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'When are you going to use the steel ball?': The First Legal Abortion Providers Tell Their Stories
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/10/first-legal-abortionists-tell-their-stories.htmlPretty recently I had this young woman, 15 maybe, and we did the procedure. I said, ‘Your uterus is empty, the procedure is over. I have to go check to make sure we got everything,’ and I left the room to examine the tissue. Then I came back and told her, ‘Everything’s fine, your uterus is healthy.’ And she said, ‘So … when are you going to use the steel ball?’ I picked my jaw up off the floor and said, ‘Steel ball?’ She said, ‘Well, I went to the crisis pregnancy center and they told me you’re going to put a steel ball that’s covered with sharp blades into my uterus and twirl it around.’ And this kid still came! I was thinking, How did you ever make yourself walk in the office believing I was going to do that?”
“There have been a number of attempts on my life, but I don’t wear a bulletproof vest anymore. They have been very clear in their letters, saying, ‘Don’t bother with the vest, we’ll go right for a head shot.’ That’s what they did with George. You just never know what’s going to happen.”
“Half a dozen years after Roe, I did my training in New York. I did a public-health residency and then became the director of what was then called the Bureau of Maternal Services and Family Planning for New York City’s Health Department. I met all the heads of the ob-gyn and pediatric departments around the city. I once had a conversation with the man who was the head of ob-gyn at Lenox Hill; he was a devout and very conservative Catholic. But he’d seen women die of botched abortions resulting in gas gangrene of the uterus. He told me, ‘Anybody who has ever seen a 13-year-old die like that has to support abortion.’"
“After Roe, I didn’t think about the backlash. We were so busy fixing things and setting up good services. I just want people to realize that it’s not a question of whether abortion is legalized or not, it’s a question of whether women are going to have one that’s medically safe or terribly unsafe. Every society that we know of, there have been abortions. Women are just as desperate not to have children as they are to have children.”
More memories of what we've gained and lost at the link.
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“I performed the abortions in the hospital, which was legally mandated at the time. The women were unbelievably relieved that they didn’t have to try find someone who would do it on someone’s kitchen table. . . . Women are just as desperate not to have children as they are to have children."
"Abortion in the U.S. has become a victim of its own success; an entire generation of Americans have grown up without seeing or understanding what the dark days of before Roe were like. Without understanding that history, you can’t fully appreciate what the right to choice means.
“When I was in medical school in North Carolina, I got a page one night to tend to a patient with a 106 degree fever. I assumed that number was made in error. It wasn’t. When I examined her I found a red rubber catheter protruding from her cervix. Another day, I was paged for a young co-ed in septic shock with barely any blood pressure. There was a fetal foot protruding from her cervix. The first had gotten an illegal abortion, the second had tried to do it herself."
“When I was in medical school in North Carolina, I got a page one night to tend to a patient with a 106 degree fever. I assumed that number was made in error. It wasn’t. When I examined her I found a red rubber catheter protruding from her cervix. Another day, I was paged for a young co-ed in septic shock with barely any blood pressure. There was a fetal foot protruding from her cervix. The first had gotten an illegal abortion, the second had tried to do it herself."
"As a medical student in the early '60s, I was regularly taking care of women who were suffering and dying from the complications of illegal abortions. There was a woman who had been turned down for an abortion at a nearby hospital. She went home and shot herself in the uterus and then drove herself back to the hospital."
Women are just as desperate not to have children as they are to have children.
We're not going back there, you hypocritical, fundie, self-righteous, zealot assholes.
Kick & rec.
