Does the right to have an abortion really matter much? Some might not think so, imagining that now that it exists it's safe or, even worse, that it's ultimately irrelevant whether abortion is legal or not. These positions seem to be based upon complete ignorance of what life was like for women before they could obtain safe, legal abortions.

The Association of Reproductive Health Professionals has published the stories of Drs. Elizabeth Connell and Louise Tyrer about what women had to go through during the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s.

“It’s hard to conceptualize what it was like before Roe v. Wade unless you were actually there,” Connell says, barely containing her anger. “In the large hospitals, ward after ward was filled with women suffering and dying from botched abortions. In some hospitals, it was the job of the first-year resident to sleep all day, because he would be up all night scraping out the remains of illegal abortions, giving blood to the women who were bleeding, trying desperately to keep them out of shock and treating their infections. This was the norm until we got Roe v. Wade and the New York law that preceded it. I’m very much afraid that the way things are going now, we could go right back to that again.”

One woman made a particular impression. “She was not able to get a sterilization procedure done by anyone,” Connell remembers. “She never wanted to have children, and she’d had several abortions. There wasn’t a doctor in New York City she could find who would do a tubal ligation, which is what she wanted, because she was young and had no children. She happened to be a lab technician, so she took cultures home, looked in a mirror and found her cervix and squirted these cultures of live organisms up through her cervix trying to block off her uterus and tubes with scar tissue. This just goes to show how desperate women were during those times. They resorted to very desperate means to control their fertility. She nearly died. She finally pulled through but not without some very hair-raising moments.”

“It’s very frightening and shocking to think that we could go back to those days of botched abortions and women dying from abortion hemorrhage and infection. I believe those days could return,” says Tyrer. “We can’t just sit by idly and say, ‘We won those battles a long time ago, we don’t have to think or worry about that.’ We do. We have to do something about it, much more than we did the first time around. Those who are opposed to abortion rights and various methods of contraception have cleverly reframed the issues so that many of people don’t realize what rights they would really lose.”

“One woman came in already in shock, she was hemorrhaging so much. The first thing we did was to give her blood to rebuild her strength so she could go through the surgical procedure to remove leftover tissue from the partial abortion. Despite getting a transfusion, she continued to bleed,” says Tyrer, who then discovered that the abortionist had torn the cervix and the uterine artery. Tyrer had to cut through the abdomen and tie off the uterine artery to stop the bleeding. The woman survived the botched abortion, but two days later she came down with gangrene, “obviously through the use of unclean instruments during the abortion. We couldn’t give her penicillin, because it had all gone to war. We gave her a sulfa drug, but it didn’t work. We put her in the private room reserved for women who were dying.” An autopsy revealed she had gangrene extensively throughout her body.

Anti-choice activists will tend to either deny that there was much bad going on before abortion became legal or insist that all the horror stories could be avoided if women simply refused to have sex until marriage. Neither response is valid and both engage in active, unconscionable denial of the reality of women's lives. It's as if they don't really care what happens to women, just so long as they limit their sexual behavior and have as many babies as God sends them.

Read More:

• Religious Right
• Religious Right News
• Christian Extremism