One of the feminist websites I regularly read (either the amazing Pandagon, Feministing, or Feministe) started a book club, so I ordered When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 http://www.amazon.com/...
But even before I'd read the book (highly readable, but frightening, if it's the view of our future, too) I wrote the below on Amazon.)
When Abortion Was a Crime is not just history for me, it was a frightening part of my life. When I was a teenager abortion was a crime: and the choices that forced on women was another crime.
Two of my young friends got pregnant while in high school, one at 14 and one at 16, "A" students both, they were forced to drop out of high school, marry, and face the world with a 9th and 10th grade education. Oh, the 14 year-old was "allowed" to come back and take her freshman finals: very possibly because a 14 year old, 9 months pregnant, was meant to be a frightening an object lesson, and one that successfully prevented me from having sex until I was 19.
Which meant that my first love at 17 left me after a year of frustration for both of us. Another of my friends was sent to Arizona to live with her Aunt for her "asthma" when she was 13 -- I now believe to have a baby in a home for unwed mothers. Which was another object lesson in our town, that home for unwed mothers, from which troops of teenage unwed mothers marched to the local mall together.
To a girl from a lower-middle class home, sex was frightening, because it meant I might not escape the fate of my friends -- a furnished basement "apartment" in their parent's home, a new baby, a teenage husband, and no education.
When I finally made it to state college I began to have sex with another long-term boyfriend -- it took six months of necking and petting with him to get me to intercourse, mind you -- I was still frightened, watching another friend get pregnant at 19, and drop out of college for another baby and teenage husband.
My fear was only partly relieved by something said by a local campus character we all called "Crazy Charlie" for what-seemed to be tall tales of his exploits. But I was ready to take on face value what Crazy Charlie said one day: that he knew a doctor in Philadelphia, who would perform an abortion for $200. (To give you an idea of how much money that was nearly 50 years ago, it was 1/10 of my yearly tuition and board at state college for a year.)
But if I had gotten pregnant, I would have spent that money, and trusted my health and fate to a Crazy Charlie, and the man he claimed was a doctor -- who could have been a nurse, mid-wife, or have no medical training whatsoever -- because I wanted to have a future.
I would have risked my life for my future, at a time when the New York Daily News printed photographs of women who had died in a pool of blood, after illegal abortions.
My sister, four years younger than I, also had a friend who got pregnant at 16, while abortion was still a crime. But she lucked upon an underground railroad of authority figures that included ministers and doctors, who found doctors to perform abortions for women in need, the forerunners of the doctors, ministers and others who pressured the courts for Roe vs. Wade, because they were sick unto death, of dealing with the ugly aftermath of illegal abortion: the suicides of pregnant women, the botched abortions that killed or maimed thousands of women a year in the United States.
Because those ministers, rabbis and doctors were also aware of another dirty secret: that upper middle class and wealthy women were routinely and discretely given D&Cs at the clean and safe hospitals of their leafy suburbs, that those with money were also able to send their daughters to Puerto Rico for abortions masked as "vacations." That only lower middle class and poor women were forced to face murder and maiming through illegal abortions.
I've read that in the states which restrict abortion, so-called "Abortion Wards" are returning, filling with women maimed by illegal abortions -- and again, damn few are daughters or wives of money. Today, my sister's friend who had an abortion at 16 has gone on to marry, have two children, and become a pharmacist (and I doubt that she's one of those pharmacists who deny patients birth control, or emergency birth control.)
None of my friends who got pregnant in high school came to our ten year reunion -- I heard that one said she was still "ashamed" that she'd never graduated. All who would support the elimination of legal abortion, keep in mind the tragedies you'd guarantee: maimed and murdered women, lives stopped short, more unwanted children in the world.
There are approximately 500,000 children in the foster care at any time in the United State -- many of those children are adoptable, but will not be adopted -- why don't "pro-life" advocates step forward to adopt them now? Do they want the forced return to warehouse orphanages for still more unwanted children? Do they want women sent to prison for seeking an abortion, and doctors also jailed, when we already have a shortage of doctors in this country? And nurses jailed, when we have a shortage of nurses in this country? How much damage and destruction of life will they support to force the rest of us to subscribe to their "religous" views?
I've never heard a so-called "pro-life" advocate answer those questions honestly. Making abortion illegal will not stop abortions, it will just stop safe abortions, as is the reality in the few civilized countries in which abortion isn't legal, but their abortion wards are full to bursting with maimed women, and whose morgues overflow with dead women.
The comments that "review" received on Amazon can be found at this link: http://www.amazon.com/...
I haven't the heart to reprint them, but you'll find them full of the eliminatist talking points that killed George Till.
I'd rather leave you with the links to my three favorite feminist blogs, whose writers support choice, and to my mind are more pro-life than any in the forced-birth brigade.
Dr. Tiller's Murder: What You Can Do: http://www.feministing.com/...
Patients Remember Dr. Tiller http://www.feministe.us/...
Anti-choice violence and why it puts "common ground" into question http://pandagon.net/...