80 year old doctor remembers the days before Roe vs Wade.

Courtesy of the New York Times: 

I am a retired gynecologist, in my mid-80s. My early formal training in my specialty was spent in New York City, from 1948 to 1953, in two of the city’s large municipal hospitals. 

There I saw and treated almost every complication of illegal abortion that one could conjure, done either by the patient herself or by an abortionist — often unknowing, unskilled and probably uncaring. Yet the patient never told us who did the work, or where and under what conditions it was performed. She was in dire need of our help to complete the process or, as frequently was the case, to correct what damage might have been done. 

The patient also did not explain why she had attempted the abortion, and we did not ask. This was a decision she made for herself, and the reasons were hers alone. Yet this much was clear: The woman had put herself at total risk, and literally did not know whether she would live or die. 

This, too, was clear: Her desperate need to terminate a pregnancy was the driving force behind the selection of any method available. 

The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous “coat hanger” — which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in — perhaps the patient herself — found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it. 

We did not have ultrasound, CT scans or any of the now accepted radiology techniques. The woman was placed under anesthesia, and as we removed the metal piece we held our breath, because we could not tell whether the hanger had gone through the uterus into the abdominal cavity. Fortunately, in the cases I saw, it had not. 

However, not simply coat hangers were used. 

Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion — darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off. 

Another method that I did not encounter, but heard about from colleagues in other hospitals, was a soap solution forced through the cervical canal with a syringe. This could cause almost immediate death if a bubble in the solution entered a blood vessel and was transported to the heart. 

It is important to remember that Roe v. Wade did not mean that abortions could be performed. They have always been done, dating from ancient Greek days. 

What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.

There is not really very much I could add to this amazing article, but I will say that I know for a fact that Roe vs Wade, and the invention of the birth control pill, changed our country in very fundamental ways.

Many old fashioned religious fundamentalist's see those two events as the beginning of a sinful period, where they lost control of their "women folk."

For women of course it meant freedom. Freedom from having to bear the burden of sex, that too many men could simply walk away from.  Now they were free to exert control over their reproductive organs, were free to plan their families, plan when they wanted to get married, and what kind of future they wanted.


And that is really what the conservatives fear. Not the prevention or termination of pregnancies, but the liberation of the living incubators which they believe God designed to carry them.

If the Republicans succeed in rolling back Roe vs Wade, they will be responsible for innumerable deaths and injuries to American women. And you know what, somehow I don't think that costs them even one night of restful sleep.