Abortion Then and Now

Christmas,1969, I was 19 working at Sears, Ala Moana in Hawaii. The only other woman under 30 working in the lamp department and I became friends.  She shared her sex life with

me, none of my peers had ever done this so vividly.  I had been contemplating becoming sexually active and how could I not, the sexual revolution went on all around me. My friend at Sears talked about a doctor who would prescribe birth control pills to single women and she told me to take note. 

 

Months later I decided to take the plunge.  I lived on the North Shore Oahu, with my roommate Karen. My cousin Lea was crashing with us.  Lea sat in the living room as I walked out the morning afterwards, she looked at me as if asking, “how was it.”  She reminds me even today that I panicked not that I did, “it” but because I could get pregnant.  When the man left Lea and Karen assured me you can’t get pregnant the first time you have sex.  They being experts with years of experience, I thought this good advice.

That day I decided I needed to get some protection.  Instead of going to the doctor my coworker told me about I went to Planned Parenthood, they had a sliding fee scale and I lived hand to mouth those days.  A couple of days later I left Planned Parenthood with two months’ supply of “The Pill” with directions to start the first day of my next period. That period never came.

Hawaii was one the first states to legalize abortion. I first went to a military doctor, I was 19, the legal age in Hawaii but was still considered a dependent by the military because I currently attended Leeward Community College.  The military doctor told me that the military didn’t do abortions but could give me what he called a voucher to get services from a civilian doc.  It was now that I called the doctor my coworker had told me about.  Dr. Chan was forward thinking.   Mom never talked to me about sex, birth control or anything about women’s health issues.  Now I was in the middle of a reproductive crisis.

Luckily for me in 60’s and 70’s women’s reproductive health landscape started opening up with more options for both single and married women, I took full advantage of this.  Even today I consider myself lucky to have come of age during this time when 30 states went from having laws prohibiting or restricting the sales and advertisement of birth control to Planned Parenthood winning a US Supreme Court case making it legal for married couples to buy contraception.  The landscape continued to expand in the years that followed.  At the end of the 60’s even though married women had won the right to buy birth control single women still needed the secret network passing around names of doctors that would illegally give out birth control to unmarried women which I had become a part of.  Social attitudes changed faster than laws in those days.

Today the vast landscape of women’s reproductive health shrinks from the gains of the 60’s and 70’s marking a new era of open season in using women's bodies in the war of public policy.  Women’s bodies have been laid out in the public realm where people, mostly men, talk openly about women’s sex lives, women’s bodies and reproductive standards.  Starting during his 2016 presidential campaign Trump abused women publicly, women’s reproductive health became a prime target and overturning Roe v Wade became a major campaign promise.  Steven Bannon, chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign, allowed the posting of an article on the Breitbart News website entitled “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.” Trump also added his own brand of talking about women’s intimate parts when the Access Hollywood tape aired publicly capturing Trump saying, “You can do anything, Grab 'em by the pussy.”  During this time Trump paid off two women, who claimed they had sexual relations with him, keeping them silent during his presidential campaign.

Once Trump became president one of his first executive orders overturned President Obama’s directive of birth control for all impacting an estimated 62 million women.  He reinstated the “Gag Rule,” setup by President Bush with even more restrictions.  Trump’s “Gag Rule,” prohibits women on any federally funded healthcare program from going to Planned Parenthood and prohibits any health care provider receiving funds for giving a referral for a safe and legal abortion.  Trump didn’t stop there he legalized policies allowing religious employers to refuse birth control in their healthcare packages to their employees as a religious right.  Trump appointed federal judges recommended by pro-life groups to establishing a long lasting legal and social climate against access to safe and legal abortion he’s completing his agenda with Supreme Court nominees.

Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Judge Kavanaugh sealed the deal on restricting women’s access to reproductive health.  Even with the limited documents released about Judge Kavanaugh we knew he participated in delaying an abortion for an undocumented woman in custody a tactic anti-abortion activist use to limit abortions.  Judge Kavanaugh also submitted a decision supporting the Priest for Life, a pro-life employer, giving way to religious freedom while sacrificing a women’s right to birth control.  The timeline of women’s health care is tied to US Supreme Court decisions and Trump and his supporters know this. Judge Kavanaugh as a supreme court justice will totally wipeout any gains women have made in the past. Access to reproductive health may even go back as far as 1821.  This will affect every woman's life, so women take note and be prepared for impacts to your family, career, and economic well being and men this will affect you too.

Women know that reproductive decisions impact their whole life more than it impacts the father who is an equal participant in producing children yet society supports men in thinking they are just bystanders in reproduction and raising children.  There is little known about male birth control and only 34% of absent fathers are court ordered to pay child support, 72% of those don’t pay a dime, that’s a total of 9 out of 100 absent fathers pay child support.  We don’t hear men’s stories in this conversation.  We have created a society where men are not held to equal responsibility, nor equal joy in raising their children.  Where is the justice in this, who suffers, and who’s responsible?

Women’s Liberation health movement story of the 70’s also gets lost in this conversation.  During this grassroots health movement women took over the narrative on reproductive healthcare talking about women’s bodies, sex lives, and attitudes on reproductive health openly and respectfully like never before.  Starting with my conversations with my co-worker in 1969 I participated in this story which led me to joining a self-help women’s health consciousness raising group when I lived in New York City in 1971.  My first self-help exam is still vivid to me today.  We talked about all things of women’s reproductive health sharing our common experience, our common birth control history which by this time was extensive because of the challenges single women came up against.

It wasn’t until 1972 that the Supreme Court in Baird v. Eisenstadt legalized birth control in all states, irrespective of marital status. A year before this decision I looked around for a birth control provided in NYC and ended up going to a clinic I saw in an ad that offered an IUD birth control program including insert and unlimited follow up visits for as long as I had the IUD for $30.  At the time of my first self-help exam I had gone for at least two follow-up visits complaining about pain and other symptoms that should had been followed up on and weren’t.  My inners did not look well compared to others in the group and I needed to find help.

Within a week of my self-exam I started going to a woman doctor women in the group referred me to. The doctor went through a litany of medications to no avail.  A year later still not cured I took off bicycling to Seattle and my symptoms continued.  In Wawa, Ontario hundreds of miles later a male doctor actual took a sample to see what bacteria had caused the infection to prescribe an antibiotic that would work.  Days later and 180 miles of bicycling I called the doctor for the results, he called a local pharmacy setting me up for yet another potential cure.  Arriving in Seattle three months after leaving NYC the infection persisted.  Hope of a cure faded as I set up my new home in Seattle. 

Seattle’s political community turned out to be as progressive as New York City’s.  Within months I started meeting with a newly formed group of women to establish a women’s clinic, our goals included training women as para medical providers under a doctors’ oversight. In the true fashion of the Women’s Liberation Second Wave the clinic group operated as a collective where all of us participating equally, one vote, one person.  As part of the clinic we participated in a citywide women’s reproductive health network with all four women’s clinics run by women activist. I represented Fremont Women’s Clinic at those meetings.  We set agendas establishing a city wide standard for women’s reproductive health care in Seattle from access to birth control, abortion and founding a midwife program for home births.  We networked with medical establishments to provide low cost women’s healthcare for medical procedures we didn’t or couldn’t do in our clinics.

We did pelvic exams on each other as part of our training.  We invited medical professionals to hold educational sessions covering topics such as simple lab work we could do in clinic, how to do a pap smear, breast exam, what a healthy cervix looks like.  We learned a lot doing pelvic exams on each other talking about our birth control history and female medical problems we experienced.  Talking about our treatment at the hands of the medical establishment gave us reasons as to why setting up a women’s clinic was important in 1972. 

During the beginning of the clinic several Supreme Court decisions opened up the landscape of women’s reproductive health care starting with the 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird case that established the right of unmarried women to obtain contraceptives followed in 1973 by Roe v. Wade that characterized women’s right to privacy when making decisions on ending her pregnancy as a fundamental right to Bellotti v. Baird giving adolescent women the right to make reproductive decisions on their own.  These decisions fueled the women’s health care movement of the day, a movement that opened independent clinics in Boston, NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle.

Take note women the gains made in the sixties and seventies are gone thanks to Judge Kavanaugh and the US Supreme Court.  The latest political policy put women’s reproductive narrative back solidly in men’s court and the narrative returns to demeaning language by ridiculing women on topics including birth control, the #MeToo movement, immigrant women who have had their children taken away from them, to openly harassing women sexually in tweets.  These images dominated by President Trump during his presidency fueled a new age where men can now openly degrade and abuse women.  The conservative movement has turned a blind eye from the people in turn Trump’s delivered the kind of control the Republican Party has been working towards for decades.

We working are way back into history starting with 1821 when Connecticut became the first state to outlaw abortion after “quickening,” onto 1860 when twenty states limited abortions.  Are we going to see reproductive information become illegal as the historical 1873 Comstock Act, supported by the American Medical Association, which banned disseminating abortion and contraceptive information by mail?  Is this similar to Bush and Trump’s “gag rule.”  Working so hard expanding the possibilities for women’s reproductive health it breaks my heart to see this backward motion.  This is not the age to be a young woman who is just starting to discover her sexuality.

In the 80’s we started living through a climate of pro-life groups busting into women’s reproductive health establishments or blocking abortion clinics bringing brings to mind the first birth control clinic established in 1916 by Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrn.  After nine days of operation the police raided the clinic, shutting it down and charging both women with crimes related to sharing birth control and abortion information.  In recent years Texas has adopted several laws resulting in Planned Parenthood clinics closing all over the state.  This wasn’t done with propaganda outlawing abortions but by instituting some of the toughest restrictions in the country on abortion clinics.  This is how it’s done in the 21st century and is quite effective resulting in Texas going from 44 abortion clinics to only six that survived these new restrictions.

Laws over the decades have eroded not only abortion rights but also access to women’s reproductive health. Laws like the ones passed in Texas over the years have closed many Planned Parenthood clinics impact access to birth control not just abortions and the first clinics closed have been in the poorest areas of the State. In 1960 after the FDA approved the sale of birth control pills, 25% of married women in the US under 45 took the pill not counting unmarried women.  Today reports state 98% of reproductive age women have used birth control at some point in their life. Trumps was the finale in this anti women’s movement that has impacted access to reproductive health for 62 million women.