Speaker 1: It's been very important to understand the conditions of reproductive
Speaker 1: life that women lived before ROW and how little control
Speaker 1: they had over their sexuality, their fertility, and their ensuing lives.
Speaker 1: We went to a planned parenthood in d C and
Speaker 1: they asked me if I was married, and unfortunately I
Speaker 1: told them the truth and they said, we can't prescribe
Speaker 1: birth control pills for you. I was sterilized by the
Speaker 1: Dalkon shield. In ninety three, I developed acute p i
Speaker 1: D pelic inflammatory disease and encountered a doctor who did
Speaker 1: not want to remove the Dalcoon shield because it was
Speaker 1: own eugenical thinking. He thought, well, you already had a baby,
Speaker 1: so I'm not gonna take a dow con shill out.
Speaker 1: It must be some kind std lab. So for six
Speaker 1: months he kept misdiagnosing my problem as my stomach became
Speaker 1: more and more distended, until I actually went into a
Speaker 1: call after my fallopian tubes exploded and so taken to
Speaker 1: the hospital in an ambulance. Woke up with all of
Speaker 1: my reproductive organs were missing. I'm Katie correct, and this
Speaker 1: is abortion the Body Politics, Part two. Today, we're stepping
Speaker 1: into the past long before brow to trace the roots
Speaker 1: of today's abortion debate. The right to make decisions over
Speaker 1: our own physical selves is the fundament of democracy. Feminist
Speaker 1: icon Glorious steinhum, You know, in the past, when women
Speaker 1: expressed this, they have been declared to be witches. This
Speaker 1: is how women got to be witches, you know, because
Speaker 1: they actuss medicine for other women, and so women would
Speaker 1: go into their homes pregnant to come out unpregnant. And
Speaker 1: this was perceived as witchery, not only in in Europe,
Speaker 1: but to some extent in New England, in this in
Speaker 1: this country too. Here's the thing about abortion, It has
Speaker 1: always existed. As activists Loretta Ross points out, as long
Speaker 1: as women have sex with men, they're always gonna want
Speaker 1: to control their reproduction, whether it was cal dung back
Speaker 1: in the ancient Roman times or lie was that that
Speaker 1: created in more modern times. And the majority of the
Speaker 1: country does not oppose abortion, that's historian Leslie Reagan. Majority
Speaker 1: of the country does not want any of these kinds
Speaker 1: of laws. Why then, is abortion such a contentious, even
Speaker 1: volatile issue in this country. Ricky Solinger is a historian
Speaker 1: and author focusing on reproductive politics, certainly starting with the
Speaker 1: slavery regime, which defined white women as distinct is essentially
Speaker 1: distinct from Black women, and black women is essentially distinct
Speaker 1: from white women. One can trace the different positions and
Speaker 1: the different consequences of reproductive bodies depending on race. And
Speaker 1: here again is Loretta Ross. My name's Loretta Ross, and
Speaker 1: I'm an associate professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Speaker 1: That was one of the twelve black women who created
Speaker 1: the theory and practice of reproductive justice in June of
Speaker 1: n At the beginning of the enslavement, most of the
Speaker 1: enslavors thought that they could import sufficient women black you know,
Speaker 1: people from Africa, women and men in in order to
Speaker 1: enlarge their labor force. But early in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: a law was passed forbidding the importation of additional African slaves,
Speaker 1: and so that's when the force breeding became the dominant strategy.
Speaker 1: One of the things that frustrates me frequently is to
Speaker 1: the extent that any of this reproductive oppression is covered.
Speaker 1: It's always covered from the perspective of what was done
Speaker 1: to the Black community. Rarely do people cover it from
Speaker 1: the perspective of what agency we exercise, what we did
Speaker 1: for ourselves, and they missed the larger story of reproductive
Speaker 1: resistance in our community. After the Civil War, that's when
Speaker 1: articles began to appear in newspapers, white newspapers for the
Speaker 1: most part, to saying that the black birth y it
Speaker 1: was a problem, but just until it was not, because
Speaker 1: when it wasn't about free labor, then the same reproductive
Speaker 1: productivity was problem with types even though the reproductive caretaking
Speaker 1: was not because he still had mammies and things like that.
Speaker 1: So you had this bifurcated kind of racist analysis that
Speaker 1: said that black women were irresponsible when it came to
Speaker 1: taking care of our own children. But we're very good,
Speaker 1: nanny said, taken care of white ones. We're sorry. But
Speaker 1: interestingly enough, from the perspective of black women, de Eb
Speaker 1: debosed at a sociological study starting at the end of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century in the beginning of the twentie and
Speaker 1: he reported that the black birth rate between the end
Speaker 1: of the Civil War and when he publisher's research have
Speaker 1: been cut in half from the days of slavery. And
Speaker 1: that was also the time that my research discovered that
Speaker 1: to the extent that we have perspectives from black women
Speaker 1: now that were sometimes reported in black newspapers as well
Speaker 1: as Black women's organizations that they were talking amongst themselves
Speaker 1: about managing their own fertility. They bought from Africa a
Speaker 1: lot of midwifery knowledge, so they knew which plants and
Speaker 1: herbs could cause, you know, an abortion. I think it
Speaker 1: was an eight two. I saw a black feminist author
Speaker 1: who said, not all women are designed to be mothers,
Speaker 1: and we need to be able to control, you know,
Speaker 1: what happens to our bodies and stuff. And of course
Speaker 1: this was two decades before Margaret Singer came about. All
Speaker 1: I can do is speculate from the bread crumbs of
Speaker 1: evidence that I found is that they've wanted desperately to
Speaker 1: control their own fertility after dewry, you know, centuries of
Speaker 1: forth reading and not only multiple pregnancies, but also when
Speaker 1: you're already living in miserable racial and economic conditions, you
Speaker 1: want the best future for the children that you do
Speaker 1: have and keep. Abortion was legal under common law in
Speaker 1: early America, but they wouldn't have called it abortion. Really,
Speaker 1: we're talking about early in pregnancy, up until the point
Speaker 1: of quickening, that was legal under common law. I'm Professor
Speaker 1: Leslie Reagan. I'm a professor in the Department of History
Speaker 1: at the University of Illinois or Banish Champaigne. My book
Speaker 1: is When abortion was a crime Women Medicine in law
Speaker 1: in the United States eighteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: Quickening is the moment when a woman can fee you
Speaker 1: the fetus moving within her. We might say, you could
Speaker 1: feel kicking. You know, it's something you made, so it's
Speaker 1: kicking so And when that occurred, then she knew, oh,
Speaker 1: there there's life within me, and they would stop trying
Speaker 1: to end this pregnancy, because after quickening was when if
Speaker 1: you ended a pregnancy, if you aborted, that was what
Speaker 1: was against the law. The quickening, as you can see,
Speaker 1: is defined by women themselves. We know from domestic guide
Speaker 1: books and um advertisements, and because they they would talk
Speaker 1: about it as their mentees were obstructed, their body was
Speaker 1: out of equilibrium. It was always very uh euphized language
Speaker 1: like that. In the black newspapers of the day that
Speaker 1: we're beginning to be published, there was a product called
Speaker 1: puff p u F and the tagline to puff was
Speaker 1: in your calendar worries, Well, what is a woman worried about?
Speaker 1: The calendar? Right? That area is missing. There's domestic guide
Speaker 1: books produced to the seventeen hundreds and the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: than they're republished over and over and over again, and
Speaker 1: they include information and recipes, that's how to make teas
Speaker 1: and how to bring the messies back. I think for
Speaker 1: all all races of women, we shared this kind of
Speaker 1: information around our kitchen tables and had conversations that we
Speaker 1: did that men weren't privy too, because we didn't think
Speaker 1: it was their business. That's what I've seen consistently through
Speaker 1: you know, millennium. That's what women do. We take care
Speaker 1: of business, and we don't care what the church says,
Speaker 1: what the state says, and what the men in our
Speaker 1: lives say. We know who's gonna be around for that
Speaker 1: baby and who's not. Kind of, you know, it's a
Speaker 1: feature of our plumbing that we have a much higher
Speaker 1: stake in these conversations than the sperm donors. The thing
Speaker 1: to remember is that women's lives, up until this point,
Speaker 1: we're part of the private sphere. But in the eighteen
Speaker 1: fifties things started to change and men wanted to control,
Speaker 1: even criminalize those private decisions. First, you have you have
Speaker 1: a very small group of elite physicians pushing for new legislation.
Speaker 1: Horatio store a specialist in gynecology and obstetrics at Harvard
Speaker 1: Um in Massachusetts, is the person behind this, and he
Speaker 1: begins to talk about how abortion is infanticide and that
Speaker 1: when women think that they're getting their mensis back before quickening,
Speaker 1: that they were all wrong, that this this was really
Speaker 1: a life. So Storer really did something when he started
Speaker 1: to name this early period when people are trying to
Speaker 1: get their menscies back, named that as an abortion. So
Speaker 1: he took something that was illegal, understood to be in moral,
Speaker 1: understood to be um, you know, taking the life, uh,
Speaker 1: developing life, and applied that term to this early period
Speaker 1: that had never been treated as the same. Once slavery
Speaker 1: was legally in dead, then the forced breeding that had
Speaker 1: been visited on black women suddenly got visited on light women.
Speaker 1: And that's when you have the beginning of the agitation
Speaker 1: for the legal restrictions on birth control, information and abortions,
Speaker 1: ending up in the eight seventy three Comstock Law, which
Speaker 1: Comstock Anthony Comstock was the Postmaster General and he's the one, yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, one of the male service after doing birth
Speaker 1: control right, but he was the one who uh campaign
Speaker 1: to make it illegal to distribute information or devices. That
Speaker 1: led the birthday drill, which of course was most successible
Speaker 1: to white women at that time. So this is post
Speaker 1: Civil War, you know, the country has changed. African Americans
Speaker 1: newly freed enslaved people are free. They are supposed to
Speaker 1: have the vote, and for a while black men do
Speaker 1: have the vote. So this is part of the I
Speaker 1: think political underpinnings of why these laws get passed. The
Speaker 1: other important part of this is at that time women
Speaker 1: were organizing in various ways against prostitution of calling out men.
Speaker 1: They were also trying to get into medical school. So
Speaker 1: the same doctor storer and the politicians are like, you
Speaker 1: should be doing your duty. Women do not belong out
Speaker 1: trying to be involved in politics x. They should be
Speaker 1: having babies and raising them to be the citizens of America.
Speaker 1: And and the doctors are particularly threatened by the possibility
Speaker 1: of women becoming doctors taking over their business frankly, and
Speaker 1: they resent their efforts to get into medical school, to
Speaker 1: get into Harvard, to claim higher education. So it's in
Speaker 1: the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies that the states make
Speaker 1: abortion illegal and criminalized it by eighteen eighty. Every state
Speaker 1: has criminalized abortion from conception on. My name is Lexi,
Speaker 1: and my abortion was amazing. Um. I did not feel
Speaker 1: that way in the moment because of all these stigma
Speaker 1: and barriers I experienced, But choosing not to become a
Speaker 1: parent was the best decision I've ever made for myself.
Speaker 1: I had an abortion, and when I was in college,
Speaker 1: I was a junior attending U mass University of Massachusetts. Amorous. Actually,
Speaker 1: let me let me provide some background information. UM. I
Speaker 1: was born to a young single mom um and raised
Speaker 1: by my grandparents. Love them to death, but they are
Speaker 1: very old school too, elderly black people from the Deep South. UM,
Speaker 1: and I was raising a very conservative household. UM. I
Speaker 1: also attended Catholic school from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so
Speaker 1: I did not I did not really have much knowledge
Speaker 1: or information about my own body, any type of sexual health.
Speaker 1: So when I did go to college and didn't know
Speaker 1: anything about UM protection or really well informed UM knowledge
Speaker 1: about options. If I were to be pregnant, I was
Speaker 1: really shook. UM and I don't really know what to do,
Speaker 1: Like I didn't know who to call, you know, my family,
Speaker 1: like we've dealt with a lot of familial separation, so
Speaker 1: you know, in incarcerations, Like my mom wasn't around. Um,
Speaker 1: like I said my grandparents, that wasn't really an option
Speaker 1: I was. I did not have a lot of money.
Speaker 1: I was trying to finish school. My partner was very abusive,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I actually initially intended to continue my pregnancy.
Speaker 1: I was going to continue my pregnancy just because of
Speaker 1: these things that I had heard about abortion, which weren't good.
Speaker 1: The very false narratives, the stigmatizing language, the hush hush
Speaker 1: around it. I found out in pregnant, I'm like, I
Speaker 1: need to go there to not just sound like there,
Speaker 1: to not just sound And I was only about four
Speaker 1: weeks long, which is pretty early to find out. And
Speaker 1: in the following weeks, I became extremely sick, um bedridden,
Speaker 1: Like I was telling my grandparents I had mono. I
Speaker 1: was trying to like contact the school, trying not to
Speaker 1: like get it like kicked out because I'm missing so
Speaker 1: much class, while also like trying to avoid my abusive
Speaker 1: partner on campus. And yeah, it was a mess. I
Speaker 1: was so sick. I lost like thirty pounds in like
Speaker 1: a month and a half. I did not know what
Speaker 1: was happening in my body. I did call my ob
Speaker 1: joyant and they were like, well, we can't see what's
Speaker 1: happening to you is normal, and you have to be
Speaker 1: for ten weeks before we book an appointment with you.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, what, I'm an older singling before, and
Speaker 1: I've been there. I've helped my mother give birth, like
Speaker 1: I have seen many pregnancies in my family, and I
Speaker 1: I knew what was happening to me was not normal.
Speaker 1: And even even if these things come with pregnancy, if
Speaker 1: you're not helping me get through them, who knows without
Speaker 1: surrounding support. I was like, there's no way I can
Speaker 1: make it through it. And in my mind, all I
Speaker 1: can think about is how many black women and other
Speaker 1: women of color die at the hands of this medical
Speaker 1: system that we have. And all I could think when
Speaker 1: I called plant parenthood was I will not die because
Speaker 1: of this pregnancy and because no one will listen to me.
Speaker 1: So I did have medication abortion, went to plan Parenthood,
Speaker 1: God pills, went home me and my best friend, and
Speaker 1: then I woke up and the pregnancy was over, and
Speaker 1: for the first time in six weeks, I had eaten
Speaker 1: real food, and my best friend had just went got
Speaker 1: like twelve inch chicken palm grinder um, and I just
Speaker 1: I was like, I need that, and physically like I
Speaker 1: was relieved, even if my even if I couldn't you know,
Speaker 1: grasp that at the time, because when I went out
Speaker 1: the bath room and I saw the pregnancy was over all,
Speaker 1: I like, it was just the biggest sign of relief,
Speaker 1: immediately followed by a lot of internalized shame and stigma
Speaker 1: and just hatred. But in that moment, I am able
Speaker 1: to look back and say, even regardless of everything that was,
Speaker 1: it was nothing but relief in that moment that I
Speaker 1: knew I was not going to be a parent because
Speaker 1: I had made this decision to have an abortion. It
Speaker 1: did take me a hot minute to be able to
Speaker 1: differentiate my abortion being negative and all the external barriers
Speaker 1: and all the other things around it being negative. It
Speaker 1: was really coming and learning that, you know, it's the
Speaker 1: same white supremacist rhetoric that tells me that I'm a murderer,
Speaker 1: I'm a sowful person for having abortion. Okay, well that's
Speaker 1: the same the same piece people would also call me
Speaker 1: a welfare queen if I had continued my pregnancy and
Speaker 1: needed to help with social services and probably want to
Speaker 1: have access to them. So I would have probably just
Speaker 1: been homeless and been an awful person for that or
Speaker 1: the same white supremacy that I continue my pregnancy. I
Speaker 1: have a child, I'm raising this child, and you go
Speaker 1: and murder them in the street for no reason. So
Speaker 1: learning really how nothing black and brown Indigenous people and
Speaker 1: families do under white supremacy is good enough really helped
Speaker 1: me realize that I don't I don't need to follow
Speaker 1: any of that. The reason I share my story is
Speaker 1: because historically black and brown Indigenous people, you know, we've
Speaker 1: always been told and dictated how to raise our families,
Speaker 1: what to do. We've always been shadowed um and we're
Speaker 1: here to claim that it's ours we're taking and not
Speaker 1: a bad period more right after this, in the first
Speaker 1: couple of decades after abortion becomes illegal, abortions continue to happen. Again,
Speaker 1: here's Leslie Reagan. So there's always an exception in the law,
Speaker 1: and those those abortions that are done by doctors are
Speaker 1: called therapeutic abortions. The Great Depression in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: increases demand hugely. People who collected evans they could see it,
Speaker 1: they could see a rise in abortions and a decline
Speaker 1: in family size. There are clinics that developed that are open,
Speaker 1: that are well known um of people who provide a
Speaker 1: who are specialists in abortion, and they have an office
Speaker 1: with their name on the door. They have business cards
Speaker 1: and people know who they are there. They are people
Speaker 1: who provide excellent abortions. They're safe, it's very safe. But
Speaker 1: there were also questionable and sometimes dangerous options that emerged
Speaker 1: at the same time. So in New York City, for example,
Speaker 1: historian Daniel Williams, there were some abortion senicates which by
Speaker 1: the were performing, according to some claims at the time
Speaker 1: to two fifty thousand abortions per years. It was of
Speaker 1: a thriving business, but they were connected with organized crime.
Speaker 1: They employed non licensed physicians, a lot of medical school
Speaker 1: dropouts and others who had a little bit of medical
Speaker 1: training but not enough to practice legitimately. And most of
Speaker 1: the time they could practice somewhat safe abortions, but it varied,
Speaker 1: and of course women were taking their lives into their
Speaker 1: hands going to some of those places, the so called
Speaker 1: back alley butchers. Professor Carol Joffey is a sociologist who
Speaker 1: has long studied abortion care, both physicians as well as
Speaker 1: nonphysicians who were horrible, I mean, who were who were
Speaker 1: medically inept. I mean, this is where most of the
Speaker 1: injuries and deaths came from. In addition to women attempting
Speaker 1: their own abortions, and these these guys, and it really
Speaker 1: was all guys at the time. Uh, we're also very
Speaker 1: ethically challenged. There are horrible stories of demanding sexual favors,
Speaker 1: are stopping halfway through the abortion and demanding more money.
Speaker 1: These butchers made an enormous impression on the rest of
Speaker 1: the medical field, the rest of medicine that had not
Speaker 1: been involved, uh in abortion care. And remember the abortion
Speaker 1: providers before Row were tiny, tiny portion of medicine as
Speaker 1: a whole. Um. They somehow equated abortion provision with these
Speaker 1: very ethically and and medically challenged people. And so beginning
Speaker 1: of the nineteen thirties, several doctors, especially in New York,
Speaker 1: said that the law was not working and rather than
Speaker 1: try to make abortion laws more stringent, what they wanted
Speaker 1: to do was to make abortion legal in certain circumstances.
Speaker 1: Rather than than continue to endanger more women. What would
Speaker 1: be best for society, will be best for women's health
Speaker 1: would be to just admit that we can't really control
Speaker 1: women's behavior with these laws. But Leslie Ringing points out
Speaker 1: these doctors pushing for reform their outliers. At least at
Speaker 1: this point, they are radicals. Uh politically, they're they're very unusual.
Speaker 1: What happens instead is that abortion, despite being illegal, becomes
Speaker 1: much more visible. I mean it starts in the thirties,
Speaker 1: but really by the methods of policing abortion change, and
Speaker 1: these clinics that had been operating for ten twenty thirty
Speaker 1: years openly suddenly are rated and closed by the police
Speaker 1: and prosecutors. They now are going after the safe practitioners
Speaker 1: who are who are also quite visible, and deliberately will
Speaker 1: time raids. You know, a group of police four or five, six, seven,
Speaker 1: eight ten police burst in and hopefully find specialist in
Speaker 1: the middle of a procedure, capture that person, the doctor,
Speaker 1: the patient, and all of the recovering patients, and collect
Speaker 1: all of the medical records and gather all of it
Speaker 1: for evidence for prosecution for illegal abortion. And this became
Speaker 1: the standard across the country, these police raids. So it
Speaker 1: became harder to find a good provider, and it became
Speaker 1: more expensive. Meanwhile, hospitals start cracking down to the departments
Speaker 1: of obstetrics and gynecology start to create these therapeutic abortion
Speaker 1: review boards um inside their own departments. So these committees
Speaker 1: are set up and they end up deciding what is
Speaker 1: a legal, legitimate abortion, what's legal and what isn't. And
Speaker 1: it meant women they knew they had to get permission,
Speaker 1: which of course means more delay. And you know, in
Speaker 1: some of these cases I saw there were four or
Speaker 1: five doctors who are on this committee, and every single
Speaker 1: one of them had to personally determine how far along
Speaker 1: her pregnancy was, so it's you know, coerced multiple gynecological exams.
Speaker 1: It means doctors learn, oh, these cases will never get
Speaker 1: by and they don't ring him. So that also fuels
Speaker 1: this sense that that doctors have the hospitals that they
Speaker 1: need to be careful. They don't want their reputations hurt
Speaker 1: by abortion. It is now, it's common, and yet it's
Speaker 1: highly stigmatized. It's it's it's in the paper a lot
Speaker 1: associated with death and crime and the mob, and and
Speaker 1: yet you can't talk about it. And in response, the
Speaker 1: people who provide abortions knowing now that this is what's happening,
Speaker 1: they change their practices. It becomes much more clandestine, it
Speaker 1: goes underground. It makes it very scary, and everyone is
Speaker 1: of course aware of the potential of police and they
Speaker 1: realize that they are breaking the law. So it really
Speaker 1: changes the practice and availability of abortion. In the past,
Speaker 1: there was much more um worry and agony and fear
Speaker 1: about whether or not you were pregnant. Again here's Glory A. Steinham.
Speaker 1: And if you were pregnant, it didn't wish to be
Speaker 1: much more likelihood that you would have to somehow get
Speaker 1: together the money and the time, often in secret, uh
Speaker 1: to travel far away and get an abortion. That was
Speaker 1: terrifically painful and time consuming and ridiculous, because that's not
Speaker 1: a democracy. Either we have in a democracy at a
Speaker 1: minimum decision making power over our own bodies, or we
Speaker 1: are not living in a democracy. To lose that power,
Speaker 1: if you're a man, you have to commit some horrible
Speaker 1: crime and go to prison. You know. It's yet it
Speaker 1: was applying to all to all women, no matter what
Speaker 1: we did. How many institutions of society had to collaborate
Speaker 1: in order to suppress women's sexual and reproductive autonomy and
Speaker 1: support second class citizenship for women. Historian Ricky Solinger. So,
Speaker 1: whether we're talking about the media, the ways that doctors
Speaker 1: set up punishing abortion boards and hospitals, how doctors refused
Speaker 1: to give prescriptions for contraception until after marriage, this is
Speaker 1: a cautionary message for the future people who understood that
Speaker 1: being able to control fertility is an absolute life necessity
Speaker 1: for most women. There were many people all over the
Speaker 1: country who capitalized on women's desperation. The reason that I
Speaker 1: stress the importance of the project of criminal abortion and
Speaker 1: how um many institutions were involved in bolstering and enforcing
Speaker 1: the culture and the politics that degraded women's sexuality and
Speaker 1: reproduction is because that has such implications for the future.
Speaker 1: The thing that went on then in sixty six was
Speaker 1: that there was nowhere to go for help. People had
Speaker 1: no way of finding out where are you could get
Speaker 1: an abortion. It was like a speak you. I didn't
Speaker 1: even know who amongst the women girls that I knew
Speaker 1: were sexually act I'm Lisa Kushner. I'm seventy five. I
Speaker 1: had an abortion in nineteen sixty six when they were illegal.
Speaker 1: I was living in New York at the time. I
Speaker 1: didn't know anybody who I could ask. I had a
Speaker 1: couple of relatives who were nurses, so I asked them,
Speaker 1: but they didn't have any resources for me, and there
Speaker 1: was a lot of like name around it, like could
Speaker 1: I even ask about it. It was a real powerless
Speaker 1: feeling and a sensation of like I actually I thought
Speaker 1: I would have to die doing an abortion on myself,
Speaker 1: is what I thought would happen if I couldn't get, um,
Speaker 1: you know, some kind of access, I was going to
Speaker 1: have to die. I didn't occur to me at all
Speaker 1: that that would be a reasonable option to go through
Speaker 1: with a pregnancy. So um, in the age of pay
Speaker 1: phones and not having cell phones, I made a thousands,
Speaker 1: hundreds of phone calls to women that I didn't know,
Speaker 1: but friends of friends of friends who may know somebody
Speaker 1: who was an abortion. Finally, after like a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks of making a lot of calls, somebody called me
Speaker 1: back and I don't know her name, and um, but
Speaker 1: she told me every single thing about her abortion experience
Speaker 1: and all the details, everything to expect. And I feel
Speaker 1: like she saved my life because it was just like
Speaker 1: a lifeline through my future. And then I had a
Speaker 1: few weeks to decide how I was going to get
Speaker 1: three hours away to his another state. I couldn't figure
Speaker 1: out what to do, but I eventually told my twin
Speaker 1: brother because he had a car and I figured he
Speaker 1: would have to drive me. But he forced me to
Speaker 1: tell my parents, and it was shocking to my poor parents.
Speaker 1: My mother just flat me for the first time in
Speaker 1: her life, and my father like rose. And this is
Speaker 1: where my story is very different from the story of
Speaker 1: most women, because they ended up helping me. They ended
Speaker 1: up helping me go for this abortion that they went
Speaker 1: with me to this uh dark office building in Newark,
Speaker 1: New Jersey. We walked through the side entrance of this building,
Speaker 1: which had an open door. The hallways were dark, and
Speaker 1: there was a very little bit of light dating coming
Speaker 1: in from a couple of windows. There were no lights on,
Speaker 1: and we're looking for the numbers on the door first
Speaker 1: to get to the right office. And we're going down
Speaker 1: this hallway which was very long in my memory. Who
Speaker 1: stive to sixty seven? That kind of thing, And then
Speaker 1: you turn a corner and then there was whatever the
Speaker 1: number was, and then opening the door, looking into this
Speaker 1: dark waiting room and a woman standing UH up in
Speaker 1: a white uniform like a like a receipt a nurse's uniform.
Speaker 1: And this man, the abortionist, he was a very slender,
Speaker 1: small person, and he said he was from the phil Things.
Speaker 1: We were making small talk. I could tell when he
Speaker 1: examined me that he had done it before that he
Speaker 1: was not a you know, he wasn't fumbling. He gave
Speaker 1: me directions, you know, on the table, and you know,
Speaker 1: he was explaining what he was doing as he was
Speaker 1: doing it, like a good practitioner. I didn't know enough,
Speaker 1: you know, I knew nothing. It was my second public exam.
Speaker 1: This procedure was also unusual because he uh inserted a
Speaker 1: plug of medical seaweed in my cervicts, which allowed the
Speaker 1: sortucts to open slowly, which was a good technique at
Speaker 1: the time and probably still now. But I had really
Speaker 1: bad cramps all night in a motel room, and my
Speaker 1: poor parents were like comforting each other, and I was
Speaker 1: like trying not to be freaked out. But it worked out, Okay.
Speaker 1: I had this procedure a DNC the next day and
Speaker 1: they took me. We went back to that house and
Speaker 1: I was okay. I didn't an infection, I didn't get raped,
Speaker 1: which was a circumstance of a lot of women, and
Speaker 1: I didn't die, so I felt very fortunate. When we
Speaker 1: come back, the police did not do anything, the politicians
Speaker 1: did not do anything. Because of the moral authority of
Speaker 1: these clergy people. They were left alone. An unexpected lifeline
Speaker 1: for people needing abortions. In the nineteen sixties, as abortion
Speaker 1: goes underground, support networks start to emerge around the country
Speaker 1: to help women find safe, if not yet legal, abortions.
Speaker 1: What a lot of people don't realize is that religious
Speaker 1: leaders were helping to My name is the Reverend Barber
Speaker 1: Girl Act. I was a counselor, a coordinator, and a
Speaker 1: trainer with Clergy Consultation Service from nineteen seventy one to
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies three in northeastern Pennsylvania. There is this long
Speaker 1: history of women in all times and places choosing to
Speaker 1: have abortions, not always UM safe ones and clergy were
Speaker 1: often one of the places that people came. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, UM the Reverend Howard Moody at Judson Memorial
Speaker 1: Church in New York City and a group of mainline
Speaker 1: Protestant ministers in New York City and Jewish rabbis wrote
Speaker 1: an article in the newspaper describing this service that they
Speaker 1: were offering. They called it Clergy Consultations Service for Abortions,
Speaker 1: and it was a service to provide women a place
Speaker 1: two receive support and information to make the decisions that
Speaker 1: they wanted and needed for a safe and legal abortion
Speaker 1: in some cases because they were referring some women to
Speaker 1: England or into Mexico and in some cases still legal
Speaker 1: abortions in the places where they were living. We had
Speaker 1: a brochure that was available in churches and I'm sure
Speaker 1: in universities and other places on It was a telephone
Speaker 1: number and basically an answering service, but one of us
Speaker 1: was the phone answer for each week, one member of
Speaker 1: the service and we would leave the person who would
Speaker 1: receive the calls. We would meet in an office. We
Speaker 1: would listen to the woman. We would listen to whatever
Speaker 1: she was struggling with in her own decisional process. We
Speaker 1: would provide information. If she chose an abortion, we had
Speaker 1: an information sheet about how to make the appointment, what
Speaker 1: it would cost, how to get there. We would encourage
Speaker 1: them to call us afterwards and certainly to come back
Speaker 1: because no matter what decision a woman makes. There are
Speaker 1: always going to be question second thoughts, losses to be mourned,
Speaker 1: changes to be you know, lived into. We also did
Speaker 1: the kind of talking in various settings and groups and
Speaker 1: churches about the work we were doing, talking to legislator
Speaker 1: chures in the states we were in about why abortion
Speaker 1: should be legalized. But we were public. We had numbers
Speaker 1: that were shared and I think it was in one state.
Speaker 1: It was in the you know that when you opened
Speaker 1: the the yellow Pages and the beginning, there would be
Speaker 1: clergy consultation service just listed in many phone books. We
Speaker 1: were listed in phone books. There were thousands of us,
Speaker 1: and we were all around the country providing these resources.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that was interesting is even
Speaker 1: in New York where it when this started and it
Speaker 1: was illegal to refer anyone for an abortion, the police
Speaker 1: did not do anything. The politicians did not do anything.
Speaker 1: Because of the moral authority of these clergy people. They
Speaker 1: were left alone. No one was prosecuted that I know of,
Speaker 1: for their work. There was fear of it. Um we
Speaker 1: all knew we were taking a risk. It felt like
Speaker 1: an important ethical decision. It felt courageous. I knew it was.
Speaker 1: It was. I was cutting ground. It was a hard
Speaker 1: time to be a woman in ministry, and it was
Speaker 1: a hard time to be a voice for a woman's
Speaker 1: right to choose. And it was dangerous. I mean we
Speaker 1: were yes, I was on the cutting edge, and it
Speaker 1: was a radical thing to do in the sense of
Speaker 1: being rooted in the truth as I saw it. In
Speaker 1: Chicago in nineteen sixty nine, another much more secretive group
Speaker 1: formed to help women get safe abortions. It was known
Speaker 1: simply as Jane. Here's one of the members. I'm Eileen Smith.
Speaker 1: I was in Jane and I had an abortion through Jane.
Speaker 1: I was in Chicago and happened to see the ad
Speaker 1: for Jane and the underground paper and I didn't even
Speaker 1: have a phone at the time. When I called and
Speaker 1: left the message, somebody called me at work and was
Speaker 1: so kind and very thoughtful and didn't let anything. You know,
Speaker 1: they knew that what they were dealing with, and they
Speaker 1: told me that I could pay them off over time,
Speaker 1: that someone would call and explain everything to me. I'm like,
Speaker 1: who are these people? Some of the Janes, like Eileen Smith,
Speaker 1: who had kept their participation secret, are finally coming out
Speaker 1: into the open thanks to a new HBO documentary called
Speaker 1: The Janes from filmmakers Emma Peldis and Tia Lesson, Here's Tea.
Speaker 1: This was like a group of very inventive, resourceful young women.
Speaker 1: They could have been robbing banks, you know, they they
Speaker 1: got they were underground, they were secretive, they had it down.
Speaker 1: And what did they choose to do? They choose, you know,
Speaker 1: they chose to put their lives on the line to
Speaker 1: help other women in need. It wasn't politics with a
Speaker 1: big p. It was politics, you know, it was. It
Speaker 1: was politics as personal. It's not an overstatement to say
Speaker 1: Ei Leaned that the Jains were a godsend for you.
Speaker 1: Uh And and they were not only kind but supportive.
Speaker 1: And you talk about the woman who drove you was
Speaker 1: seven months pregnant. H And why why were you impressed
Speaker 1: by that? Well, first of all, I knew these people
Speaker 1: were doing something illegally, putting themselves out there for me.
Speaker 1: And I was in a room with a bunch of
Speaker 1: other people and I had to go by myself. I
Speaker 1: remember read in a book and being really like, you know, anxious,
Speaker 1: and this woman walks in and it's like, oh, the
Speaker 1: driver's here, and she's seven months pregnant. I'm like, I
Speaker 1: thought it was so cool that someone who clearly wanted
Speaker 1: to have a baby, because I knew I wanted to
Speaker 1: have kids. I really knew I did. I was willing
Speaker 1: to put herself out there for someone who couldn't or
Speaker 1: didn't want to have a baby. Right then, I just
Speaker 1: it really, it really impressed. It's like whoa. So, you know,
Speaker 1: we all get in the car and she drove and
Speaker 1: was so nice and explained everything. The woman who sat
Speaker 1: with me while I had the abortion was amazing. You know.
Speaker 1: You walked into this bedroom and she said, you know,
Speaker 1: get undressed from the bottom down. I'm gonna blindfold you.
Speaker 1: And I thought, oh, this sounds horrible. But she was
Speaker 1: so nice and sat there. And then the person who
Speaker 1: came in to do the abortion, who I assumed was
Speaker 1: a doctor and wasn't. He was so personable. I mean,
Speaker 1: he was just relaxed, as won't take too long, you're
Speaker 1: not you know, uterus feels good. He explained everything, and
Speaker 1: I just remember being really shaky because I hadn't eaten anything.
Speaker 1: I remember standing up afterwards. You know, when he left
Speaker 1: the room, she took the blindfold up, and then I
Speaker 1: went to stand up and I almost just crashed, and
Speaker 1: she goes, you haven't eaten anything, and she brought me
Speaker 1: into this kitchen and gave me a cup of tea
Speaker 1: and a hard boiled egg, and I just, you know,
Speaker 1: you're like, where where am I? This is? This is
Speaker 1: like wow, okay. It was like the most positive medical
Speaker 1: experience I never had, never mind the legal abortion. When
Speaker 1: it was discovered that Jane's quote unquote doctor didn't have
Speaker 1: a medical license. Instead of calling it quits, the Janes
Speaker 1: dug in deeper. It gave the group, uh, you know
Speaker 1: and in on, hey, if you're not a doctor, then
Speaker 1: you know, why don't we learn how to do it? So,
Speaker 1: you know, a couple of people got trained and it
Speaker 1: was pretty it was pretty amazing. There were a bunch
Speaker 1: of different jobs. There was somebody who you know, took
Speaker 1: the phone calls and took all the information, and then
Speaker 1: there was the people that organized the information. We had meetings.
Speaker 1: They would bring all the cards to the meetings. We had,
Speaker 1: you know, some people that went to what we called
Speaker 1: the front where people met. They sometimes brought their kids.
Speaker 1: The people that ran the front. We had to have food, tea, coffee,
Speaker 1: stuff for the kids. To play with, and then there
Speaker 1: were people that work the actual abortion, and then there
Speaker 1: was a person driving. And besides that, you were doing counselings.
Speaker 1: You've got a group of people to call and then
Speaker 1: you tell them where you lived. They were going to
Speaker 1: come to your house. You set up a time, and
Speaker 1: then you would explain to them exactly what was going
Speaker 1: to happen. They were going to be going to one
Speaker 1: apartment or house, driven to another one, and you know,
Speaker 1: you told them what to expect. So you know that
Speaker 1: that took up a lot. And that's what I love
Speaker 1: doing the counseling, I mean, because you met all these
Speaker 1: interesting people. But you know, so there were a bunch
Speaker 1: of different things you ended up doing, and usually it
Speaker 1: was a combination of those things. I was young, I
Speaker 1: really didn't have a lot to lose. A lot of
Speaker 1: me thought that was very cool, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: we got to it was something illegal, but very cool.
Speaker 1: And plus the work was so immediate, you know, you
Speaker 1: could think about it. But then there was there was
Speaker 1: like another thirty calls coming in of people asking for abortions,
Speaker 1: so you were like, well, you know, we gotta keep
Speaker 1: taking this information down and go into the meetings. And
Speaker 1: putting the medications in and setting you know, the work
Speaker 1: was just made. It also immediate. Dr Warren Hearn was
Speaker 1: a medical student back in the mid nineteen sixties. He
Speaker 1: saw firsthand what unsafe illegal abortions were doing two women.
Speaker 1: The main thing that our experience was taking care of
Speaker 1: women on the guy in Ecology Award, and my classmates
Speaker 1: and I would be up just about all night every
Speaker 1: night taking care of these women who were very critically
Speaker 1: ill with acceptions, with overwhelming infection. I really didn't understand
Speaker 1: what was going on. I knew they were very sick, uh,
Speaker 1: and nobody talked about this, but I learned later that
Speaker 1: these were women were had probably had an unsafe illegal
Speaker 1: abortion and they were suffering from the effects of that.
Speaker 1: I was simply struck by how sick they were. Again,
Speaker 1: here's Leslie Reagan. By the nineteen sixties, the major public
Speaker 1: hospitals in Chicago and New York and l A. They
Speaker 1: have five or six thousand women every single year coming
Speaker 1: in following an abortion, bleeding injured with perforated uterus or
Speaker 1: perforated intestines um an infection. This is part of what
Speaker 1: fuels the movement to decriminalize abortion. And the support of doctors,
Speaker 1: where the majority of doctors our favor reforming and repealing
Speaker 1: the laws because they see the results and they know
Speaker 1: they've been taught in medical school, they might be performing themselves.
Speaker 1: They know that abortion can be perfectly safe and perfectly
Speaker 1: simple procedure, and that this should not be happening. There
Speaker 1: should not be women bleeding and dying. They could see
Speaker 1: it's a disaster, that that it's mostly poor women, high
Speaker 1: proportions of black women and Latino women, and that it's
Speaker 1: completely inequitable and unfair in terms of who is able
Speaker 1: to get those safe abortions from doctors, the therapeutic abortions
Speaker 1: and everybody else. A growing national push for reform continued.
Speaker 1: Doctors were joined by lawyers, activists, and clergy lobbying state legislatures. Again,
Speaker 1: here's Reverend Barbara Gerlock of the Clergy Consultation Service. We
Speaker 1: kept statistics and who these women were, their ages, if
Speaker 1: they had a religious affiliation, the decision that they made
Speaker 1: with the information that was gathered between sixty seven in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, the clergy who were involved in Clergy Consultation
Speaker 1: Service had a major impact on the debate that went
Speaker 1: into the legalization of abortion in New York State in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. In nineteen seventy, the New York State Assembly
Speaker 1: voted to legalize abortion up to twenty four weeks. So
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's becoming more available, but not everybody
Speaker 1: could find the information. Not everyone ever heard about Jane
Speaker 1: called Jane called the collective or or new where to go?
Speaker 1: And and and even as becomes legal in New York
Speaker 1: and they're sending people to New York, not everybody could go.
Speaker 1: They never found out about them. And so there were people.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's cases of women who died um in
Speaker 1: those years when you know, legal abortion was legal in
Speaker 1: some states, and they could have gone there, but they
Speaker 1: didn't have the money, they didn't have any way to go.
Speaker 1: States may have been chipping away at restrictive abortion laws,
Speaker 1: but something bigger had to be done. Sometimes when someone
Speaker 1: doesn't really know who I am, though they've heard that
Speaker 1: I'm a lawyer, but they don't know how much about me,
Speaker 1: And I'd say, what have you ever heard of the
Speaker 1: case of Roversus White? Next week on abortion, The Body
Speaker 1: Politic wrote and it's unraveling abortion. The Body Politic is
Speaker 1: executive produced by me Katie Curic and was created by
Speaker 1: a small team led by our intrepid supervising producer Lauren Hansen.
Speaker 1: Editing and sound designed by Derrick Clements and Jessica Crying
Speaker 1: chich researched by Nina Perlman, and a special thanks to
Speaker 1: k c M producers Courtney Litz and Adriana Fasio