It was 1970 and I was 16, a senior in high school, who was also volunteering as a surgical orderly whilst starting medical illustration training.
She came in, her gurney bursting through the emergency door that connected the ER to the OR suites at the old county hospital in South Tucson, and straight to No. 1 Unit for emergency surgery. A heavy, vile odor came in too, of a septic, gangrenous wound, revealed as a large, gaping incision in her abdomen – over the uterus. It was the result of a botched “back-alley” abortion. Her vital signs were dropping, all the chemistry was bad, and there was damn-all NOTHING any of us could do for her. Her hand came out from under the sheet near me, reaching for something, and a nurse motioned to me to take and hold it. And so I did.
I saw this too many times in the dark days before Roe v. Wade, and before that, I was the typical young male who opposed abortion, but ignorant of what it is to be a woman, as well as knowing very little about women. But seeing that happen, and why it happened, and the subsequent hellish autopsies so many times was what quickly turned me into the uncompromising pro-choicer and women’s-rights advocate that I am today.
Now here we are, 45 years later, still arguing about women’s most basic bodily autonomy rights. How many of us realize that our vaunted federal Constitution still doesn’t provide equal rights for women? In the United States, boys, men, and even cadavers have more bodily-autonomy rights than women. Hence, the crying need for the Equal Rights Amendment, which does not confer extra rights for women, but places women’s rights as equal to men’s in this country.
Abortion opponents won’t accept the basic precept of “choice”: a woman has her choice to either choose or decline abortion, without hindrance, and with full support by all for her personal, private decision. She is neither to be forced into abortion, nor into keeping the pregnancy. As the law stands now, abortion is permitted until viability of the fetus, and this is why nearly all abortions are done well within the first trimester, nearly all via medication. Abortion is a medical procedure – nothing more, nothing less – and no other aspect of health care is so incredibly, intrusively regulated. This is definitely discriminatory, so ERA ratification would certainly strengthen Roe.
Opponents invoke fatuous, disproved “reasons” against abortion rights, such as:
– “It’s not your body.” If the woman’s body isn’t her own, then whose body is it, then? Of course it’s her body alone, and she decides as to its use: It’s called bodily autonomy.
– “Adoption.” They invoke this one in the face of the many hundreds of thousands of born children in the United States alone, either still awaiting adoption (they’re not white enough, for one thing), or, snared in the foster-care system and dumped out on turning 18. Women do not carry pregnancies for the pleasure of the infertile – that’s gestational slavery, and women are not “Handmaid” brood-mares.
– “It’s murder.” By this “rationale,” removing cancerous tumors is “murder,” too. If abortion is “against God,” then, isn’t that same God responsible for all that “murder” by natural, spontaneous abortion – almost two-thirds of all conceptions?
– “Late-term abortions.” Late-term abortions are performed at only four hospitals in the United States, always involve desired pregnancies, and they are done only as last-resort, in extremis cases when the only alternative is the death of the woman. The opponents flaunt their vicious fakery by using photos of late-term miscarriages and the like, without permission, taking crass advantage of families’ grief over losing a desired pregnancy.
– “Abortion causes cancer and depression.” False. The former is based on one seriously flawed “study” conducted in a breast cancer treatment clinic – so everyone in there already had cancer. Does that mean, then, that since someone there had an abortion it obviously “caused her cancer”? And tell the latter to the 95 percent-plus of all women who had an abortion – who express relief, not “depression.”
Banning abortion rights will not stop women from obtaining them, any more than the law stopped abortion before 1973 – as I learned then. Desperate women will turn to desperate means, no matter the prohibitions. And back then, those laws certainly didn’t stop the wealthy from flying their wives and daughters out of the country to obtain safe abortions – all whilst mouthing their opposition to abortion. And how many times have we read in the news of some rabidly no-choice male evangelical or “conservative” politician themselves resorting to abortion to “hide the evidence”?
Abortion opponents always have the “no” but have nothing to back it up, or any alternative than what they’re really doing: They argue only from their own fragile egos, aiming to dictate their will, strictures and hang-ups on the rest of us.
And, do abortion opponents know that they have the Devil himself on their side? Gloria Steinem pointed out that “Hitler himself, and the Nazi doctrine he created, were unequivocally opposed to any individual right to abortion.” That is, for any German or “Aryan” woman under his jackboot. On seizing power, he decreed for women the old status of “Kirche, Küche, Kinder” (“Church, Kitchen, Children”), and banned them from public office. The Nazis initially forced abortion and sterilization on those groups whom they deemed “undesirable,” but by 1940 they had abandoned that – for much quicker means. And providing an abortion was a capital crime in the Third Reich. They openly promoted gestational slavery, showcased in their brutal SS-run Lebensborn forced-breeding programme. Why invoke them as mentors?
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, the unsafe abortion won’t be just coat-hangers in back alleys – add to that the unregulated pills from “ghost” pharmacy websites. She will never know WHAT ingredients are in those pills.
I took and held her hand in that OR that day – maybe, through the spiraling darkness and unquenchable pain, she might perceive that there was at least one friend. I heard her moaning cease as I watched her die. And I slowly released her hand. Again and again, I watched women die from botched abortions. Roe v. Wade did not end abortions: It stopped women from dying from unsafe abortions.
(R.P. Hale is an artist-scientist and advocate who lives in Concord.)