My Abortion Story
While on my first real job after high school in Memphis, Tennessee, I was asked to do a “favor” for my supervisor, a woman in her early thirties who had become a mentor and friend. The favor she asked was that I accompany her to get an abortion. She had become pregnant by her own boss, the married Vice President of the company. This woman, I’ll call her Martha, was going through a divorce at the time and was terrified of losing custody of her two young children. I believe this was 1970. Abortions were legal in some states but not anywhere in the Mississippi Delta.
On a Friday after work I accompanied Martha across the Tennessee state line into rural Mississippi. I have no idea where we actually were, but I recall our driving down a long unpaved road, deep in woods, to a small frame house. We were met by a bent old lady (straight out of Disney casting for “witches”) who immediately asked for money and then told Martha to take off her underwear and get up on the table. It was white. Enamel. Dents and rust around the edges. I was told to wait in a back room. In perhaps half an hour I was called. Martha was a little ashen, but standing, dressed, ready to go. She got into the back seat of her car. (I remember it as a Cadillac; it probably wasn’t.) I began to drive us back to Memphis.
Before we’d been too long on the road Martha became very irritable, complaining about my driving, even swearing—something I’d never heard her do. By the time we’d arrived back at her house, this had become moaning and sobbing. Somehow, I got her into the house, into a nightgown, and into her own bed. She wanted coffee. I went to make it. When I returned I found her white as a ghost and almost the entire bed soaked in blood.
I called an ambulance, even while she cried and begged me not to, and Martha was taken to the hospital. She was there slightly under a week and recovered with the exception that she was rendered permanently sterile by whatever that old witch had done to her. About two weeks after she returned to work she was dismissed by the company. Her husband, of course, learned the details of her hospitalization. She lost custody of her kids. I lost touch with Martha.
After all this time I sometimes have dreams about this incident. You can’t tell me that overturning Roe won’t take us back to this. For the sake of our daughters, our granddaughters, all the Marthas we might know, we CAN’T let that happen
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and other financial tools.
It can and will happen if we don't fight them. GOTV.
And keep one eye on traitor trump, because I suspect the timing of these anti-woman laws is a diversion.
Thanks for being supportive 
I am crying as I read this story you just shared...
This....
With my one hand that can still barely type with, I say what pill? No pill works 100% of the time.
Till my dying day it shall be my wish that the males that impregnate the females take responsibility for their actions!
Till death do us part indeed!
I was thinking you were referring to "The Pill" as in birth control.
Misunderstanding.
Sorry about that. 
We can never go back to this! I hate these men with a passion for what they are trying to force the women of this country to endure. They don't care. I actually believe that this is what they want for women. They want us to suffer and die. They want to punish us. I am so angry I can barely see straight.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your story Leslie and welcome to DU! 
n/t !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My father had a vasectomy in 1958 or so as my mother wanted no more children. It was a new procedure at this time.
She had MS and was pushing 40 and was physically shot.
My father was embarrassed to get a follow-up on this new "vasectomy" procedure and assumed it worked.
WRONG.
My mother got pregnant again and asked my father to find her a way to get a legal abortion. He went to his mother to seek money for one but grandma was a Catholic and she just cried and cried and offered no help.
Mother tried everything to abort but none of her efforts worked.
In early 1960 she gave birth to my brother she never wanted. I remember picking her up at the hospital and she was in a wheelchiar with both legs wrapped in bandages. She was in intense pain from having both legs stripped of varicose veins and had a bundle in her arms and was not happy at all.
My brother grew up hearing this story every day of his life and he had major problems (deemed to be mentally retarded).
Both my mother and my brother are both dead today but I grew up knowing how important it is for a woman to have the right to choose what is best for HER.
Sad story yes.
Better question is, how in the hell did we get here?
It was very sad.
My mother died of cancer in 2001 and the following year said brother died of cancer as well. He thought only old people died, not young people like himself!
I have often wondered if some of the things she tried to abort may have had an effect of him en utero, thus the condition of him being deemed a "mental retard". 
She tried everything short of attempting to dislodge the fetus from her body herself, that is how badly she did not want another child.
To grow up knowing you were not wanted is a damned curse IMO.
I know what she would have said had he gone first and that would have been, "I never wanted that child. He ruined the family!".
After seeing what an unwanted pregnancy did to her it made me never want a child out of sheer fear if nothing else.
Sickening situation at best.
I’m too young for this kind of story, but I’m
Horror story. I'm so sorry for Martha and for you.
There was a word-of-mouth "backstreet" network of abortion providers in Tennessee back then. Hubs & I helped finance his cousin's from Memphis in '69. Anywhere there's a med school, you could find knowledgeable, cash-needy med students willing to assist with sterile instruments.
I'm just so, so sorry.
Such tragedies should never again happen, but they certainly will, thanks the Christofascist, American Taliban party.
