Speak-Out testimony underlines need for abortion rights defense

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We devote this page to excerpts from the Speak-Out in Defense of Women's Right to Choose held in San Francisco at the Women's Building on Nov. 21, 1987. The testimony presented below came from women who had gotten illegal abortions prior to the historic Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973. Some of the women were The meeting was co-sponsored by the Northern California Pro-Choice Coalition and the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW). Organizers had announced that the meeting was intended to educate young people in light of the increasing attacks on the right to abortion by all branches of government, and a virulent even terrorist anti-abortion right wing. This meeting was an important step in the ongoing effort to organize women The Northern California Pro-Choice Coalition will sponsor a picketline on the 15th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision, Jan. 22, 1988, from 12 noon to 1:30 p.m. at the new California State Building at Van Ness and MacAllister in San Francisco.

order to make sure we do back to the dark ages."

SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1988 speaking out publicly for the first time.

to fight back to defend this vital right.

No.1:

When I found out I was pregnant I was standing in a phone booth near a subway stop in Boston. I had one finger in my ear to block out the noise of cars screeching by as I listened to the woman on the other end of the phone as she recited my options.

I could obtain a legal abortion with my parents' approval. Without their approval, I could seek consent from a judge who somehow had the authority to determine whether or not I was responsible enough to have an abortion. The wait to see the judge was at least one month, at which time it would be too late for a safe, legal, firsttrimester abortion. Furthermore, if I was refused by the judge, I couldn't appeal to another judge in another precinct.

I left the phone booth and stood at a street corner, not able to cross the street, not able to move, trying to digest the fact that not only was I pregnant but that all angles were against me. I was frightened and alone. I had no choice but to give birth to an unwanted, unplanned child or undergo the horror of an unsanctioned abortion.

There are many of us young women here in America who are being denied this basic right to take control of our lives and our bodies. I know now that we cannot expect the government to make laws to protect us. As women, we have to fight for our rights. And as women, we will.

Speaker No.2:

It is generally believed that before 1973 at least 1 million women a year had illegal abortions. It has been said that between 5000 and 10,000 have died from the effects of improperly performed abortions. The choice of abortion as a back-up to birth control that fails has been legally ours since 1973.

I will relate my story, a painful pan remembrance of long ago, with the hope that it will help in understanding where we have been as women-and where we resolve never to retur.

About 30 years ago, I was a working mother in San Francisco with three children, a home with two mortgages on it and an unplanned, unwelcome pregnancy. Fortunately, I had a very supportive husband. So we began to look around for a solution. We were told that we would have to go to Los Angeles or Tijuana-there since legalization was nothing in San Francisco.

We both took time off from work, found someone to look after our household, and drove to Los Angeles. A friend offered to help and we spent a couple of days visiting friendly doctors. They would smile weakly, indicating their sympathy with my predicament, all in deathly fear of losing their license to practice.

Some wrote names and addresses on slips of paper and pushed them across their desks to me. We drove all over Los Angeles. The addresses were either non-existent or doors would be slammed in my face when I asked for help.

Finally, another friend, a nurse, provided a "lead," a Dr. Green, an optometrist who had an office in downtown Los Angeles. I went to see Dr. Green and begged him to help me. He hesitated for a moment and 204101000 Tina Beacock/Socialist Action then said, "I don't do it very often, but my wife likes fur coats, so if you can bring me $500 in cash this evening after 5:30, I will take care of you."

We managed to borrow the money. It was an enormous amount of money in those days and I went back that evening to Dr. Green. He apologized for the primitive facilities, a back room with an examining table. He gave me a shot of something and performed the abortion.

Dr. Green told me that he usually asks his "girls" to come back the next day just to make sure they are doing well, but since I had to go back to San Francisco to get back to my job, he gave me some pills and hoped I would be OK.

I was fortunate. I recovered from the back-room surgery and we worked and paid back the $500. I don't know if we ever completely recovered from the recollection of fear, indignity, and damages to our selfworth.

The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), of which I am a founding member, made reproductive choice part of its program. Economic equality cannot be achieved without full reproductive rights. Women who are members of labor unions should join with CLUW and help to secure our rights.

The National Organization for Women (NOW) is also dedicated to the fight for our rights. Ever since legalization we have met, marched, demonstrated in order to make sure that we do not go back to the dark ages. We must never return...

Adrienne Rich, in her book "Of Woman Born," states: "We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bring forth not only children (if and as we choose) but the visions, and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence—a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy, will develop new meaning thinking itself will be transformed." This is our beginning.

Speaker No.3:

It's important to know what happens when abortion is illegal. I was 18. I couldn't tell my parents because they'd disown me. The man who got me pregnant had left town. So I went to my best friend, whose mother had an abortion years before, and she referred me to the doctor who performed her abortion. I then went to my brother, who agreed to pay for it and he went with me through the whole ordeal.

We went to a doctor in Chicago who examined me on a couch. In half a minute, he decided I was "probably having twins" and promptly upped the price to $750. He then referred my brother and me to another doctor. He made the appointment for a week later and then made reservations for a motel room where it would all take place.

In the morning a man came, supposedly a doctor, carrying a small bag. My brother came to the room and gave him the envelope with the $750 in it and said he and my friend's mother were going downstairs to wait.

Meanwhile the doctor started setting up the room. First he turned the TV on, kind of loud, to cover up any noise I'd make. Then he took two chairs and put them at the end of the bed and a wastebasket with a plastic bag in between the chairs—a makeshift operating room. He then told me to take off my clothes, that he'd have to examine me.

He examined me alright, with his fingers in my vagina for what seemed like a very long time. Then he told me my cervix was too small and since we weren't in a doctor's office, he didn't have the tools he needed to perform the abortion. He said he'd have to insert seminal fluid in order to allow the enzymes to open up my cervix so he could perform the abortion.

I said "OK" and he started taking his clothes off. Then I understood what he meant and started crying and begging him not to do this to me. But he got on top of me and started kissing me and acted as if he was making love to me.

He raped me. But I felt like there was nothing I could do. I had to get the abortion done and was so scared he would do something else to me if I fought him. I felt I had no choice.

Then he put his clothes back on and told me to get on the end of the bed and put my legs over the chairs. He gave me an anesthetic and did the abortion-all as if nothing had happened. When he finished, he kissed me on my forehead and said, "I meet the nicest people this way," and left Speaker No.4:

When I came to my hospital bed there was a woman across from me with three policemen around her bed. She was crying in pain and they were telling her she wasn't going to get any treatment until she told them who the abortionist was. These are the sort of things that I and many women have gone through. We were young and poor and didn't have the money to buy what we needed.

I think that the only way that we can guarantee our rights is by ourselves. We have to get out in the streets once again and begin marching and demonstrating so that no politician, Democrat or Republican, can sell us down the river again.

And unless we can do that, next year they'll probably pass a foot-binding law and we'll be lining up to get our feet bound. When you're so scared, so pained, so disgusted, you are ready to do anything, including take your own life in your hands, including going into some empty motel room or onto some empty table and allow some pharmacist to mess you over.

So I hope you all get involved because the life you save is going to be your own.

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