ILLEGAL ABORTION
Excerpts from:
“The Worst of Times: Illegal Abortion Survivors, Practitioners, Coroners, Cops and Children of Women Who Died Talk About its Horrors ”
by Patricia G.MillerJANE
MIRIAM
DR TED
ESTELLE
JANET
DR DON
PAULA
UNDERGROUND ABORTIONMy mother was born in 1899 and passed away in 1932, just a few days before her thirty-third birthday. She bled to death after an illegal abortion, leaving six motherless children who needed her desperately. I was the oldest, twelve, and the youngest was only two.
We lived in Nebraska. My dad worked in a factory. I don’t know what he did, but he made pretty good money. The problem was that a lot of that money went into drink. My mother was a housewife. She worked hard and didn’t have a lot of time or a lot of energy to play with us, but she cooked and cleaned and washed and ironed and took good care of us. We were Methodists, and I don’t remember anything about birth control being wrong. Big families weren’t a religious thing. She came from a big family - one of thirteen children. She married when she was about sixteen.
My mother had had several abortions before the one that ended her life. My aunt, her sister, told me about this man in our town who did abortions. I remember the 1932 abortion like it was yesterday. That evening I had gone to babysit for a family who lived two blocks from our house. My mother had gone to bed early, saying she didn’t feel well.
The next morning my dad came to the neighbors’ to get me. He was cold sober and looked scared. When we got home – as I said, I was only two blocks away – an ambulance was there and they were carrying my mother out on a stretcher. But it was too late. She was gone.
My aunts on my dad’s side came over and stayed with us that first night. I slept in the middle of my parents’ double bed, between my two aunts. When I got up in the morning I could see there was a lot of blood on the bed. It was her blood! They had changed the sheets and everything but they couldn’t do anything about the mattress. I was lying in the same spot where my mother had bled to death less than twenty-four hours earlier!I was born in 1925. In 1946, when I became pregnant, I was living with my mother in Pittsburgh. I wasn’t married. I had graduated from college about a year earlier and had been working. I still lived at home because that is what girls did in those days – at least that is what “nice girls” did. It goes without saying that nice girls weren’t supposed to have sex, but a lot of us did. Of course I got pregnant, which is something else nice girls didn’t do.
As soon as I realized I was pregnant, I started looking for a solution to my problem. I knew I wanted an abortion. First I went to my own doctor. He confirmed that I was pregnant but told me he had no help to offer.
My sources of information were usually men, not women. They gave me names and telephone numbers. I was getting really panicky as time was going by and I was going nowhere. Eventually I got to a nurse in East Liberty.
I went to her house. She didn’t have an office or anything like that. I know she told me that the cost would be four hundred dollars and that I had to have the money in cash. Now, that was a lot of money in 1946. I went to my bank and cashed in my savings bonds, my savings account, and everything else I had.
The day of my abortion, I went by myself. I remember a very small room with a couch. I was told to lie on the couch. That is where the abortion was done. Nothing was sterile. I lay down on the couch, and she put something up my vagina. I never saw what it was. It sort of hurt. Then she put some sort of packing in and gave me some medicine in a small container. They were dark brown pills. She never told me what the medicine was; she just said that I should take it when I got home. I left the same way I had come – alone and on foot. At that point, I didn’t have a feeling of fear. It was more like disgust: “This is an awful thing to have to go through.” But my over whelming emotion was one of relief.
I went home and took the medicine. I thought I might be okay, but I got terribly sick. I don’t know if it was the abortion or the medicine. In the middle of the night I went to the bathroom and suddenly began hemorrhaging. I start screaming. My mother rushes in. She called a doctor, and it was the same doctor I had originally gone to. As soon as she told him I was bleeding, he knew immediately what was going on and sent an ambulance.
I was in the hospital for quite a while because I had peritonitis. I continued going to the same doctor after the abortion, although I’m not sure why. He didn’t treat me very well when he was treating me for peritonitis, and it didn’t get any better later. Several years later, when I got engaged, I went to him to be fitted for a diaphragm. He refused to do it! He refused, as he put it, because of the kind of person I was. He made me feel like dirt, slime – a despicable person.
At the time of my abortion, 1946, there wasn’t much in the way of birth control, and I didn’t have much knowledge. We had health classes in high school, but they didn’t focus on birth control. The topic wasn’t even discussed. When I got pregnant, we were using a condom. That was all we had access to. Diaphragms existed, but you had to have a prescription to get one, and in 1946 you had to be married to get a prescription. Remember how the doctor wouldn’t give me a prescription even when I was engaged? When he turned me down, I went to Planned Parenthood and got fitted with a diaphragm. They were very nice to me.
Considering what happened to a lot of women in whose days, I guess I have been very lucky.Growing up, I never heard anything about abortion. In medical school there certainly was no training about how to do an abortion. I graduated from medical school in 1943. In my third year of medical school – that’s when the clinical training begins and you go out onto the wards and see real patients – I spent time on an ob-gyn ward.
During that year, in 1942, I first saw women with septic abortions. In 1942 antibiotics existed, but were very scarce. We had sulfa. Penicillin was around, but most of it was going into the war effort. In those days the only available abortion treatment was the same as the treatment for a women with puerperal sepsis, which is an infection after delivery, except that the puerperal sepsis patient was easier to treat. What we did there was to try to irrigate the uterus – which in a postpartum patient is much larger and more open – with antiseptic solutions in an attempt to wash out or clean out the infection.
With the abortion patient, you couldn’t really do that as well, because you couldn’t get tubes far enough up into the uterus. The result was that the septic abortion patient, tended to be a lot sicker and was more likely to die. What we usually had was twin problems – blood loss and infection. Even today these two things, without blood replacement and massive doses of antibiotics, can be bad news and are often fatal.
A perforation isn’t the only way you bleed to death. The woman could bleed to death from an incomplete abortion. She has the catheter inserted, goes home, and two days later she spontaneously aborts, but she doesn’t pass everything. She would be bleeding fairly heavily as her body tries to rid itself of remaining tissue. If left untreated, she will just keep bleeding until she exanguinates – dies from blood loss.
With infection, it usually took the woman several days to die. It would be death from septicemia, which is blood poisoning. Her symptoms were usually severe pain and ultimately renal shutdown – her kidneys failed.
The hospital had a twelve-bed ward where these women were treated. It was called the septic floor. It was reserved for any patient with severe blood poisoning, but more than half of these beds were occupied by abortion patients. They were pretty representative of the general population in terms of white or black or rich or poor. The abortion patients were just average women – wives, mothers, young girls, mature women.
The only medically safe abortion technique at that time, for the extremely rare hospital-performed abortion, was a hysterotomy, because it was least likely to result in an infection. However, it was abdominal surgery, which required a general anesthetic, so that added an element of risk. The only time a hospital did what it considered a “therapeutic abortion” in those days was for a woman with severe renal disease or maybe heart disease, where she might die if she continued the pregnancy. In those days, no one thought that a woman should have any choice about these things.
During the forties and fifties I don’t remember any concern by the hospital or the medical community about the wards being full of septic abortion patients and whether it was a public health problem. I first recall learning in the mid-fifties about how abortions were done in Japan. It was legal there, and they were done under sterile conditions. It was kind of an eye-opener for me, and other doctors, to discover how safe abortions could be when they were done under proper conditions…The problem was that even if you were a competent doctor, the whole illegality thing meant that you were doing it in your office under dangerous conditions. Those were bad times for everyone.I have had lots of babies and abortions because I could never get birth control. I had my first baby in 1957. I was twenty- one. Then I had a second baby in 1958 and a third baby in 1959. I wasn’t married. My third baby died just fifteen after her birth. They called it “crib death” but I never know anything more than that. In 1961 I had my first attempted abortion.
When I got pregnant for the fourth time in five years, I knew I didn’t want any more children. I had just lost a child, and I had two little babies. I just couldn’t handle any more children. Because I wasn’t married, I couldn’t get birth control. I had tried to get birth control after my first bay, but they wouldn’t let me have it, so I just kept having babies. Black women living in the Hill at that time couldn’t get birth control from the clinic unless they had the consent of their husbands, and there was no place on the forms for women who didn’t have husbands.
I called my sister and told her I was pregnant and wanted an abortion. My sister asked around and found out that there were lots of women in the Hill who did abortions. The black community I grew up was like that. It was a close community, and someone always knew someone, so it was pretty easy to get names.
I never really knew the woman’s full name. When I asked, she told me to call her Mary. She came to my house and brought all kinds of instruments and things with her. She really seem to know her business. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t do the abortion. She told me I was too far along. I figured she was right and that no one else was going to do it either, so I gave up and had the baby.
My next experience was just a year later. I had gotten married a few months after the baby was born, and my husband refused to sign for the birth control pills. This was like a bad dream. First I couldn’t get birth control because I wasn’t married, and then, the way things turned out, I couldn’t get birth control because I was! I got pregnant just a few months after I got married. I had had my fourth baby in May of 1961. I got married in August, and by November I was pregnant again.
This time I contacted Mary right away. I couldn’t contact her directly. I had to call someone else who would take my name and number and have her call me – just like the year before. Again she came to the house and examined me. Since I was very early, she could do the abortion. She told me to buy a catheter and penicillin pills. She told me what drugstore to go to and who to ask for. I don’t remember his name. He wasn’t a pharmacist. I called him and told him what I wanted. He told me to bring twenty-five dollars in cash and to ask for him. When I got home I looked in the bag, and there were twelve penicillin tablets and a catheter. The catheter was about twelve inches long. It was red and looked like it had a wire or something inside of it.
Mary came to my house the next day. I paid her fifty dollars. She spread newspaper on my bed and put those pads they put under you in hospitals on top of the newspaper. Then she had me lie down on the pads. She told me I could just feel a little pinch, and that was exactly what it felt like. She inserted the catheter in me and pulled out the wire. When she was finished, she told me to start taking the penicillin pills right away, even though it would be several hours before anything happened…
The next year, 1962, I was pregnant all over again. Again I tried to get an abortion. I didn’t go back to Mary because I didn’t have seventy-five dollars. I got the name of different, cheaper abortionist. She only charged fifteen dollars. I was told that she would give you a shot and some pills (probably Ergotrate) and you would miscarry. I called and went over that Thursday for my shot and pills. Well, nothing happened.
Then someone told me about an oblong purple pill (probably potassium permanganate). I remember that two or three pills cost five dollars. You didn’t swallow these pills, you inserted them, and they were supposed to cause an abortion. I inserted the pills and they did make me bleed. The flow was so heavy that blood ran down my legs, but it was kind of thick and funny looking. Anyway, in spite of all the bleeding, the pills didn’t cause an abortion. I was weak and nauseated and bled for about two days, but nothing else happened. I was still pregnant. By this time I was too scared to go and see a doctor to see if I was all right, and there really didn’t seem to be anything else to try, so I just gave up and had another baby. She was born in 1962.
After that I tried to get a hysterectomy or get my tubes tied so I wouldn’t be at risk every time my husband came after me, but they wouldn’t do it. They asked me why I wanted one. Why? Why couldn’t they understand? I was tired. My body was tired. It is hard on your body, being pregnant every year. My marriage was going bad. My husband wasn’t working. He had been laid off from the steel mill. We were on welfare. I was depressed, desperate, and frantic. I felt that I really couldn’t survive another pregnancy. How many reasons did I need? Well they didn’t think my reasons were good enough, and they refused to sterilize me, so I was stuck again.
I had to do something, so I forged my husband’s signature on a consent form and did get a diaphragm. If he found it, he would tear it or throw it away, and sometimes he would hit me.
In 1963 I got pregnant again, but it was a tubal pregnancy and they had to operate. They removed one tube and one ovary, but they still wouldn’t sterilize me. I begged them to just take out both tubes while they were there, but they wouldn’t do it. They would say things like, “What if all your babies burned up in a fire?” Isn’t that crazy? I wouldn’t have been willing to get pregnant if the whole country burned up in a fire! But I couldn’t make them understand that. If God put me on earth to have babies, I had done that. I had done more than my share…
In 1964, I got pregnant again, even though I had only one ovary. My husband was an ass and the marriage wasn’t good, but he was working at the mill again. We were off welfare, I could feed the kids. Things seemed better, so I had that baby. After that my marriage just fell apart. My husband was physically abusive, and he would throw away my birth control if he had ever found it. He refused to leave, and there was no place for me to go with all those kids.
One hot day in August 1965, when I was seven months pregnant, my husband came home after being out all night drinking. He came into the living room and said, “Is that baby mine?” I laughed. I figured it had to be a joke. Well, he grabbed me and threw me down on the floor. Then he sat on my chest, holding my arms down with his knees, and he beat me. It was bad. He had a big ring on his finger, and it cut my face and his hand when he hit me. My youngest boy, hit him with a chair. That stopped him, and he left the house.
That day I drifted in and out of consciousness at home. One of my children called my sister, who came and got me and took me to the hospital. I had a concussion, and my face was all swollen and cut. My doctor, who had delivered my last baby, came to see me, and he was really upset. He said, “Don’t you tell me you fell downstairs or walked into a door, because I know what happened to you, and if you lose this baby, I’m going to press charges against him if you don’t!”
My daughter was born two months prematurely three days after the beating. She only weighted one and a quarter pounds. My husband came to see me in the hospital and begged me not to press charges against him. My doctor told me that I really shouldn’t have any more babies and that I ought to get away from my husband.
In spite of what my doctor told me, the hospital sent me home with no birth control, and my husband was still in the house. Well, I knew I could not survive another pregnancy, so I forged my husband’s consent again, went to the clinic in the Hill, and told them I had to have birth control pills. They wanted to give me a diaphragm, but I had enough of that, I said, “ I don’t want no diaphragm. I want the pill.” Maybe the desperation I felt got conveyed to them, because somehow, for the first time in my life, I got the pill. It was wonderful. I went home and told my husband, “If you touch me or my pills, I’ll kill you!” I started taking birth control pills. I took them for the next five years and I never got pregnant. Since I grew up I had a pregnancy almost every year, so this was a real miracle.
My daddy left my mother when I was only two, and I always felt like I got cheated out of a father. But I tell you, I never had to run out of the house because my daddy was beating up on my mama. When I look back on it, I realized that my childhood was better than my children’s childhood.
My husband kept living there. He wouldn’t move, and the kids and I couldn’t. My mother had moved into the projects, so she just had three rooms. She couldn’t take us in. No one really wants a woman with six children, let me tell you! I called the Salvation Army. They could take me and my girls, but they couldn’t take my boys. I wasn’t about to leave my boys behind, so I just stayed.
I bought a gun and practiced in my basement until I learned how to use it. I wasn’t going to have any more beatings or any more babies, and I figured having a gun gave me a better chance of making sure that those things didn’t happen to me anymore.
In 1966, when my last baby was six months old, I got a job. It was the first real job I’d ever had. It was part time and minimum wage – no health insurance or anything like that – but it was wonderful. I felt I had a little more control over my life and that I could do for my children. Then I got a second job working nights at the museum, and a third job doing cleaning three mornings a week. I worked three jobs for eight years until I finally got a real full-time job, with health insurance and everything, at the museum. I still work there.
I ruled my kids with an iron hand, and they did what they were supposed to do. They came rights home from school. They did their homework. The bigger ones watched out for the little ones. I ignored my husband and tried to save some of my money. He was really crazy jealous after I got the jobs.
Anyway, one day my husband was upstairs yelling at the kids- he never hit them, just me- and he yelled down, saying he was going to kill me. I grabbed my purse and ran out the door. He came running after me. I decided I couldn’t keep running, so I turned around and told him that if he took another step I’d shoot him. The gun was in my purse. Well, he laughed and kept coming. I took aim and shot him. I hit his arm. He looked amazed. I was amazed too…That man never hit me again – never!
By 1970 I had become a diabetic. I had been taking the pill for five years and they told me I had to quit, so they gave me an IUD. I had it for less than a year when I got a severe infection from it. I was in the hospital, and they took the IUD out and told me I couldn’t use it anymore, so I was back to nothing. I got pregnant, but by then it was 1971, and I got a legal abortion through the clinic. A year later I had a second legal abortion through the clinic. When I came back that second time, they asked me if I thought abortion was a form of birth control. I told them I didn’t but that if they wouldn’t do the abortion because I was a “repeater” , I would find someone who would. They did the abortion.
After that second legal abortion, I never got pregnant anymore. I kept working and saving money. That third job was my ticket out of this lousy marriage. I figured that if I never talked to him and never gave him any money, he might get tired of me and take up with another women, maybe even leave.
Well, it happened. One day I came home from work and he was gone, along with almost everything in the house. He left us six towels and washcloths – one for each kid, but none for me. He divorced me on December 31,1973. In February of 1974, I took all the money I had been secretly saving and I made a down payment on this house. This is mine. I pay my bills. My kids are all grown, and they all turned out fine.
In 1958 my best girlfriend Millie, called and told me she was going to have an abortion. She had a year-old child and an infant. Her husband had started fighting with her and had other women. I tried to talk her out of it but she was determined. She died from gangrene. She was only twenty-three. I was devastated. About six years ago I met her son, who had been a year old when his mother died. He wanted to know everything I could tell him about his mother. He didn’t have any memory of her at all.
Those years were awful, and I never want my daughter to go through what I went through. You know, I never really knew until today that the stuff that happened to me happened to white women too. I thought it just happened to me and Millie and other women in the Hill because we were poor and black. But it was not. This isn’t a black thing, this is a woman thing. Why was it that way? Why did it have to happen? Why did we let it happen?I knew immediately when I was pregnant. I am one of these women who immediately become nauseated. I didn’t have to miss a period to know what was happening. I could not possibly have continued the pregnancy. I was barely surviving with two little kids, not job, and an abusive husband. With a third child I would never have gotten away or survived.
I started asking around immediately, looking for a way to end the pregnancy. I didn’t ask any family members for help. Abortion was never discussed in my family, so my parents never imparted any “abortion values”, good or bad. The one value that was imparted, over and over, was the importance of being chaste. Abortion was never discussed and birth control was never discussed because a chaste female had absolutely no need to know anything about either of these things, right? The reason I married the abusive man was because I went to bed with him. Who else would have me?
One of my friends told me about a doctor right there in the neighborhood who might be able to help me. I think he was a general practitioner.
“Doctor, I’m pregnant. Can you help me?” I didn’t quite dare to use the word “abortion”, and I sort of whispered my request to him, in case saying the word out loud would make him more likely to call the police. The first thing he did was to give me a prescription for something called ergot. Then he did something that I thought was very strange and that I have always been convinced was for his benefit, not mine. He had me take off my clothes from the waist down and lie on this table in his office. There was no nurse or anyone else present. He began to do this weird “manipulation”, as he called it. He put his hand in my vagina and kept touching my clitoris. I just lay there waiting for it to be over. Does it surprise you to learn that the “manipulation” did absolutely nothing to dislodge the fetus? I took the big black pills and they didn’t do anything either.
I tried home remedies: jumping up and down, running up and down stairs, the hottest possible tub baths, the coldest possible showers, things that made me throw up, and things that gave me diarrhea. Nothing worked.
Finally someone told me about a nurse in Turtle Creek. All I knew was a phone number and a first name: Barbara. I called her and said I needed to come and see her because I had this “problem”. I had absolutely no knowledge of this woman’s medical competence, but I sure wasn’t going to ask. I didn’t care. That isn’t exactly true. I cared a lot. I had two small children at home. I didn’t want to die and leave them alone with a brutal father. But I didn’t have a choice. Barbara was all there was.
The abortion was actually done in Barbara’s kitchen. She had me remove my underpants and lie down on the table. Then she inserted something in me. I didn’t see it, but it felt like some sort of rubber tubing. In about ten or fifteen minutes I began to feel cramps, and she took the tubing, or whatever it was, out. She told me to lie there for a few minutes, and then she moved me to a little room that had a cot in it. That was where I was going to spend the night.
I was having intermittent cramping, but I wasn’t bleeding. Now I was really scared, because in the morning, even though I hadn’t aborted, she told me to go home, saying there was nothing more she could do for me. She told me something might happen in a few days.
With that assurance I went home, but I was a wreck. You know, I can’t remember what I told my husband about where I had been all night. He had no idea I was pregnant, because if he had known, he would never have let me get an abortion. He didn’t want a divorce, and this would have given him enough control to keep me where he wanted me forever. I went about my daily chores, taking care of the kids, cooking meals and trying to act normal. But I was really frightened. Finally, a full two weeks after my trip to Barbara, I miscarried. I went to the bathroom one day and just passed it in the toilet. There was no bleeding or cramping. I fished it out of the toilet and looked at it. It was a glob of tissue. I felt bad. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t regret it. I didn’t regret then, and I never have. I just felt bad about the circumstances.I graduated from medical school in 1961. During my internship at the Catholic hospital, I received a very strong message that abortion was evil, and I am quite sure there were no septic abortion patients there. At the Catholic hospital I did learn how to do a D and C, though, since it would be appropriate treatment for things other than abortion.
During my residency, I remember one young girl. When she was admitted in the hospital, she had peritonitis and septicemia. Now, either of those things can kill you. She was in bad shape when she was brought in. Her body was covered all over with horrible boils, and she had gangrene. It took weeks but she finally did recover. She would never tell us what happened to her – who did it or how it was done – but there was talk around the hospital of a coat hanger of slippery elm or something like that. Whatever was used on her sure wasn’t sterilized firs for her to get an infection like that.
The hospital always had so many septic abortion patients that I don’t think they could have bothered trying to find out the identity of the abortionists. The septic abortion patients in that public hospital were disproportionately black or Hispanic and disproportionately poor.
I had no idea how may years it covered, but the pathology department at that municipal hospital had a rather large collection of jars of preserved organs that had been removed for one reason or another. Many of the organs were uteruses with the abortion instruments still in place. Some of the instruments were knitting needles, and some were coat hungers, and there they were, neatly labeled and lined up, each floating in its jar of formaldehyde.
Colorado legalized abortion in 1967, do they probably haven’t added much to that part of the collection in the last twenty years. I wonder if those bottles are still there. If they are, I wonder if today’s medical students understand just what they mean. Coat hungers and knitting needles probably seem very strange to them. They must wonder, even more that we did twenty-five years ago, “Why would any woman take such a chance?” I don’t know why, but I knew a lot of them did.I called the guy, whose name was George. He told me he would come to my house at night, after Jeff was in bed and asleep, and do the abortion there. I wouldn’t have to get a babysitter and then drive myself home. However, I had to have a hundred and fifty dollars in cash, which wasn’t easy.
George came about three days later – it took me a few days to scrape up that much money.
He sort of poked around with a catheter. I think it took about twenty minutes, maybe not that long. He told me to go to bed and the next day I would have some bleeding and I would abort. He also told me that if I passed any clots or pieces of tissue, to save them in my freezer so he would be able to tell if he got everything. He didn’t give me antibiotics or anything like that.
The next morning, when I woke up, I knew something was different. Although no bleeding or cramping had started, for the first time in sixty or seventy days I wasn’t nauseated. Feeling good for the first time in weeks, I jumped out of bed, go Jeff and myself dressed, and went out in the backyard to rake leaves.
Suddenly I felt this wet sensation on my legs. I looked down. The leaves and I were covered with blood. Remembering George’s instructions about any tissue, I dropped the rake, grabbed Jeff, and ran into the house to take off my blood soaked clothes. I picked through the clothes for tissue.
Well, my body wasn’t yet finished, it seemed. The backyard hemorrhage happened three more times. Each time I picked through my clothes looking for tissue. The last two times, there was some. I put the pieces in an ashtray and put them in the freezer. Most of it looked like pieces of dark red liver, but there was one part of it that was different – sort of white and yellow and firmer than the liverlike stuff. That different tissue was less than two inches long. I studied it very closely, because I figured it was fetal tissue and was what George would be concerned about. Well, it didn’t have arms or legs or toes or anything like the posters and billboards the anti-abortionists seem so fond of displaying. When George saw it, he said that was all of it and I would be fine. I was. The bleeding tapered off and stopped in about a week.
After George left that second time, when he came to check the tissue, I went and looked at Jeff sleeping in his crib. He was real. He needed a mother, and now, again, he had one. I still have that ashtray, and sometimes I look at it when the anti-abortionists are blocking clinics and telling people that fetuses are more important than living women and children. It has been twenty-eight years since that backyard hemorrhage.
It is Maggie, my only “woman-child”, whose story shows me how much things can change. When Maggie was twenty-five, married, working full time, and attending graduate school at night, she became unwillingly pregnant.
So unlike her mother in the options available to her. No backyard hemorrhages. Maggie had her abortion in 1991. She called a clinic and made an appointment. Her husband was to take her to the clinic, but she asked me to meet her there. The waiting room was full of people – husbands, parents, sisters, friends…I mused about how nice it would be to be a grandmother, but almost before the thought was formed, I knew I could never say that to Maggie. However much I might desire a grandchild to bounce upon my knee, that was not a reason to coerce my daughter, even subtly, to continue an unwanted pregnancy…I jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. A kindly gray-haired doctor said, “Are you Maggie’s mother? She’s fine. She’s in the recovery room.”
My little girl was in an overstuffed reclining chair, with a warm, white blanket tucked around her, a steaming cup of tea in her hand, a radiant smile on her face, and not one but two uniformed nurse-practitioners, with blood pressure cuffs and stethoscopes attending to her. One was taking her blood pressure. The other was taking to her about contraception and post-abortion care.
Different? I can’t even articulate it. She was, in a very literal sense, surrounded by competent medical care. Frightened? Not a bit I exited the building and bumped into a man carrying a sign: “Abortion kills. Choose life.” My god! Have they walked in my shoes or Maggie’s? No. Abortion – even illegal abortion – saves lives. It saved mine, and Jeff’s and now Maggie’s. Now the tears I blinked back were those of rage.No one knows how many women needlessly died from illegal abortions, but we do know of the desperate remedies they subjected their bodies.
The abortion techniques used during the American underground period of 1900 to 1973, and earlier, can essentially be grouped into three categories:
1. Noninvasive “activity” such as hot baths or strenuous exercise.
2. Ingestion of a chemical or herbal substance believed to have abortifacient properties.
3. Invasive mechanical or surgical techniques. The physician-abortionist was more likely to do a curettage, or surgical scraping, while the lay abortionist and the self-abortionist were more likely to introduce a foreign object or substance into the uterus or to use an oral medication or chemical.
Among the herbs rumored to cause abortions were angelica, gentian, tansy… hellebore, foxglove, pennyroyal, and rue. Desperate women also resorted to ergot, quinine, opium, and belladonna. At best, these various home remedies were ineffective. At worst, they were dangerous or even fatal.
Some herbs, among them angelica, savin, and tansy, are emmenagogues – substances capable of producing a menstrual discharge. These may have been effective abortifacients if the discharge was sufficiently powerful to carry the fetus along with it. More commonly, however, they produced a much-desired menstrual period without affecting the pregnancy at all.
If a woman was trying to abort herself with home-grown herbs, she would have no way of knowing the concentration or toxicity of what she was ingesting. Even if she knew, as in the case of ergot or quinine obtained from the drugstore in pill form, she may not have cared. A desperate woman might well reason, “If one pill doesn’t work, five may.”
Among the more hazardous underground abortion methods was the ingestion of substances known to be toxic to the fetus: lead, mercury, phosphorus, prussic acid, and strychnine. Alas, they were toxic to the woman as well, though if she was lucky, not fatally so. The fetus is particularly vulnerable to lead.
Many lay abortionists used douches of Clorox, pine oil, turpentine, Lysol, or plain soapy water, a popular favorite. These solutions were inserted by means of a catheter or syringe, through the cervix into the uterus, which contracts in the presence of a foreign and irritating substance.
Potassium permanganate, sometimes in crystalline or tablet form, sometimes dissolved in a solution, was also widely used to induce abortions. A woman who had the potassium permanganate solution inserted into her uterus might well have aborted. The unfortunate woman who inserted the dry tablet or crystal into her vagina would have experienced severe chemical burns while remaining pregnant.
Another invasive technique involves material that draws moisture from surrounding body tissues. Inserted into the neck of the uterus, such material – slippery elm, a dehydrated tree bark, and laminaria, a dried seaweed, for example – enlarges as it absorbs fluid, causing the cervix to dilate, which in turn, in combination with the presence of the foreign object, causes the uterus to contract, evacuating its contents.
The mechanical methods can be ranked in terms of the level of sophistication and skill they require. The least sophisticated techniques were typically used by the least skilled – the self abortionist, perhaps aided by he equally unskilled partner or best friend. Women who were too poor or too frightened to go to an abortionist, or didn’t know how to find one, resorted to inserting common house hold objects into the uterus: crochet hooks, knitting needles, coat hangers…One farm woman is reported to have successfully aborted herself twenty-eight times with a goose quill dipped in kerosene.
The most commonly used foreign body was the catheter, readily available in drusgstores without a prescription. Sometimes a metal stylet was threaded through the catheter so that the tip would be rigid enough to insert through the cervix. Often a coat hanger served the same purpose.
Underground abortionists used two main catheter techniques. Sometimes they inserted the catheter and then removed it almost immediately. With this method, the foreign substance the uterus tries to expel is not the catheter but the infection it leaves behind, though in some cases the uterus contracts simply in response to the irritation cause by the introduction of the catheter.
In the early 1960s women began forming self-help groups to teach themselves how to do abortions through the technique of menstrual extraction – in some ways a throwback to an earlier time when women handled all such “female matters” among themselves, without the knowledge or involvement of men.
In this “home” abortion technique, a sterile cannula, about the length and circumference of a soda straw, is attached to plastic aquarium tubing, which is inserted into one hole of a two-hole rubber stopper in a mason jar. Plastic tubing in the second hole is attached to a syringe that provides the necessary suction when the plunger is pulled back. With the aid of a flashlight and a speculum, the cannula is inserted into the uterus until it reaches the uterine wall. Then one operator slowly moves the cannula back and forth across the uterine wall while the other operator gently pumps the syringe, creating a vacuum in the mason jar. The contents of the uterus are removed and pass through the cannula into the mason jar in a process that takes from about ten to thirty minutes.
Menstrual extraction is possible only in the early stages – approximately the first eight weeks - of pregnancy. It is not really a do-it-yourself abortion technique, since it takes two people to operate the equipment.
Today women are once again teaching each other how to perform menstrual extractions. Meanwhile, in a return to the united front of the 1800s, the anti-abortionists and the established medical community condemn menstrual extraction. Both Operation Rescue [a fanatical anti-abortion group] and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists claim that it is highly dangerous in the hands of laypeople. They may well be right, but if medically safe abortions are not available, American women may have no alternative.
ALSO SEE: ABORTION
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