Taking Abortion for Granted

"BONNIE SWAIN," now age 61, got pregnant in her second year of college. She came home, told her parents, who begged their family physician to perform an illegal abortion. He agreed. Five years later, she married and had two sons. Today, she is the proud grandmother of six grandchildren and says she has never regretted what she did.

That's not the kind of story the anti-abortion movement wants you to hear. Nor do they want us to remember how many children's lives were ruined when women bore babies they couldn't take care of or how many women died as the result of botched abortions.

We forget what life was like before 1973, when one Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade -- suddenly made abortion legal. Women lived with the constant fear of pregnancy. All it took was a single mistake, the failure of a condom or a diaphragm, an inadequate monitoring of the ovulation cycle, and life was irrevocably changed. Some women hastily married, leaving behind the dream of an education. Other women, including those who were married, sought to keep those dreams alive by having an abortion.

"Iris Manning," a college student in the 1960s, went through a horrible ordeal. Estranged from her parents, she raised enough money to pay a "back alley" abortionist. After she handed over the money, the "doctor" told her to strip and lie down on a dirty kitchen table. A friend held her hand. Without anesthesia, she screamed in pain as a leering sadist shoved a rubber hose inside her womb. A decade later, she married, raised a daughter and son, and now has three grandchildren. She, too, had no regrets, but has never forgotten the desperation, the humiliation or the pain.

She was, in fact, one of the lucky ones. In the 1960s, advocates of abortion reform estimated that 1 million American women had illegal abortions annually and they attributed some 5,000 deaths directly to illegal abortions. The most common kind of illegal abortion was self-induced. All too often, an infection spread, the woman began to bleed profusely, landed in an emergency room, and found herself interrogated by hospital personnel shortly before she died.

To prevent such deaths, an underground network made up of abortion reformers, 1,000 ministers and rabbis, and feminist activists began helping frightened young women find competent and courageous doctors willing to perform illegal abortions.

In San Francisco, Patricia McGinnis, a longtime advocate of legal abortion, founded one of those groups, the Society for Humane Abortion (SHA). "Phyllis Sanders" became pregnant in 1968, her second year in graduate school at UC Berkeley. A friend took her to a SHA clandestine meeting. McGinnis, who had referred thousands of women for abortions, asked each woman to write an evaluation of the medical treatment she's received. As a result, she had a long list of competent doctors. That night, she gave Sanders the name of the doctor who performed abortions on the girlfriends of the chief of police in Mexico City. Sanders received competent medical treatment, returned to her studies, became a professor, married and raised three children.

None of the women I've interviewed is willing to use her real name. Some never told their parents, who are still alive. They also don't want to admit they committed a crime. Still others fear the "lunatic fringe" of the anti- abortion movement who have murdered abortion providers. Thirty years after the Supreme Court gave women the right to choose whether and when to bear children, that choice is in serious jeopardy. When abortion was a crime, many women died. Now is the perfect time for us to recall those deaths when we hear that abortion is about destroying life.