'This girl was hemorrhaging'
Abortion, before and after Roe
When Republican members of the Supreme Court of the United States vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, abortion will go from difficult-to-obtain to outright-illegal in at least 26 of the 50 states. One way to picture a post-Roe reality is to look back at pre-Roe reality.
What follows is an excerpt from an oral history given by a woman speaking about underground abortion networks in South Carolina in the 1960s and early ‘70s. It was collected by researchers from the College of Charleston’s Women’s Health Research Team and published in Nursing Clio, where you really should read the whole article if you get a minute.
Because the medical university was here. Residents and interns would perform what we would call “No-Tell Motel” abortions … We came down for Citadel football and it was parents weekend or it was some kind of big weekend. And a girl who lived down my hall who was a senior had been dating a cadet, they were going to get married, she was in Charleston every chance she got. But that weekend or that Wednesday she came and asked if there was room in my car to come to Charleston and I said yeah ... We didn’t see ‘em at the parades, the Friday afternoon parade. We didn’t see ‘em at the football game Saturday. Sunday, when we were leaving to come back, all of us were there with our dates or whatever. She showed up and she looked God-awful, and we just thought, “Oh my god they had major fights,” because she had cried so much that her eyes were almost, she could see out of ‘em but you obviously knew she’d been crying. She said nothing on the way back to school … And we didn’t say an awful lot because we didn’t know what had gone on. Get back in and 3 o’clock the next morning, there’s a pounding on the room door across the hall from us … This girl was hemorrhaging. And I remember going into her room and looking at her and she’s lying on the bed and the bed is full of blood. She’d had an abortion, she’d gone up to Rivers Avenue [in North Charleston], to one of the motels.
When Christian dominionists’ hand-picked judges deliver on their promises at the federal level, currently unconstitutional state laws know as “trigger laws” will go into effect. States will force people to carry their pregnancies to term or seek care elsewhere, as they did before the Roe decision of 1973.
Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum tried to capture the horror and precarity of pre-1973 abortions in the U.S. in her article “Perilous Politics — Morbidity and Mortality in the Pre-Roe Era,” published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2019. Anticipating that conservatives’ half-century project to subvert democracy through the courts would eventually succeed, she spoke to experts including Dr. Michael Baden, an 85-year-old forensic pathologist who worked in the New York City medical examiner’s office pre-Roe. Baden was still haunted by what he saw from the aftermath of abortion attempts. Desperate people died of infections and air embolisms. Some survived but were rendered infertile for life. Some were permanently brain damaged.
“We would see largely persons dying from infections that came into the medical examiner’s office 3 or 4 days after the attempt,” Baden said in an interview that ran alongside the NEJM article. “These were always young women — usually, almost always, from poor minority households, because if you had enough money there were plenty of ways to get proper abortions.”
In her paper, Rosenbaum notes that self-managed abortions might be safer now than they were 50 years ago, but we’re talking about harm reduction. If we don’t keep abortion legal, safe, and accessible, we’ll be reduced to desperate measures.
“There have always been very brave physicians and nurses who have stepped up and performed illegal abortions safely and ethically,” Karissa Haugeberg, a historian of women and medicine at Tulane, told Rosenbaum. “The problem is, when it’s illegal, a vast entrepreneurial class rises to fill the vacuum.”
This time around, when people seeking abortions are driven underground, misinformation about safe abortion procedures won’t only come from quack doctors and rumor mills. It will come from the state.
Under one of the recent anti-abortion bills approved by the South Carolina House of Representatives last week (perhaps designed to make abortion more dangerous until they can ban it outright), the state would require doctors to recommend a scientifically unsupported abortion “reversal” pill to patients seeking medically induced abortions. House Republicans passed the bill knowing full well that these progesterone treatments were based on shoddy, unethical research according to The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. If the Senate passes this mandate before the Supreme Court axes Roe, we will be performing an unmonitored, open-ended experiment on the bodies of South Carolinians.
In the leaked draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization obtained by Politico this week, Justice Samuel Alito writes, “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” This is notable. If we are bound by traditions, there are few traditions more consistent than that of cruelty toward women. Particularly in a state like South Carolina, where the “Father of Modern Gynecology” J. Marion Sims conducted experiments on enslaved women without anesthesia, what higher cause is served by appealing to tradition? What is the point of alluding to history if we are not going to transcend it?
Here is a list of abortion funds. Here are the details for rallies being planned in Columbia (6 p.m. today at the Statehouse) and Charleston, S.C. (5 p.m. today at the U.S. Courthouse on Broad Street).
Here’s a statement by 3 DSA chapters including mine calling on House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) to cancel his stump speech today in support of Rep. Henry Cuellar, an anti-choice Texas Democrat facing a pro-choice primary challenger. Here’s where you can donate to Cuellar’s opponent Jessica Cisneros.
Abolish the filibuster. Keep yourselves safe. Go in peace.
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There is opposition everywhere to abolishing Roe v. Wade, yet the few are going to control the many. How does this happen in a democracy. We need a new word to describe our political system--DEMONOCRACY! Because that is what it is becoming.