When There Was No Choice

[nightperson]

This may be tough going for some, but I read this during lunch and was glad the Voice published it:

"At 77, Dr. Harry S. Jonas can still pinpoint the exact moment when he understood the importance of making abortion legal. The year was 1952 and he was an eager, young obstetrics-gynecology intern in Independence, Missouri. The specialty promised exciting pregnancies and bouncing babies, but his very first patient entered the hospital extremely sick. A mother of 12 children, she had tried—unsuccessfully—to induce an abortion. "She came into the hospital with her intestines hanging out her vagina," recalls Jonas. "Then she died..."

Abortions were common well before New York decriminalized them in 1970 and Roe made them legal in the rest of the country in 1973. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, which does research on reproductive issues, reports that in 1930 almost 2,700 women died from illegal abortions—and that's just the number who had abortion recorded as their official cause of death. Almost one in 10 low-income women in New York City reported having attempted to end a pregnancy with an illegal abortion, according to one study done in the 1960s. In 1962 alone, almost 1,600 women were treated for incomplete illegal abortions in at Harlem Hospital. And there's plenty of current evidence showing the danger of outlawing the procedure. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 80,000 women around the world still die each year of complications from illegal abortion...

The fading of collective memory helps explain why the number of doctors willing to perform the procedure is falling. There were only 1,819 abortion providers in 2000, down 11 percent from the 2,042 abortion providers in 1996, according to the Guttmacher Institute. And these days, as legal restrictions on abortion mount, most doctors who do abortions are over 65. Rather than performing the procedures in their offices or in hospitals, they've been forced to do them in freestanding clinics, where they and their patients are exposed to violence and harassment...

In New York, William Rashbaum, a 78-year-old obstetrician and gynecologist, also continues to work well past what many think of as retirement age. As with other veteran abortion doctors, Rashbaum's career has spanned many eras. He saw "gobs and gobs" of women with complications from illegal abortions during his training in New York City in the 1950s. Then Rashbaum went on to provide medical advice and backup to illegal abortionists before Roe. (One, in New Jersey, sent a limousine containing a pale, bleeding patient and the piece of her intestine he had accidentally cut off to Rashbaum's office.) And after abortions became legal, he provided them. Now as his practice winds down, Rashbaum worries that the right to safe, legal abortion is slipping away. "You'd be crazy not to worry," says the white-haired physician. "Abortion has always had a stigma. And now, instead of things getting better, they're getting worse."

Margaret Sanger, 1879-1966: An early advocate for birth control, she lived to see it legalized for married couples, in 1965.

[LosinIt]

1. My grandmother drank formaldehyde at age 45 pregnant for #7

she had suffered from depression for years and this last pregnancy was enough to push her over the edge. I was just a baby at the time. I lost a grandma I never knew and an aunt or uncle I would have grown up with. My aunt was 5 at the time and she was the one who found her. This is what we have to look forward to when they repeal Roe Vs. Wade.

[Warpy]

2. I lost a friend in 1968

We don't know if she tried to abort herself or if she found an illegal abortionist. We do know her uterus was punctured and that she developed a raging infection on top of massive blood loss.

It is a hard way to die. Desperate women will choose it over being forced to keep pregnancies they do not want and which will destroy their lives anyway.

Antiabortion laws kill women. That is the bottom line.

[zbdent]

3. Hmm, interesting - 1819 doctors performing them, down from 2042

and yet, the abortion rate is rising?

Damn, the ones performing them must be getting more and more efficient!

Maybe they'll qualify for jobs in the camps, er, impoverished areas where they will stem the tide of the "welfare moms" . . .

[iverglas]

4. well, just in case anybody misses it

Our friend zbdent suggests that with the number of doctors providing abortion services falling, and the abortion rate rising (sez zbdent):

Maybe they'll qualify for jobs in the camps, er, impoverished areas where they will stem the tide of the "welfare moms" ...

I think zbdent needs a big round of applause for so accurately and colourfully capturing the viciousness and deceit of the anti-choice brigade and portraying it for our edification. A veritable Sarah Bernhardt, or Laurence Olivier (I forgot to check), playing the role so realistically you'd almost think one of those Army of God people (or whoever it was) being talked about in the other thread had wandered in. Brava/o!

Do you do Jimmy Durante?

[zbdent]

5. No Durante (at least, I haven't tried, as far as I can remember)

but I do a mean Marvin the Martian.

When Bush was trying to take credit for the initiative to "put a man on mars", maybe a few hundred years from now, I soooooo wanted to call up the local "music" radio station (where the morning DJ of 20+ years started showing his red-iness in 99) and give an "ultimatum from the people of Mars to the 'invaders' from Earth" . . .

[CTyankee]

6. Just a little clarification

as a former staffer at Planned Parenthood, I was as concerned as anyone that abortion providers were being terrorized out of doing them. However, what we should all remember is that abortions have been avoided by better and more choices in contraceptives for women. No thanks to the righties since they disapprove of contraception also. Anyone want to make a bet on the FDA approval of OTC status for Emergency Contraception this time round?