Women Tell Stories of Terrifying Illegal Abortions
Before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal across all of the United States, women had two choices if they became pregnant: give birth, or seek an illegal procedure that wasn't guaranteed to be safe or to work. With help from the 1 in 3 Campaign - a movement to destigmatize abortion that gets its name from the statistic that 1 in 3 women will have abortion in her lifetime - the Scene filmed women telling stories of their own terrifying, pre-Roe abortions.
Each woman's story is different, but the common thread that runs among them is fear - fear of being pregnant, fear of staying pregnant, fear of dying, and fear that someone would find out about the abortion.
"[The abortionist] said, 'I'm not going to give you any anesthetic,' and he said, 'If you scream, they will hear you,'" Connie, who had an abortion in 1953 when she was 16, said. She described being wide awake while the procedure was taking place and feeling like the man was "scooping me out like a piece of fruit."
"The pain was so outrageous that I do remember leaving my body," Connie added. "I didn't scream, but it was the feeling that I was up out of my body, looking down on it."
Jane had an equally harrowing experience. She first had difficulty finding someone to perform the procedure - she said she felt she had to threaten suicide to get one at the hospital, but still, physicians denied her. She sought an illegal abortionist instead.
"I had been a very bad abortion, the doctor had actually left in tissue that had - I guess putrified may be the right word - and had caused massive infection in this whole area of my body," Jane said. "I was in the hospital for two weeks, the doctor said basically I was seven hours away from death."
The doctors cared for Jane, though resulting scar tissue from her infection made her unable to get pregnant again, and then called the police. Even though her abortionist had nearly killed her, she said she refused to give police his name. "I believed in abortion and I didn't want to see this doctor arrested," she said. "He was doing me a favor."
Another woman from the video, identified as Dr. Samuels, hadn't had an abortion herself, but had a brief medical internship in Brooklyn before New York became the first state to legalize abortion in 1970. In what she described as a "short period of time in one little hospital," she watched women die from complications of illegal abortions.
"Someone gave her a hanger abortion, perforated her uterus and her bowel, and by the time she came to the hospital, she was in septic shock, and she died," Dr. Samuels said.
At the end of the video, each of the women brings their own experience from decades ago up to the current day - emphasizing how important legal abortion is to them and how making abortion illegal will never keep women from seeking the procedure.
"If abortion doesn't continue to be legal, women will lose their lives," Jane said. "Women will have abortions. Women were having abortions when they were illegal and women died. I almost died."
You can watch the full video below, or over on the Scene.
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