to come back
because no matter what decision a woman makes. There are
always going to be question second thoughts, losses to be mourned,
changes to be you know, lived into. We also did
(37:47):
the kind of talking in various settings and groups and
churches about the work we were doing, talking to legislative
chures in the states we were in about why abortion
should be legalized. But we were public. We had numbers
(38:09):
that were shared and I think it was in one state.
It was in the you know that when you opened
the the yellow Pages and the beginning, there would be
clergy consultation service just listed in many phone books. We
were listed in phone books. There were thousands of us,
(38:31):
and we were all around the country providing these resources.
And one of the things that was interesting is even
in New York where it when this started and it
was illegal to refer anyone for an abortion, the police
did not do anything. The politicians did not do anything.
(38:53):
Because of the moral authority of these clergy people. They
were left alone. No one was prosecuted that I know of,
for their work. There was fear of it. Um we
all knew we were taking a risk. It felt like
(39:15):
an important ethical decision. It felt courageous. I knew it was.
It was. I was cutting ground. It was a hard
time to be a woman in ministry, and it was
a hard time to be a voice for a woman's
(39:38):
right to choose. And it was dangerous. I mean we
were yes, I was on the cutting edge, and it
was a radical thing to do in the sense of
being wounded in the truth as I saw it. In
Chicago in nineteen sixty nine, another much more secretive formed
(40:00):
to help women get safe abortions. It was known simply
as Jane. Here's one of the members. I'm Eileen Smith.
I was in Jane and I had an abortion through Jane.
I was in Chicago and happened to see the ad
for Jane and the underground paper and I didn't even
(40:22):
have a phone at the time. When I called and
left the message, somebody called me at work and was
so kind and very thoughtful and didn't let anything. You know,
they knew that what they were dealing with, and they
told me that I could pay them off over time,
that someone would call and explain everything to me. I'm like,
who are these people? Some of the Janes, like Eileen Smith,
(40:47):
who had kept their participation secret, are finally coming out
into the open thanks to a new HBO documentary called
The James from filmmakers Emma Peldis and Tia Lesson. Here's tea. Uh.
This was like a group of very inventive, resourceful young women.
They could have been robbing banks, you know, they they
(41:10):
got they were underground, they were secretive, they had it down.
And what did they choose to do? They choose, you know,
they chose to put their lives on the line to
to help other women in need. It wasn't politics with
a big p. It was politics, you know, it was.
It was politics as personal. It's not an overstatement to
say Ei Leaned that the Jains were a godsend for you. Uh.
(41:32):
And and they were not only kind but supportive. And
you talk about the woman who drove you was seven
months pregnant. H And why why were you impressed by that? Well,
first of all, I knew these people were doing something illegally,
(41:52):
putting themselves out there for me. And I was in
a room with a bunch of other people and I
had to go by myself. I remember read in a
book and being really like, you know, anxious, and this
woman walks in and it's like, oh, the driver's here,
and she's seven months pregnant. I'm like, I thought it
was so cool that someone who clearly wanted to have
a baby, because I knew I wanted to have kids.
(42:14):
I really knew I did. I was willing to put
herself out there for someone who couldn't or didn't want
to have a baby. Right then, I just it really,
it really impressed. It's like whoa. So, you know, we
all get in the car and she drove and was
so nice and explained everything. The woman who sat with
(42:34):
me while I had the abortion was amazing. You know.
You walked into this bedroom and she said, you know,
don't get undressed from the bottom bown. I'm gonna blindfold you.
And I thought, oh, this sounds horrible. But she was
so nice and sat there. And then the person who
came in to do the abortion, who I assumed was
a doctor and wasn't. He was so personable. I mean
(42:57):
he was just relax, won't take too long, you're not
you know, uterus feels good. He explained everything, and I
just remember being really shaky because I hadn't eaten anything.
I remember standing up afterwards. You know, when he left
the room, she took the blindfold lout, and then I
went to stand up and I almost just crashed, and
she goes, you haven't eaten anything, And she brought me
(43:19):
into this kitchen and gave me a cup of tea
and a hard boiled egg, and I just, you know,
you're like, where where am I? This is? This is
like wow, Okay. It was like the most positive medical
experience I've ever had, never mind the legal abortion. When
it was discovered that Jane's quote unquote doctor didn't have
(43:41):
a medical license. Instead of calling it quits, the Janes
dug in deeper. It gave the group, uh, you know
and in on, hey, if you're not a doctor, then
you know, why don't we learn how to do it? So,
you know, a couple of people got trained and it
was pretty it was pretty amazing. There were a bunch
(44:04):
of different jobs. There was somebody who you know, took
the phone calls and took all the information, and then
there was the people that organized the information. We had meetings.
They would bring all the cards to the meetings. We had,
you know, some people that went to what we called
the front where people met. They sometimes brought their kids.
(44:26):
The people that ran the front. We had to have food, tea, coffee, stuff,
for the kids to play with, and then there were
people that work the actual abortion, and then there was
a person driving. And besides that, you were doing counselings.
You've got a group of people to call and then
you tell them where you lived. They were going to
come to your house. You set up a time, and
(44:46):
then you would explain to them exactly what was going
to happen. They were going to be going to one
apartment or house, driven to another one, and you know,
you told them what to expect. So you know that
that took up a lot. And that's what I love
doing the counseling, I mean, because you met all these
interesting people. But you know, so there were a bunch
(45:07):
of different things you ended up doing, and usually it
was a combination of those things. I was young, I
really didn't have a lot to lose. A lot of
me thought that was very cool, you know, I mean,
we got to it was something illegal, but very cool.
And plus the work was so immediate, you know, you
could think about it. But then there was there was
(45:29):
like another thirty calls coming in of people asking for abortions.
So you were like, well, you know, we gotta keep
taking this information down and go into the meetings and
putting the medications in and setting you know, the work
was just made. It also immediate. Dr Warren Hearn was
a medical student back in the mid nineteen sixties. He
(45:50):
saw firsthand what unsafe illegal abortions were doing two women.
The main thing that our experience was taking care of
women on the Guy in Ecology Award, and my classmates
and I would be up just about all night every
night taking care of these women who were very critically
(46:10):
ill with acceptions, with overwhelming infection. I really didn't understand
what was going on. I knew they were very sick, uh,
and nobody talked about this, but I learned later that
these were women were had probably had an unsafe illegal abortion,
and they were suffering from the effects of that. I
(46:32):
was simply struck by how sick they were. Again, here's
Leslie Reagan. By the nineteen sixties, the major public hospitals
in Chicago and New York and l A. They have
five or six thousand women every single year coming in
following an abortion, bleeding injured with perforated uterus or perforated
(46:54):
intestines um an infection. This is part of what fuels
the movement to decriminalize abortion and the support of doctors,
where the majority of doctors our favor reforming and repealing
the laws because they see the results and they know
they've been taught in medical school, they might be performing themselves.
(47:18):
They know that abortion can be perfectly safe and perfectly
simple procedure, and that this should not be happening. There
should not be women bleeding and dying. They could see
it's a disaster, that that it's mostly poor women, high
proportions of black women and Latino women, and that it's
(47:41):
completely inequitable and unfair in terms of who is able
to get those safe abortions from doctors, the therapeutic abortions
and everybody else. A growing national push for reform continued.
Doctors were joined by lawyers, activists, and clergy lobbying stay legislatures. Again,
(48:02):
here's Reverend Barbara Gerlock of the Clergy Consultation Service. We
kept statistics and who these women were, their ages, if
they had a religious affiliation, the decision that they made
with the information that was gathered between sixty seven in
(48:22):
nineteen seventy, the clergy who were involved in Clergy Consultation
Service had a major impact on the debate that went
into the legalization of abortion in New York State in
nineteen seventy. In nineteen seventy, the New York State Assembly
(48:43):
voted to legalize abortion up to twenty four weeks. So
you know, it's it's becoming more available, but not everybody
could find the information. Not everyone ever heard about Jane
called Jane called the collective or or new where to go,
and and and even as becomes legal in New York
and they're sending people to New York, not everybody could go.
(49:04):
They never found out about them. And so there were people.
I mean, there's cases of women who died um in
those years when you know, legal abortion was legal in
some states, and they could have gone there, but they
didn't have the money, they didn't have any way to go.
States may have been chipping away at restrictive abortion laws,
(49:24):
but something bigger had to be done. Sometimes when someone
doesn't really know who I am, though they've heard that
I'm a lawyer, but they don't know how much about me,
And I'd say, what have you ever heard of? The
case of Roversus White? Next week on abortion, the body
Politic wrote, and it's unraveling abortion. The body politic is
(49:56):
executive produced by me Katie Curic, and was created by
a small team led by our intrepid supervising producer Lauren Hansen.
Editing and sound designed by Derrick Clements and Jessica Crying
chich researched by Nina Perlman, and a special thanks to
k c M producers Courtney Litz and Adriana Fasio
It's been very important to understand the conditions of reproductive
life that women lived before ROW and how little control
they had over their sexuality, their fertility, and their ensuing lives.
We went to a planned parenthood in d C and
(00:26):
they asked me if I was married, and unfortunately I
told them the truth and they said, we can't prescribe
birth control pills for you. I was sterilized by the
Dalkon shield. In ninety three, I developed acute p i
D pelic inflammatory disease and encountered a doctor who did
(00:52):
not want to remove the Dalcoon shield because it was
own eugenical thinking. He thought, well, you already had a baby,
so I'm not gonna take a dow con shill out.
It must be some kind std lab. So for six
months he kept misdiagnosing my problem as my stomach became
more and more distended, until I actually went into a
call after my fallopian tubes exploded and so taken to
(01:17):
the hospital in an ambulance. Woke up with all of
my reproductive organs we're missing. I'm Katie CURRCT and this
is abortion the Body Politic, Part two. Today we're stepping
into the past long before row to trace the roots
of today's abortion debate. The right to make decisions over
(01:40):
our own physical selves is the fundament of democracy. Feminist
icon Glorious steinhum You know, in the past, when women
expressed this, they have been declared to be witches. This
is how women got to be witches, you know, because
they actress medicine for other women, and so women would
(02:04):
go into their homes pregnant to come out unpregnant. And
this was perceived as witchery, not only in in Europe,
but to some extent in New England, in this in
this country too. Here's the thing about abortion, It has
always existed. As activists Loretta Ross points out, as long
(02:26):
as women have sex with men, they're always gonna want
to control their reproduction, whether it was cal dung back
in the ancient Roman times or lie was that got
created in more modern times. And the majority of the
country does not oppose abortion, that's historian Leslie Reagan. Majority
(02:46):
of the country does not want any of these kinds
of laws. Why then, is abortion such a contentious, even
volatile issue in this country. Ricky Solinger is a historian
and author focusing reproductive politics, certainly starting with the slavery regime,
(03:07):
which defined white women as distinct is essentially distinct from
Black women, and black women is essentially distinct from white women.
One can trace the different positions and the different consequences
of reproductive bodies depending on race. And here again is
(03:28):
Loretta Ross. My name's Loretta Ross, and I'm an associate
professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. That was one
of the twelve black women who created the theory and
practice of reproductive justice in June of nine. At the
beginning of the enslavement, most of the enslavors thought that
(03:53):
they could import sufficient women black, you know, people from Africa,
women and me in in order to enlarge their labor force.
But early in the eighteen hundreds, a law was passed
forbidding the importation of additional African slaves, and so that's
(04:14):
when the force breeding became the dominant strategy. One of
the things that frustrates me frequently is to the extent
that any of this reproductive oppression is covered. It's always
covered from the perspective of what was done to the
black community. Rarely do people cover it from the perspective
of what agency we exercise, what we did for ourselves,
(04:39):
and they missed the larger story of reproductive resistance in
our community. After the Civil War, that's when articles began
to appear in newspapers, white newspapers for the most part,
to saying that the black birth it was a problem,
(05:01):
but just until it was not, because when it wasn't
about free labor, then the same reproductive productivity was problem
with types even though the reproductive caretaking was not because
he still had mammies and things like that. So you
had this bifurcated kind of racist analysis that said that
(05:26):
black women were irresponsible when it came to taking care
of our own children. But we're very good, nanny said,
taken care of white ones. We're sorry. But interestingly enough,
from the perspective of black women, de Eb debosed at
a sociological study starting at the end of the nineteenth
(05:51):
century in the beginning of the twentie and he reported
that the black birth rate between the end of the
Civil War and when he publisher's research have been cut
in half from the days of slavery. And that was
also the time that my research discovered that to the
(06:11):
extent that we have perspectives from black women now that
were sometimes reported in black newspapers as well as black
women's organizations that they were talking amongst themselves about managing
their own fertility. They bought from Africa a lot of
midwifery knowledge, so they knew which plants and herbs could cause,
(06:35):
you know, an abortion. I think it was an eight two.
I saw a black feminist author who said, not all
women are designed to be mothers, and we need to
be able to control, you know, what happens to our
bodies and stuff. And of course this was two decades
before Margaret Singer came about. All I can do is
speculate from the bread crumbs of evidence that I found
(07:00):
is that they've wanted desperately to control their own fertility
after Dewy, you know, centuries of forth reading, and not
only multiple pregnancies, but also when you're already living in
miserable racial and economic conditions, you want the best future
(07:22):
for the children that you do have and keep. Abortion
was legal under common law in early America, but they
wouldn't have called it abortion. Really, we're talking about early
in pregnancy, up until the point of quickening, that was
legal under common law. I'm Professor Leslie Reagan. I'm a
(07:43):
professor in the Department of History at the University of
Illinois or Banish Champaigne. My book is When abortion was
a crime Women Medicine in law in the United States
eighteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy three. Quickening is the
moment when a woman can feel the fetus moving within her.
We might say, you could feel kicking. You know, it's
(08:04):
something you make, so it's kicking so and when that occurred,
then she knew, oh, there there's life within me, and
they would stop trying to end this pregnancy, because after
quickening was when if you ended a pregnancy, if you aborted,
that was what was against the law. The quickening, as
(08:25):
you can see, is defined by women themselves. We know
from domestic guide books and um advertisements, and because they
they would talk about it as their menstees were obstructed,
their body was out of equilibrium. It was always very
uh euphiized language like that. In the black newspapers of
(08:47):
the day that we're beginning to be published, there was
a product called pup p u f and the tagline
to puff was in your calendar worries, Well, what is
a woman worried about? The calendar? Right that area is missing.
(09:07):
There's domestic guide books produced to the seventeen hundreds and
the eighteen hundreds, than they're republished over and over and
over again, and they include information and recipes, that's how
to make teas and how to bring the messies back.
I think for all all races of women, we shared
this kind of information around our kitchen tables and had
(09:28):
conversations that we did that men weren't prevy too, because
we didn't think it was their business. That's what I've
seen consistently through you know, millennium. That's what women do.
We take care of business and we don't care what
the church says, what the state says, and what the
men in our lives say. We know who's gonna be
around for that baby and who's not. Kind of, you know,
(09:52):
it's a feature of our plumbing that we have a
much higher stake in these conversations than the sperm donors.
The thing to remember is that women's lives, up until
this point, we're part of the private sphere. But in
the eighteen fifties things started to change and men wanted
to control, even criminalize those private decisions. First, you have
(10:18):
you have a very small group of elite physicians pushing
for new legislation. Horatio store a specialist in gynecology and
obstetrics at Harvard Um in Massachusetts, is the person behind this,
and he begins to talk about how abortion is infanticide
(10:39):
and that when women think that they're getting their mensis
back before quickening, that they were all wrong, that this
this was really a life. So Storer really did something
when he started to name this early period when people
are trying to get their menscies back, named that as
an abortion. So he took something that was illegal, understood
(11:02):
to being moral, understood to be um, you know, taking
the life, uh, developing life, and applied that term to
this early period that had never been treated as the same.
Once slavery was legally in dead, then the forced breeding
(11:23):
that had been visited on black women suddenly got visited
on light women. And that's when you had the beginning
of the agitation for the legal restrictions on birth control,
information and abortions, ending up in the eighteen seventy three
Comstock Law, which Comstock, Anthony Comstock was the Postmaster General
(11:45):
and he's the one, yeah, all right, one of the
male service after doing birth control right, but he was
the one who uh campaign to make it illegal to
distribute information or devices. That led the birthday drill, which
of course was most successible to white women at that time.
(12:11):
So this is post Civil War, you know, the country
has changed. African Americans newly freed enslaved people are free.
They are supposed to have the vote, and for a
while black men do have the vote. So this is
part of the I think political underpinnings of why these
(12:34):
laws get passed. The other important part of this is
at that time women were organizing in various ways against
prostitution of calling out men. They were also trying to
get into medical school. So the same doctor storer and
the politicians are like, you should be doing your duty.
(12:54):
Women do not belong out trying to be involved in politics.
Six they should be having babies and raising them to
be the citizens of America. And and the doctors are
particularly threatened by the possibility of women becoming doctors taking
(13:16):
over their business frankly, and they resent their efforts to
get into medical school, to get into Harvard, to claim
higher education. So it's in the eighteen sixties and eighteen
seventies that the states make abortion illegal and criminalized it.
By eighteen eighty, every state has criminalized abortion from conception on.
(13:42):
My name was Lexi, and my abortion was amazing. UM.
I did not feel that way in the moment because
of all these stigma and barriers I experienced, But choosing
not to become a parent was the best decision I've
ever made for myself. I had an abortion, and when
I was in college, I was a junior attending U
(14:06):
mass University of Massachusetts. AMers actually let me. Let me
provide some background information. UM. I was born to a
young single mom um and raised by my grandparents. Love
them to death, but they are very old school, too,
elderly black people from the Deep South. UM, and I
(14:29):
was raising a very conservative household. UM. I also attended
Catholic school from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so I did
not I did not really have much knowledge or information
about my own body, any type of sexual health. So
(14:51):
when I did go to college and didn't know anything
about UM protection or really well informed UM knowledge about options.
If I were to be pregnant, I was really shook.
UM and I don't really know what to do, Like
I didn't know who to call, you know, my family,
(15:13):
like we've dealt with a lot of familial separation, so
you know, in incarcerations, Like my mom wasn't around. Um,
like I said my grandparents, that wasn't really an option
I was. I did not have a lot of money.
I was trying to finish school. My partner was very abusive,
and yeah, I actually initially intended to continue my pregnancy.
(15:36):
I was going to continue my pregnancy just because of
these things that I had heard about abortion, which weren't good,
the very false narratives, the stigmatizing language, the hush hush
around it. I found out in pregnant, I'm like, I
need to go there and not just sound there to
not just sound. And I was only about four weeks long,
(15:58):
which is pretty early to find out. And in the
following weeks, I became extremely sick, um bedridden, Like I
was telling my grandparents I had mono. I was trying
to like contact the school, trying not to like get
it like kicked out because I'm missing so much class,
while also like trying to avoid my abusive partner on campus.
(16:19):
And yeah, it was a mess. I was so sick.
I lost like thirty pounds in like a month and
a half. I did not know what was happening in
my body. I did call my ob joyant and they
were like, well, we can't see what's happening to you
is normal, and you have to be for ten weeks
before we book an appointment with you. And I'm like, what,
(16:42):
I'm an older singling before, and I've been there. I've
helped my mother give birth, like I have seen many
pregnancies in my family, and I I knew what was
happening to me was not normal. And even even if
these things come with pregnancy, if you're not helping me
get through them, who knows without surrounding support. I was like,
(17:04):
there's no way I can make it through it. And
in my mind, all I can think about is how
many black women and other women of color die at
the hands of this medical system that we have. And
all I could think when I called plant parenthood was
I will not die because of this pregnancy and because
no one will listen to me. So I did have
(17:28):
medication abortion, went to plan Parenthood, God pills, went home
and my best friend and then I woke up and
the pregnancy was over, and for the first time in
six weeks, I had eaten real food, and my best
friend had just went got like twelve inch chicken palm
grinder um, and I just I was like, I need that,
(17:50):
and physically like I was relieved, even if even if
I couldn't you know, grasp that at the time, because
when I went out the bath room and I saw
the pregnancy was over all, I like, it was just
the biggest sign of relief, immediately followed by a lot
of internalized shame and stigma and just hatred. But in
(18:13):
that moment, I am able to look back and say,
even regardless of everything that was, it was nothing but
relief in that moment that I knew I was not
going to be a parent because I had made this
decision to have an abortion. It did take me a
hot minute to be able to differentiate my abortion being
(18:35):
negative and all the external barriers and all the other
things around it being negative. It was really coming and
learning that, you know, it's the same white supremacist rhetoric
that tells me that I'm a murderer, I'm a sowful
(18:55):
person for having abortion. Okay, well that's the same The
same people would also call me a welfare queen if
I had continued my pregnancy and needed to help with
social services and probably want to have access to them,
so I would have probably just been homeless. You've been
an awful person for that, or the same white supremacy
that I continue my pregnancy. I have a child, I'm
(19:18):
raising this child, and you go and murder them in
the street for no reason. So learning really how nothing
black and brown Indigenous people and families do under white
supremacy is good enough really helped me realize that I
don't I don't need to follow any of that. The
reason I share my story is because historically black and
(19:43):
brown Indigenous people, you know, we've always been told and
dictated how to raise our families, what to do. We've
always been shadowed um and we're here to claim that
it's ours we're taking here and have a bad period
more right after this, in the first couple of decades
(20:14):
after abortion becomes illegal, abortions continue to happen. Again, here's
Leslie Reagan. So there's always an exception in the law,
and those those abortions that are done by doctors are
called therapeutic abortions. The Great Depression in the nineteen thirties
increases demand hugely. People who collected evans they could see
(20:36):
it they could see a rise in abortions and a
decline in family size. There are clinics that developed that
are open, that are well known um of people who
provide a who are specialists in abortion, and they have
an office with their name on the door. They have
business cards and people know who they are there. They
(20:58):
are people who provide excellent abortions. They're safe. It's it's
very safe. But there were also questionable and sometimes dangerous
options that emerged at the same time. So in New
York City, for example, historian Daniel Williams, there were some
abortion senicates which by theti were performing, according to some
(21:22):
claims at the time to two fifty thousand abortions per years.
It was of a thriving business, but they were connected
with organized crime. They employed non licensed physicians, a lot
of medical school dropouts and others who had a little
bit of medical training but not enough to practice legitimately.
And most of the time they could practice somewhat safe abortions,
but it varied, and of course women were taking their
(21:46):
lives into their hands going to some of those places,
the so called back alley butchers. Professor Carol Joffey is
a sociologist who has long studied abortion care, both physicians
as well as nonphysicians who were horrible, I mean, who
were who were medically inept. I mean, this is where
(22:09):
most of the injuries and deaths came from. In addition
to women attempting their own abortions, and these these guys,
and it really was all guys at the time. Uh,
we're also very ethically challenged. There are horrible stories of
demanding sexual favors, are stopping halfway through the abortion and
(22:32):
demanding more money. These butchers made an enormous impression on
the rest of the medical field, the rest of medicine
that had not been involved, uh in abortion care. And
remember the abortion providers before Row were tiny, tiny portion
of medicine as a whole. Um. They somehow equated abortion
(22:55):
provision with these very ethically and and medically challenged people.
And so beginning of the nineteen thirties, several doctors, especially
in New York, said that the law was not working
and rather than try to make abortion laws more stringent,
what they wanted to do was to make abortion legal
(23:19):
in certain circumstances. Rather than than continue to endanger more women,
what would be best for society will be best for
women's health would be to just admit that we can't
really control women's behavior with these laws. But Leslie Ringing
points out these doctors pushing for reform their outliers. At
(23:40):
least at this point, they are radicals. Uh politically, they're
They're very unusual. What happens instead is that abortion, despite
being illegal, becomes much more visible. I mean it starts
in the thirties, but really by methods of policing abortion change,
(24:03):
and these clinics that had been operating for ten twenty
thirty years openly suddenly are rated and closed by the
police and prosecutors. They now are going after the safe
practitioners who are who are also quite visible and deliberately
(24:27):
will time raids, you know, a group of police four
or five, six, seven, eight ten police burst in and
hopefully find specialist in the middle of a procedure, capture
that person, the doctor, the patient, and all of the
recovering patients, and collect all of the medical records and
(24:50):
gather all of it for evidence for prosecution for illegal abortion.
And this became the standard across the country, these police raids,
So it became harder to find a good provider, and
it became more expensive. Meanwhile, hospitals start cracking down to
(25:12):
the departments of obstetrics and gynecology start to create these
therapeutic abortion review boards um inside their own departments. So
these committees are set up and they end up deciding
what is a legal, legitimate abortion, what's legal and what isn't.
And it meant women they knew they had to get permission,
(25:34):
which of course means more delay. And you know, in
some of these cases I saw there were four or
five doctors who are on this committee, and every single
one of them had to personally determine how far along
her pregnancy was, so it's you know, coerced multiple gynecological exams.
(25:56):
It means doctors learn, oh, these cases will never get
by and they don't ringham. So that also fuels this
sense that that doctors have the hospitals that they need
to be careful. They don't want their reputations hurt by abortion.
It is no it's common, and yet it's highly stigmatized.
It's it's it's in the paper a lot associated with
(26:18):
death and crime and the mob, and and yet you
can't talk about it. And in response, the people who
provide abortions knowing now that this is what's happening, they
change their practices. It becomes much more clandestine, it goes underground.
It makes it very scary, and everyone is of course
(26:39):
aware of the potential of police and they realize that
they are breaking the law. So it really changes the
practice and availability of abortion. In the past, there was
much more um worry and agony and fear about whether
or not you were pregnant. Again here's glory a steinem
(27:01):
And if you were pregnant, it didn't wish to be
much more likelihood that you would have to somehow get
together the money and the time, often in secret, uh
to travel far away and get an abortion. That was
terrifically painful and time consuming and ridiculous, because that's not
(27:24):
a democracy. Either we have in a democracy at a
minimum decision making power over our own bodies, or we
are not living in a democracy. To lose that power,
if you're a man, you have to commit some horrible
crime and go to prison. You know. It's yet it
(27:45):
was applying to all to all women, no matter what
we did. How many institutions of society had to collaborate
in order to suppress women's sexual and reproductive autonomy and
(28:06):
support second class citizenship for women. Historian Ricky Solinger. So,
whether we're talking about the media, the ways that doctors
set up punishing abortion boards and hospitals, how doctors refused
to give prescriptions for contraception until after marriage, this is
(28:33):
a cautionary message for the future people who understood that
being able to control fertility is an absolute life necessity
for most women. There were many people all over the
country who capitalized on women's desperation. The reason that I
(28:53):
stress the importance of the project of criminal abortion and
how um many institutions were involved in bolstering and enforcing
the culture and the politics that degraded women's sexuality and
reproduction is because that has such implications for the future.
(29:18):
The thing that went on then in sixty six was
that there was nowhere to go for help. People had
no way of finding out where are you could get
an abortion. It was like a speak you. I didn't
even know who amongst the women girls that I knew
were sexually act I'm Lisa Kushner. I'm seventy five. I
(29:42):
had an abortion in nineteen sixty six when they were illegal.
I was living in New York at the time, I
didn't know anybody who I could ask. I had a
couple of relatives who were nurses, so I asked them,
but they didn't have any resources for me, and there
was a lot of like name around it, like could
(30:03):
I even ask about it. It was a real powerless
feeling and a sensation of like, I actually I thought
I would have to die doing an abortion on myself,
is what I thought would happen if I couldn't get, um,
you know, some kind of access, I was going to
(30:25):
have to die. I didn't occur to me at all
that that would be a reasonable option to go through
with a pregnancy. So um, in the age of pay
phones and not having cell phones, I made a thousands,
hundreds of phone calls to women that I didn't know,
but friends of friends of friends who may know somebody
(30:48):
who was an abortion. Finally, after like a couple of
weeks of making a lot of calls, somebody called me
back and I don't know her name, and she told
me every single thing about her abortion experience and all
the detailed everything to expect. And I feel like she
(31:10):
saved my life because it was just like a lifeline
through my future. And then I had a few weeks
to decide how I was going to get three hours
away to his another state. I couldn't figure out what
to do, but I eventually told my twin brother because
he had a cough and I figured he would have
(31:32):
to drive me. But he forced me to tell my parents,
and it was shocking to my poor parents. My mother
just flat me for the first time in her life,
and my father like rose. And this is where my
story is very different from the story of most women,
because they ended up helping me. They ended up helping
(31:55):
me go for this abortion that they went with me
to this uh dark office building in Newark, New Jersey.
We walked through the side entrance of this building, which
had an open door. The hallways were dark, and there
was a very little bit of light dating coming in
(32:17):
from a couple of windows. There were no lights on,
and we're looking for the numbers on the door first
to get to the right office. And we're going down
this hallway which was very long in my memory, who
sixty five to sixty seven that kind of thing, And
then you turn a corner and then there was whatever
the number was, and then opening the door looking into
(32:42):
this dark waiting room and a woman standing uh up
in a white uniform like a like a receipt, a
nurse's uniform. And this man, the abortionist. He was a
very slender, small person and he said he was from
the pill things. We were making small talk. I could
(33:04):
tell when he examined me that he had done it
before that he was not a you know, he wasn't fumbling.
He gave me directions, you know, on the table, and
you know, he was explaining what he was doing as
he was doing it, like a good practitioner. I didn't
know enough, you know, I knew nothing. It was my
second public exam. This procedure was also unusual because he
(33:28):
uh inserted a plug of medical seaweed in my services,
which allowed the services to open slowly, which was a
good technique at the time and probably still now. But
I had really bad cramps all night in a motel room,
and my poor parents were like comforting each other, and
I was like trying not to be freaked out. But
(33:51):
it worked out, Okay. I had this procedure a DNC
the next day and they took me. We went back
to that house and I was okay. I didn't an infection,
I didn't get raped, which was a circumstance of a
lot of women, and I didn't die, so I felt
very fortunate. When we come back, the police did not
(34:12):
do anything, the politicians did not do anything. Because of
the moral authority of these clergy people. They were left alone.
An unexpected lifeline for people needing abortions. In the nineteen sixties,
(34:40):
as abortion goes underground, support networks start to emerge around
the country to help women find safe, if not yet legal, abortions.
What a lot of people don't realize is that religious
leaders were helping to My name is the Reverend Barber
Girl Act. I was a counselor, a coordinator, and a
(35:04):
trainer with Clergy Consultation Service from nineteen seventy one to
nineteen seventies three in northeastern Pennsylvania. There is this long
history of women in all times and places choosing to
have abortions, not always UM safe ones and clergy were
(35:29):
often one of the places that people came. In nineteen
sixty seven, UM the Reverend Howard Moody at Judson Memorial
Church in New York City and a group of mainline
Protestant ministers in New York City and Jewish rabbis wrote
(35:51):
an article in the newspaper describing this service that they
were offering. They called it Clergy Consultations Service for Abortions,
and it was a service to provide women a place
two receive support and information to make the decisions that
(36:13):
they wanted and needed for a safe and legal abortion
in some cases because they were referring some women to
England or into Mexico and in some cases still legal
abortions in the places where they were living. We had
a brochure that was available in churches and I'm sure
(36:38):
in universities and other places on It was a telephone
number and basically an answering service, but one of us
was the phone answer for each week, one member of
the service and we would leave the person who would
(36:59):
receive the calls. We would meet in an office. We
would listen to the woman. We would listen to whatever
she was struggling with in her own decisional process. We
would provide information. If she chose an abortion, we had
an information sheet about how to make the appointment, what
(37:23):
it would cost, how to get there. We would encourage
them to call us afterwards and certainly to come back
because no matter what decision a woman makes. There are
always going to be question second thoughts, losses to be mourned,
changes to be you know, lived into. We also did
(37:47):
the kind of talking in various settings and groups and
churches about the work we were doing, talking to legislative
chures in the states we were in about why abortion
should be legalized. But we were public. We had numbers
(38:09):
that were shared and I think it was in one state.
It was in the you know that when you opened
the the yellow Pages and the beginning, there would be
clergy consultation service just listed in many phone books. We
were listed in phone books. There were thousands of us,
(38:31):
and we were all around the country providing these resources.
And one of the things that was interesting is even
in New York where it when this started and it
was illegal to refer anyone for an abortion, the police
did not do anything. The politicians did not do anything.
(38:53):
Because of the moral authority of these clergy people. They
were left alone. No one was prosecuted that I know of,
for their work. There was fear of it. Um we
all knew we were taking a risk. It felt like
(39:15):
an important ethical decision. It felt courageous. I knew it was.
It was. I was cutting ground. It was a hard
time to be a woman in ministry, and it was
a hard time to be a voice for a woman's
(39:38):
right to choose. And it was dangerous. I mean we
were yes, I was on the cutting edge, and it
was a radical thing to do in the sense of
being wounded in the truth as I saw it. In
Chicago in nineteen sixty nine, another much more secretive formed
(40:00):
to help women get safe abortions. It was known simply
as Jane. Here's one of the members. I'm Eileen Smith.
I was in Jane and I had an abortion through Jane.
I was in Chicago and happened to see the ad
for Jane and the underground paper and I didn't even
(40:22):
have a phone at the time. When I called and
left the message, somebody called me at work and was
so kind and very thoughtful and didn't let anything. You know,
they knew that what they were dealing with, and they
told me that I could pay them off over time,
that someone would call and explain everything to me. I'm like,
who are these people? Some of the Janes, like Eileen Smith,
(40:47):
who had kept their participation secret, are finally coming out
into the open thanks to a new HBO documentary called
The James from filmmakers Emma Peldis and Tia Lesson. Here's tea. Uh.
This was like a group of very inventive, resourceful young women.
They could have been robbing banks, you know, they they
(41:10):
got they were underground, they were secretive, they had it down.
And what did they choose to do? They choose, you know,
they chose to put their lives on the line to
to help other women in need. It wasn't politics with
a big p. It was politics, you know, it was.
It was politics as personal. It's not an overstatement to
say Ei Leaned that the Jains were a godsend for you. Uh.
(41:32):
And and they were not only kind but supportive. And
you talk about the woman who drove you was seven
months pregnant. H And why why were you impressed by that? Well,
first of all, I knew these people were doing something illegally,
(41:52):
putting themselves out there for me. And I was in
a room with a bunch of other people and I
had to go by myself. I remember read in a
book and being really like, you know, anxious, and this
woman walks in and it's like, oh, the driver's here,
and she's seven months pregnant. I'm like, I thought it
was so cool that someone who clearly wanted to have
a baby, because I knew I wanted to have kids.
(42:14):
I really knew I did. I was willing to put
herself out there for someone who couldn't or didn't want
to have a baby. Right then, I just it really,
it really impressed. It's like whoa. So, you know, we
all get in the car and she drove and was
so nice and explained everything. The woman who sat with
(42:34):
me while I had the abortion was amazing. You know.
You walked into this bedroom and she said, you know,
don't get undressed from the bottom bown. I'm gonna blindfold you.
And I thought, oh, this sounds horrible. But she was
so nice and sat there. And then the person who
came in to do the abortion, who I assumed was
a doctor and wasn't. He was so personable. I mean
(42:57):
he was just relax, won't take too long, you're not
you know, uterus feels good. He explained everything, and I
just remember being really shaky because I hadn't eaten anything.
I remember standing up afterwards. You know, when he left
the room, she took the blindfold lout, and then I
went to stand up and I almost just crashed, and
she goes, you haven't eaten anything, And she brought me
(43:19):
into this kitchen and gave me a cup of tea
and a hard boiled egg, and I just, you know,
you're like, where where am I? This is? This is
like wow, Okay. It was like the most positive medical
experience I've ever had, never mind the legal abortion. When
it was discovered that Jane's quote unquote doctor didn't have
(43:41):
a medical license. Instead of calling it quits, the Janes
dug in deeper. It gave the group, uh, you know
and in on, hey, if you're not a doctor, then
you know, why don't we learn how to do it? So,
you know, a couple of people got trained and it
was pretty it was pretty amazing. There were a bunch
(44:04):
of different jobs. There was somebody who you know, took
the phone calls and took all the information, and then
there was the people that organized the information. We had meetings.
They would bring all the cards to the meetings. We had,
you know, some people that went to what we called
the front where people met. They sometimes brought their kids.
(44:26):
The people that ran the front. We had to have food, tea, coffee, stuff,
for the kids to play with, and then there were
people that work the actual abortion, and then there was
a person driving. And besides that, you were doing counselings.
You've got a group of people to call and then
you tell them where you lived. They were going to
come to your house. You set up a time, and
(44:46):
then you would explain to them exactly what was going
to happen. They were going to be going to one
apartment or house, driven to another one, and you know,
you told them what to expect. So you know that
that took up a lot. And that's what I love
doing the counseling, I mean, because you met all these
interesting people. But you know, so there were a bunch
(45:07):
of different things you ended up doing, and usually it
was a combination of those things. I was young, I
really didn't have a lot to lose. A lot of
me thought that was very cool, you know, I mean,
we got to it was something illegal, but very cool.
And plus the work was so immediate, you know, you
could think about it. But then there was there was
(45:29):
like another thirty calls coming in of people asking for abortions.
So you were like, well, you know, we gotta keep
taking this information down and go into the meetings and
putting the medications in and setting you know, the work
was just made. It also immediate. Dr Warren Hearn was
a medical student back in the mid nineteen sixties. He
(45:50):
saw firsthand what unsafe illegal abortions were doing two women.
The main thing that our experience was taking care of
women on the Guy in Ecology Award, and my classmates
and I would be up just about all night every
night taking care of these women who were very critically
(46:10):
ill with acceptions, with overwhelming infection. I really didn't understand
what was going on. I knew they were very sick, uh,
and nobody talked about this, but I learned later that
these were women were had probably had an unsafe illegal abortion,
and they were suffering from the effects of that. I
(46:32):
was simply struck by how sick they were. Again, here's
Leslie Reagan. By the nineteen sixties, the major public hospitals
in Chicago and New York and l A. They have
five or six thousand women every single year coming in
following an abortion, bleeding injured with perforated uterus or perforated
(46:54):
intestines um an infection. This is part of what fuels
the movement to decriminalize abortion and the support of doctors,
where the majority of doctors our favor reforming and repealing
the laws because they see the results and they know
they've been taught in medical school, they might be performing themselves.
(47:18):
They know that abortion can be perfectly safe and perfectly
simple procedure, and that this should not be happening. There
should not be women bleeding and dying. They could see
it's a disaster, that that it's mostly poor women, high
proportions of black women and Latino women, and that it's
(47:41):
completely inequitable and unfair in terms of who is able
to get those safe abortions from doctors, the therapeutic abortions
and everybody else. A growing national push for reform continued.
Doctors were joined by lawyers, activists, and clergy lobbying stay legislatures. Again,
(48:02):
here's Reverend Barbara Gerlock of the Clergy Consultation Service. We
kept statistics and who these women were, their ages, if
they had a religious affiliation, the decision that they made
with the information that was gathered between sixty seven in
(48:22):
nineteen seventy, the clergy who were involved in Clergy Consultation
Service had a major impact on the debate that went
into the legalization of abortion in New York State in
nineteen seventy. In nineteen seventy, the New York State Assembly
(48:43):
voted to legalize abortion up to twenty four weeks. So
you know, it's it's becoming more available, but not everybody
could find the information. Not everyone ever heard about Jane
called Jane called the collective or or new where to go,
and and and even as becomes legal in New York
and they're sending people to New York, not everybody could go.
(49:04):
They never found out about them. And so there were people.
I mean, there's cases of women who died um in
those years when you know, legal abortion was legal in
some states, and they could have gone there, but they
didn't have the money, they didn't have any way to go.
States may have been chipping away at restrictive abortion laws,
(49:24):
but something bigger had to be done. Sometimes when someone
doesn't really know who I am, though they've heard that
I'm a lawyer, but they don't know how much about me,
And I'd say, what have you ever heard of? The
case of Roversus White? Next week on abortion, the body
Politic wrote, and it's unraveling abortion. The body politic is
(49:56):
executive produced by me Katie Curic, and was created by
a small team led by our intrepid supervising producer Lauren Hansen.
Editing and sound designed by Derrick Clements and Jessica Crying
chich researched by Nina Perlman, and a special thanks to
k c M producers Courtney Litz and Adriana Fasio
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!