The SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was no surprise after the leaked memo last month. Nevertheless, it is heartbreaking.
It is impossible to know how many deaths of women and their fetuses occurred before Roe v Wade became the law of the land in 1973 because many happened to marginalized women in the peeled painting and leaky ceilings of their bathrooms or back alleys at the hands of those calling themselves doctors. Only the wealthy could fly out to more civilized countries for a proper medical termination of their unwanted pregnancy. There are many reasons for not wanting to carry a fetus full term: from 1973 until 2022, all of these decisions were personal, nonpolitical, private, until the pietists came along and reversed all that.
Prior to that, for those women with money, there was a safe haven and safe medical abortion; for others “Humiliation, agony, and the risk of sterility or death do not deter American women from ending an average of one out of every five pregnancies by abortion.”[i] This was one of the findings after extensive research in 1966, when the Washington Post ran a series on abortions by Elizabeth Stevens, whose research was extensive. She died in 2018, and her papers are at Brown University’s John Jay Library.
She documented several of the known deaths in the Washington, D.C. area alone from botched abortions. “Dr. Benny Waxman, chief medical officer in D.C. General’s Department of Obstetrics, says about 10 percent of D.C. General’s obstetrical admissions are suffering from spontaneous or criminal abortions. One recent patient was a 16-year-old girl who drank lye to abort herself and died. Another woman succumbed to gas gangrene — a toxin that can kill between 24 and 48 hours after a bungled abortion.”
“With laws as they are, the dreary story of the frightened girl and the incompetent abortionist is doomed to be repeated day after day in the back rooms of every American city.” Déjà vu.
LINKS/CITATIONS
[i] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/24/illegal-abortions-before-roe-dc/
All the quotes after this citation are from the same source.
Poster at the protest march on June 26, 2022 that I participated in protesting the overturn of Roe v Wade.
I never considered this would be an issue in my lifetime. Now I’m at a loss about how to fight it, especially living in Texas.