Money is a bit tight for me, right now. If the Republicans get in this Fall, I’m considering becoming an illegal abortionist.
It used to be a a fairly lucrative business. It may be again. Unplanned, unwanted pregnancies are a fact of life, and always have been. So has abortion. Even if it becomes illegal again, the demand will still be there. People who can meet that demand will do pretty well for themselves.
As for my qualifications, well, I got a Red Cross first aid certificate in high school. My father was a malpractice lawyer. I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism, but I did take biology, and I got a C. All things considered those aren’t bad qualifications.
Back in pre Roe v Wade days, there was a taxi driver here in Pittsburgh, who performed abortions in the back of his cab.
We will all pause to shudder.
Terminating a pregnancy is, apparently, fairly simple. It’s also fairly safe if you know what you’re doing, and you can keep your workspace and equipment sterile. Back before Roe v Wade, the best illegal abortionists kept a stock of penicillin to pass along to their patients.
Infections were one of the things that damaged and sometimes killed women back in the day. If the abortionist used an unsterilized coffee stirrer, or a knitting needle, the bacteria would have a field day.
Of course these days it’s easy to order just about anything on the internet. I could probably stock my clinic online without anyone asking for anything except the little number on the back of my debit card. No need to resort to coffee stirrers or turpentine, or any of the other horrors pre Roe abortionists used.
Of course I would be breaking the law. A good many illegal abortionists paid off the police. A few of the more successful had a judge and a couple of politicians on their payroll too. A woman who called herself Madame Restell worked hand in glove with Boss Tweed, back in the day. I’m not sure I could afford politicians. But I could manage to pay off a few police, especially if business was good.
Back in the day, the law prosecuted men and women who performed illegal abortions. A doctor who terminated pregnancies might risk a few years in jail and the loss of his medical license.
But it was difficult to get evidence on illegal abortionists. The women who went to them certainly weren’t going to say anything to the police. Not if it meant that they might be proscuted. Not if it meant that their family, their friends, and their employers would find out what they’d done. Even if the woman had to be hospitalized from a botched procedure, she wasn’t going to say anything.
One doctor was prosecuted because he had a bottle of green soap in his office.
A woman in the area had died after someone tried to abort her fetus with the liquid antiseptic. It is not surprising that a doctor would have a bottle of antiseptic soap on hand. My mother swore by green soap. She always had a bottle in her medicine cabinet. She was not an abortionist.
In pre Roe days, women who paid to terminate an unwanted pregnancy weren’t prosecuted. But they were still unwilling to talk to the police. They would be even less willing if they knew that they would go to jail. The would be reluctant to go to the emergency room when things went wrong, if they feared prosecution. E.R. staff would be reluctant to report women suffering from the after effects of a botched abortion if they knew those women would be prosecuted.
I don’t think Donald Trump was thinking about that when he made his now famous comment about women who had abortions. I don’t think Donald Trump thinks.
Many years ago, a friend asked me if I knew a way to terminate a pregnancy. I told her to go see a doctor. She told me she couldn’t. She’d left her job to care for her grandmother, and she couldn’t afford to see one. So I told her to take a lot of hot baths. It was something I’d read in a novel. I didn’t think it would work, frankly. But I figured it wouldn’t kill her either. I wondered if anyone had ever asked my mother or my grandmothers for similar advice.
She should have had better options than advice from a work of light fiction. But even after Roe v Wade women don’t always get to decide if they want to stay pregnant. Men seem to feel that they should make that decision for them.
Donald Trump seems to feel that he should make that decision for them, at least for now he does. It may be different next week.