Abortion: The Body Politic, Part 2

Dalkon shield. In ninety three, I developed acute p i D pelic inflammatory disease and encountered a doctor who did 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

the hospital in an ambulance. Woke up with all of my reproductive organs were missing. I'm Katie correct, and this is abortion the Body Politics, Part two. Today, we're stepping into the past long before brow to trace the roots of today's abortion debate. The right to make decisions over 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 actuss medicine for other women, and so women would 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 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 that created in more modern times. And the majority of the country does not oppose abortion, that's historian Leslie Reagan. Majority 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 on reproductive politics, certainly starting with the slavery regime, 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 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 n At the beginning of the enslavement, most of the enslavors thought that they could import sufficient women black you know, people from Africa, women and men 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 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, 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 y it was a problem, 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 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 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 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, 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 is that they've wanted desperately to control their own fertility after dewry, 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 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 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 fee you

the fetus moving within her. We might say, you could feel kicking. You know, it's something you made, 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 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 mentees were obstructed, their body was out of equilibrium. It was always very uh euphized language like that. In the black newspapers of the day that we're beginning to be published, there was a product called puff 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. 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 conversations that we did that men weren't privy 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, 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 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 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 to be in 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 that had been visited on black women suddenly got visited on light women.

And that's when you have the beginning of the agitation for the legal restrictions on birth control, information and abortions, ending up in the eight seventy three Comstock Law, which Comstock Anthony Comstock was the Postmaster General 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. 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 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. Women do not belong out trying to be involved in politics x. 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 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. My name is 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 mass University of Massachusetts. Amorous. 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 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 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, 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.

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 to not just sound like there, to not just sound And I was only about four weeks long, 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. 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, 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, 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 medication abortion, went to plan Parenthood, God pills, went home me 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, and physically like I was relieved, even if my 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 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 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 person for having abortion. Okay, well that's the same the same piece 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 and been an awful person for that or the same white supremacy that I continue my pregnancy. I have a child, I'm 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 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 and not a bad period more right after this, in the first couple of decades 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 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 are people

who provide excellent abortions. They're safe, 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 the were performing, according to some 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 the methods of policing abortion change, 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 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 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 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,

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. It means doctors learn, oh, these cases will never get by and they don't ring him. 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 now, it's common, and yet it's highly stigmatized. It's it's it's in the paper a lot associated with 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 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. Steinham. 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 um, but she told me every single thing about her abortion experience

and all the details, everything to expect. And I feel like she 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 car and I figured he would have 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 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 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 stive 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 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 phil Things. We were making small talk. I could 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 uh inserted a plug of medical seaweed in my cervicts, which allowed the sortucts 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 the kind of talking in various settings and groups and churches about the work we were doing, talking to legislator chures in the states we were in about why abortion should be legalized. But we were public. We had numbers 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, 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. 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 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 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 rooted in the truth as I saw it. In Chicago in nineteen sixty nine, another much more secretive group

formed 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 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, who had kept their participation secret, are finally coming out into the open thanks to a new HBO documentary called The Janes from filmmakers Emma Peldis and Tia Lesson, Here's Tea.

This was like a group of very inventive, resourceful young women. They could have been robbing banks, you know, they they 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 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 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, 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. 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 me while I had the abortion was amazing. You know. You walked into this bedroom and she said, you know, get undressed from the bottom down. 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, he was just relaxed, as 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 up, and then I went to stand up and I almost just crashed, and she goes, you haven't eaten anything, and she brought me 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 never had, never mind the legal abortion. When it was discovered that Jane's quote unquote doctor didn't have 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 state legislatures. Again,

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 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

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. 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, 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 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