And they did this all while working underground and virtually unsupported by anyone else. They made sure the women left feeling like they had actively made an important choice about their future and were a part of the whole process, rather than leaving feeling condescended to and patronized like in the medical system of the time. They not only provided safe abortions, they educated women about their own bodies, how birth control worked, and how the abortion was actually going to work. Desperate enough to seek the underground abortion market when with a lot of it you ran the risk of butchery or assault. Desperate women, whether they were seeking to protect their health, their relationships, or just their lives in general. It’s one thing to know statistics on how many women have abortions, some facts about the era, and quite another to read about these women being absolutely buried by women seeking their service. I can’t even imagine directly helping 11,000 people – I definitely shed some tears on the train over the narratives.īecause once you get over the sheer, mind-blowing factor of the work they were doing, you’d have to be heartless not to be affected by the emotional burden they carried.
Women deciding that begging male doctors and male hospital boards for permission to have an abortion was dangerous and messed up and deciding to do something about it! Realizing the underground market for abortions was just as dangerous and doing something about that! Bullying an abortionist into working on their terms and also into teaching them the procedures! They had a tangential relationship with a network of the clergy who referred women for abortions and used their societal status to lobby for legal abortion access (where did those guys go?)! We can’t even get people to call their reps on a regular basis these days, and these women helped an estimated 11,000 women over the course of the organization’s run.
More people should talk about this – about how it happened, why it was necessary, and why it’s so important to protect the abortion access we have now so we don’t have to go back to this era. I spent the whole read text-screaming random bits of it to my friends, my mind was so blown. Wade fight for women to control their own bodies that I had no idea even happened.
This was such an eye-opener for me – a whole chapter of the pre-Roe v.
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