My Mind, My Body, My Choice: Roe v. Wade turns 35

Today marks the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling that gave women the right to safe, legal abortions if they chose to have them. I have never had an abortion, I have not yet even been truly pregnant (scares, yes, but all test have come back negative, and knock on wood they’ll continue to do so), but I have always been, and always will be, an ardent supporter of Roe v. Wade, and convinced of the idea that whether or not you believe abortion is wrong, is is both a consitutional and human right for women to choose what to do with their own bodies, and bodies contained therein, and that the government must, then, give us safe options to do as we want without putting our own, legally-protected lives in danger.

As a 23-year-old who is facing probably at least one abortion in her future (there are few people I know who wish to be pregnant less than I do), I could write any number of youthful, naive things about abortion. They would ring hollow, and un-researched. So, instead, I will give you a few examples of why I think it is desperately important that a woman’s right to choose is protected. And I will probably follow those up with some commentary, because this is my blog and I can’t help myself.

First, we must remember that abortion did not suddenly start happening because the Supreme Court made it legal, protected. Women have been performing their own abortions from herbal tinctures and purposeful falls down the stairs for centuries. And don’t forget the back-alley, coathanger abortions. ChoiceMatters.org is a great website with many resources for finding information (both clinically researched and anecdotal) about abortion, how it is done, what its effects are, and how to make a well-informed choice about it. In one of their sections, titled “Lest We Forget,” they share with us stories of what it used to be like to get an abortion:

From: “The Bad Old Days” by Polly Rothstein

Barely able to utter “abortion,” we said, “get rid of it,” and saw no alternative. X called acquaintances for “a name,” any name; qualifications were low priority. One referred us to Dr. Robert Spencer in Ashland, Penn, instructing X to complain of a vaginal discharge. We missed the humor of going from Cambridge to coal country for a vaginal discharge. Dr. Spencer told us the procedure would take two visits, what motel to call, and where to park.

Dr. Spencer’s office was weird – walls and ceilings brimming with souvenir plaques from the gift shops in places like Lake George. One was a drawing of a vase that became the silhouette of two people when you stared at it. We avoided eye contact with the others in the waiting room, all of us too scared, unwilling to swap how-I-got-here stories, seek or give solace, or make small talk. X and I whispered to each other.

Dr. Spencer was white-haired and kindly, but couldn’t ease our fear. He packed X’s vagina with something to dilate her cervix and told us to come back in the morning. I have no memory of the evening. In the morning, I was fearful when Dr. Spencer installed me in a tiny room to wait it out and took X with him. The room had a chair, cot, afghan, and a black paperback, Crimes of Passion. I fantasized telling X’s parents where we were, and why, and that she was dead. Eventually, Dr. Spencer came in with X over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, out cold. He gently unloaded her on the cot, her eyes rolled back so the whites showed. After she came to and had rested, he checked her and gave her post-op instructions and antibiotics. The entire charge was $50.

Dr. Spencer was the beloved town doctor, protected by the police, and a hero to women around the nation. He’s in all the books about illegal abortions, and is the subject of a new documentary, “Dear Dr. Spencer: Abortion in a Small Town.” His file of requests from desperate women and thanks from women he helped (some still put flowers on his grave) is an education in itself. We realized how lucky we were when we heard horror stories: the difficulties amassing the huge fees the butchers charged, being driven around blindfolded so as not to know where the deed was done, forced sex with the abortionist before he’d get to work, the tied hands and the mouth stuffed to muffle the cries of pain from abortions without anesthesia, the soiled equipment, the hemorrhaging, the lies to the hospital emergency room, and the newspaper reports of women who died trying not to become a mother.

From “Susan X”:

A lot of people In those days did abortions. Most were greedy people who didn’t know what they were doing, but some were concerned people with good reputations. Lothringer was there for the money and was totally unconcerned with what happened to his patients.

He charged me $400, which he made me pay up front. We went there in the evening. He wouldn’t let my boyfriend stay.

Lothringer and I proceeded to the operating room. He gave me a shot to put me out. As I was fading, I saw him come into the room, stripped to the waist, with his German shepherd. I always assumed it was to dispose of the evidence, but I have tried not to think about it.

When the anesthetic wore off, I was crying and yelling and he was telling me to shut up. He couldn’t give me any more anesthetic, because I had to be out of there as soon as he was finished. I got up and was not really feeling too terrific and he said, “You have to leave.” My boyfriend had not come back yet, but he showed me the back door and said to go.

He had scraped so much of the lining of my uterus that I didn’t have a period for a year. Very soon afterwards, I read about Lothringer murdering a girl. Knowing how he operated, I Iways assumed he was responsible. He was very strange. Cutting her up and flushing her down the sewer! I remember acing about it and thanking God I got out of there alive.

Note: The doctor in that story, Dr. Harvey Lothringer, was sentenced to 4 years in prison in 1962 after he botched an illegal abortion on a 19-year-old girl, then dismembered her body and flushed it down the toilet (it was discovered within days when his pipes backed up). Seriously.

A statement from Dr. Don, a Colorado physician who practiced in the 1960s:

As for the attitudes of the medical community toward these women who got coat hanger abortions, it’s not that the doctors were judgmental or hostile as much as they were kind of contemptuous. The attitude was “How could these women do anything so stupid as to get a dangerous abortion?” or “Why would any smart person take such a stupid chance?” I don’t recall any discussion about the need to provide women with safer options.

I have no idea how many years it covered, but the pathology department at that municipal hospital had a rather large collection of jars of preserved organs that had been removed for one reason or another. Many of the Organs were uteruses with the abortion instrument still in place. Some of the instruments were knitting needles, and some were coat hangers, and there they were, neatly labeled and lined up, each floating in its jar of formaldehyde.

A statement from Dr. Bert, who was a young physician in the 60’s:

The patient was in a private room. I even remember the room number, 724. That was one of the gold coast rooms. The woman, in her early or mid-thirties, was married to someone really important, with a lot of connections. She came in with severe pelvic sepsis and she died. I remember her so vividly because she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. She was also one of the sickest. She was ashen. When I first saw her, she was still conscious and lucid. I think she suspected she might die. She had kidney failure. Then all her other systems failed as well. She got ecchymosis-red blotches all over her skin. Her blood vessels were just breaking underneath her skin, sort of like what happens when you bruise yourself, but this was happening all over her body without anyone even touching her. It was due to a disturbance of her coagulating mechanism as a result of the overwhelming sepsis. She died two or three days after she was admitted.

[snip]

My political ideas in those days were pretty primitive. Like most medical students, I was just trying to survive it all. However, primitive though I was, she did touch something at some level in me. I was angry that she had died, and I was angry at the system that let her die. As I said, in those days I thought the solution was to jail the abortionist. It took me another twenty years to fully understand that it was the system and not the abortionist who killed her. The system forced her away from the medical community and into the shadowy world of the illegal abortionist.

By the time she got to a doctor, it was too late. The system, and especially the lawmakers who left her with no choice, killed her just as surely as if they had held the catheter or coat hanger or whatever. I’m still angry. It was all so unnecessary.

This is a picture of Gerri Santoro, a woman who died of a back-alley abortion in 1964. Warning: This is a picture of how she was found, dead. It is very, very graphic. It is very, very disturbing. It is worth more than 5,000 words to describe why it is so, so important that women be given a legal, safe place to be given an abortion. We won’t stop just because you tell us it’s illegal. Please, please keep it safe.

Before I give you the final, and probably the most important, link in this post, I want to say something about my views on abortion:

I don’t know if I will ever have an abortion, though I expect I might. I don’t know that, in the moment of realizing I am pregnant, in the moment of walking up to Planned Parenthood, in the moment of actually making that choice, that I will be able to go through with it. I don’t think any woman knows if she will or won’t have an aborition, faced with a situation that may warrant it. But I do know this: It is my choice to make. There is no lawmaker that can tell what to or not to do with my body, no lawmaker who has that kind of moral authority, that kind of ethical omniscience. Every woman who has an abortion goes through her own set of processes to deal with the taking of a life, or a future life, growing within her. But the choice MUST be her own. We are the only people who can understand, truly, what we are going to. No male, for certain, has any idea about what pregnancy entails, as much as they think they might. And women, well women are the only ones who really know.

Roe v. Wade is not about being pro-abortion; it is about being pro-choice. It’s about supporting women as intelligent, congnizent, responsible (at their core) people who are more than capable of making their own decisions about their bodies. It is about realizing that a woman’s body is her own, that the things that grow inside it belong to HER and not to the country, that it is a inherent, natural, human right, just as the right to free speech or free religion, free press or free expression, for a woman to maintain enough privacy to keep her body as her own, private property, and not the property of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Roe v. Wade is not a case about human life, about who should or shouldn’t have the power to determine when life begins; it’s not about religion, dead babies, or anything that the Pro-Life movement would like to make it about. It is about privacy, about the reach of the government not just into our lives but into our bodies as well, and it is about mainting the right of women to be equal to men on all levels, from the ability to vote, to hold office, and to determine — without interference from the government, local, state or national — what to do and not to do with our bodies.

And, on that note, I leave you with the most important link of all. THIS is a link to the full, original text of Roe v. Wade. Read it. Know it. Understand it. Protect it.

Edited To Add:

The comments posted so far have been great, but have reminded me of a point I wanted to make, but then got distracted from. There are many women now joining to pro-life movement under the weight of emotions brought on from regretting their past abortion(s). I feel for them, I really do. To have an abortion is a serious decision, and as I said in that moment of choice I don’t know whether I would or would not go through with it. I won’t know until it happens.

BUT: That you made a bad choice does not, and should not lead to the conclusion that the government should either be stricter about abortion or ban it entirely. What it means is that women who are considering abortions should be given as much educational material as possible to help them understand the risks, the potential physical consequences, and the potential emotional consequenes. Perhaps there should be something like a three day waiting period, so you can be sure (I’m actually kind of uncomfortable with that idea, the forced wait, and I’m under the impression that you rarely get an abortion appointment the same day you go in to make one, so a period of consideration and thought is kind of already built into the process) you are making the “right” decision.

In this day and age, we are losing our ability to have and to keep personal responsibility. It used to be that if you fucked up in life, it was probably your own fault. Drink at lunch and lose your job? Your fault for thinking you could drink on your break. Refuse to tie your shoelaces and trip down an escalator, breaking your legs? Your fault for being a dumbass who holds stupid fashion trends over personal safety. Get turned down for the college of your dreams? Maybe you should’ve gotten better grade and studied harder for the SATs. We used to take responsibility for our own actions, from getting an A on a test to remembering to use a condom during sex. The same goes for abortion — it is a personal choice, a personal responsibility, and the consequences must be dealt with personally. It is no one else’s business but our own; the government’s only responsibility to us is to maintain doctors’ offices that are clean, sterile and safe for us to use should we choose to have such a procedure.

–Sara Tenenbaum