General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWho here was alive and very aware of the time just before and just after Roe?
Who knew women who suffered, or worse, before? How did you react when Roe passed?
Hopefully some will share stories from before or after?
Walleye
(31,045 posts)She told me about it. It was horrific. You dont forget these stories
msfiddlestix
(7,286 posts)future, should I choose not to.
PlanetBev
(4,104 posts)I knew young women who went over the border to Mexico. One abortion was done without anesthesia.
moondust
(20,006 posts)a mutual friend informed me that one of my former HS classmates had recently performed a "coat hanger procedure." Fortunately she recovered but I don't know if any lasting damage was done.
vlyons
(10,252 posts)I was in high school when birth control pills became available. Started having sex when I was in college and got birth control pills at the college med clinic. I lived in Texas and knew girls in college, who went to Mexico to get an abortion before Roe/Wade.
agingdem
(7,857 posts)I was 22 years old, 8 weeks pregnant and bleeding..my OB advised a termination but because abortion was illegal in Texas I had to find another way..my husband was a law student, working nights, and I worked two jobs so money was an issue, but we cashed in our two savings bonds, and I boarded a bus for New Mexico, suffered through a 12 hour ride, sitting on a towel, blood seeping through my pants...I was met at the bus terminal by a Planned Parenthood volunteer and was driven to a doctor's office...3 hours post-procedure, no anesthetic, I was back on the bus holding a bag of sanitary napkins...
In the years before Roe v Wade, I lost a close friend to a back-alley abortion..her uterus was perforated and she bled to death...when Roe v Wade was argued successfully, I cried tears of relief...never again would a woman have to die at the end of a coat hanger...
and now this...I worry, not for my 50 year old daughter, but for my granddaughter...we cannot go back...
musette_sf
(10,206 posts)and I waited to have sex until it was passed. I may have been the oldest virgin in Brooklyn. There was NO WAY that some pimply creep was going to coerce me into ending up being tortured in a pregnancy jail hellhole and having my issue trafficked to greedy barren vultures.
FuzzyRabbit
(1,969 posts)every day in the newspaper, on the 2nd or 3rd page, there was at least one story about a botched abortion. Usually it was a report of a young woman whose life was saved at a hospital emergency room.
Often it was a report of a young woman's bloody body found in a dumpster.
And occasionally a young woman would tell me about being sent by her parents to the home for unwed mothers, just off Sixth Avenue in Tacoma.
Sometimes a young woman just disappeared from high school or college, then reappeared several months later with no explanation.
I could tell a couple stories with good endings, starting in 1970 when Washington state legalized abortion.
Tickle
(2,540 posts)around. I can remember my mother going to New York to get an abortion
catbyte
(34,447 posts)Young women have no idea just how bad it's going to get.
BlueBloodedAmerican
(117 posts)next several years after that who didnt have to suit up and sat on the sidelines in PE class because they had just had abortions. This was in blood red western Kansas.
marybourg
(12,634 posts)apartment building that was like a village. I remember hearing about my friends mother, who had 3 daughters, going to Puerto Rico for an abortion, and I remember talk about women who had to go before a panel of ( male) doctors and (falsely) testify that they would commit suicide if forced to continue the pregnancy, thus qualifying - in liberal N.Y. - for the life of the mother exception.
Stinky The Clown
(67,818 posts). . . . . where we lived in southwestern Connecticut to New York where, at the time, abortion was legal. Coming from a place where coat hanger occasional had blood on them, we were so relieved the clinic was clean and well equipped. I don't recall if it was Planned Parenthood or not. I seem to recall it was not.