Over at the wonderful Pandagon (www.pandagon.net) the equally wonderful Amanda Marcotte, fresh off the Edwards blogging brouhaha, has announced their first book club selection chosen by readers:
When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973
Which was also my choice for first book, because the book represents more than just history for me: when I was a teenager abortion was a crime: and the choices that forced women to make 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 object lesson. It certainly scared me off 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" — I now believe to have a baby in a home for unwed mothers. Which was another object lesson in our town, a home for unwed mothers, from which troops of teenage unwed mothers marched to the local shopping center. To a lower-middle class girl like myself, sex was frightening, because it meant I might not escape the fate of my friends: a furnished basement "apartment" in their parents’ home, a new baby, a teenage husband, and no education.
When I made it to state college, I began to have sleep with another long-term boyfriend, but in fear, from watching a college friend get pregnant at 19, and drop out of college for yet another baby and teenage husband.
My fear was only partly relieved 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 35 years ago, it was 1/10 of my yearly tuition and board at state college.)
But if I had gotten pregnant, I would have found that money somehow, 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 -- all because I wanted a future. I would have risked my life for my future, at a time when the New York Daily News published 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 that frightened girl lucked upon an underground railroad of ministers and doctors, who found doctors to perform abortions for women and girls in need.
They were the forerunners of the doctors, ministers and other authority figures 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, and the botched abortions that killed or maimed thousands of women a year in the United States.
Ministers and doctors were among those also aware of another dirty secret: that upper-middle class and wealthy women were routinely and discreetly 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.
In the states which restrict abortion now, so-called "abortion wards" have returned, filled with women maimed by illegal abortions — and again, damn few are daughters or wives of money. My sister’s friend who had an abortion at 16 went on to marry, have two children, and become a pharmacist (but I doubt she’s one of the pharmacists who deny patients birth control pills, or deny rape victims emergency birth control.)
None of my friends who got pregnant in high school came to our ten year reunion — I later heard one was still "ashamed" that she hadn't graduated.
Those who would support the elimination of legal abortion, should be aware of the tragedies that would guarantee: maimed and murdered women, lives stopped short, more unwanted children in the world.
There are 500,000 children in the foster care at this moment — how many million more do "pro-life" advocates want? Many of those children are adoptable, but will not be adopted — why is it that "pro-life" advocates don't adopt adopt these foster children, or fight to find them families? Do they want the return to warehouse orphanages for the many more unwanted children that would result from forced pregnancies?
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? Nurses and midwives sent to prison, when we have a shortage of both? How much damage and destruction of life will "pro-life" factions support in order to force the rest of us to subscribe to their personal "religious" views?
I’ve never heard a so-called "pro-life" advocate answer those questions honestly. Making abortion illegal won't stop abortion; it will just eliminate safe abortions. As is the reality in the few civilized countries in which abortion isn’t legal, which sport their own "abortion wards" full to bursting with maimed women, and whose morgues are populated with the dead women and girls who sought to have a say in their own future.