The Truth About Roe v. Wade

Posted by Jill Filipovic, Feministe at 8:28 AM on June 4, 2008.

A must-read piece in the New York Times, written by an 80-something doctor who remembers what life was like before Roe. It’s a good reminder of what we have (blessedly) left behind — but what anti-choicers would like to turn us back to. He details the gruesome effects of illegal abortion, but I want to highlight his concluding statement:

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.

This is not about ending abortion — it’s about whether women are first-class citizens, deserving of full human rights. Abortion exists. It has always existed, and it probably will always exist. We know what decreases it — contraception; sexual health education; healthy views of sex as a responsibility and a pleasure, not a shame — and we know that the policies promoted by anti-choice groups increase it. We know that illegalizing it doesn’t make it go away. But it does create situations like this:

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.

The worst case I saw, and one I hope no one else will ever have to face, was that of a nurse who was admitted with what looked like a partly delivered umbilical cord. Yet as soon as we examined her, we realized that what we thought was the cord was in fact part of her intestine, which had been hooked and torn by whatever implement had been used in the abortion. It took six hours of surgery to remove the infected uterus and ovaries and repair the part of the bowel that was still functional.

That is what illegal abortion looks like. All the feigned concern for “babies” doesn’t negate that fact.

And this article fully emphasizes that “pro-lifers” don’t care all that much about life at all — because if they did, they’d take a few minutes to consider the women’s lives they’re putting at risk. And if they were actually interested in decreasing the abortion rate, they would agitate for the kinds of policies we see in the countries with the lowest abortion rates in the world: Universal health care, free contraception, comprehensive sex ed, open discussion about human sexuality, and, yes, legal (and often free) abortion. Instead, they’re busy protesting contraception. Yes, you read that right: They are opposed to the very best tool around at lowering the abortion rate. In fact, they’re claiming that contraception is abortion.

What’s clear is that their definition of “abortion” is something along the lines of “letting women have sex for pleasure” or “letting uppity bitches make their own decisions.”

And as the Times article illustrates, “pro-lifers” are a-ok with allowing death or serious bodily injury be punishment for such a transgression. For the babies, of course.

Tagged as: abortion, choice, roe v. wade