Welcome to Litsy!

It‘s refreshing to hear from the doctors who know what zero access to abortion healthcare looks like. We must have providers— and we must have them in every town, city, village, and rural area. Access for ALL is VITAL. There are horrific stories in this book. How could we ever think of going back?!

While antiabortion forces predictably use the Hayat case to declaim against all who provide abortion, the pro-choice analysis is that such cases are the tragic and inevitable result both of abortion provision having become so separate from mainstream medicine, and of the inaccessibility of reputable abortion services for poor women.

The most fundamental change needed within the medical community to deal with this problem is one that cannot be simply addressed at the”policy” level. Rather, I speak of a full-fledged attitudinal change. The majority of US physicians who consider themselves pro-choice must acknowledge the inadequacy of supporting abortion while allowing the abortion provider to remain marginalized—and often victimized—within medical circles.

It is also the case, ironically, that the restrictions—mandated waiting periods and especially parental notification regulations—may themselves ~result in~ later abortions, because of the impediments they pose to those seeking abortions.

Most womxn know what they want to do immediately. Why put extra nonsense on them, forcing them to wait longer, while accusing them of waiting too long?! 🤔🙄

Our generation has been trying to pass the torch to the next one to show that there has never been a time when the termination of pregnancy didn‘t take place. And there‘s no society where it doesn‘t take place. What one determines is the circumstances, how it takes place and whether it takes place in a medically safe and humane environment or is criminalized.

We had a woman come in here. Admittedly, she was very honest. She said, “I‘m a member of the River Prolife Council, but when it touches your own home, you have to forget the philosophy. You have to do what you have to do.” But she told me that she will still go out on the picket line.

Why do you go against yourself?!!!! Such hypocrisy!🙄

The combination of human frailty, imperfect contraceptive technology, and the workings of fate will always make some abortion inevitable.

Peoplx will always need abortion healthcare.

The men stink, forget about them, they are useless. I mean, they enjoy their little efforts and their problem is ended. They came and went, in essence, and it still a woman‘s problem. It ~shouldn‘t~ be a woman‘s problem but it ~is~ a woman‘s problem in today‘s society, and the women are going to have to stay tuned to what the antiabortionists are doing.

It comes down to who is the patient. Is the woman the patient, or is the fetus the patient? One or the other is the patient. I‘ve never heard a fetus talk to me. I‘ve heard thousands and thousands of women share their pain, their desperation, and their hopelessness…

The womxn is the patient!

In addition to the rage and fear antiabortion forces provoke, abortion providers feel betrayed by a medical community that has marginalized them, and abandoned by both political leaders and a law enforcement system that has—in providers‘ views—been unconsciously slow to acknowledge the seriousness of the violence of the antiabortion movement.

We were doing abortions that day when the news came over the radio. It was just an overwhelming feeling, I got tears in my eyes...at last it was all over, finally…never again the fear, the threats, the violence, the threat of going to prison, the constant harassment, fear of the woman not being able to get service. It was a new day. —David Bennett

I begin to feel that Orthodox Judaism was lacking in compassion – that all orthodox religions were lacking in compassion. I felt that one of the qualifications of a good physician, a good healthcare professional, was not just to know what the dosage of a pill was, or what shot to give, but to be compassionate, and to realize that this woman with the problem needs help and empathy.

Yes!!!

I didn‘t realize how desperate she was…I think the route I presented her was just too much to handle…I was probably her last hope. Well anyway, I found out later that she just went back to her college and jumped out of her dormitory window… I read about it in the newspaper.

Abortion healthcare is also mental health care!

Shortly thereafter he invited a television crew into his Montreal clinic and, with the patient‘s permission, he performed an abortion which was broadcast on a national television network. Morgentaler‘s motivation was to demonstrate to the Canadian public the safety of clinic-based abortions—and hence the inappropriateness of the 1969 Canadian Abortion Law which permitted only hospital-based abortions.

FUCK TRAP LAWS! 🖕🏻

What helped me make the decision was one terrible story about a woman, a mother of a three-year-old – I think she had broken up with her husband – and she asked her boyfriend to abort her. He used a bicycle pump, pumped air air into her uterus, and she died from an embolism on the spot. So this guy was brought to court and he was crying and said, ‘I didn‘t know, I was trying to help her, she wanted me to help.‘ 😔

Many doctors would go to countries in Africa and South America and subject themselves to the dangers of yellow fever, cholera. Some of them would even die, and they were taking enormous risks for humanity. Here in our own society, nobody was willing to take risks to help women with this kind of problem. It didn‘t make sense. And I researched it, and it seemed like it was religious prejudice.

IT IS.

There was the “rule of thirty”—you had to have six kids, living, by the time you were thirty, five by age thirty-five, four by age forty, or have had three C-sections, and you had to have the permission of your husband, or if you were separated, he had to have been gone seven years....

FUCK THAT. #womxndontneedpermission #womxnarenotincubatorswithlegs

I became aware that pregnancy for all women was not a joyful or a happy thing. That maybe they should be offered an alternative to pregnancy. Until then, I hadn‘t really thought about abortion.

The thought of pregnancy in my body literally makes me feel nauseous. It would be devastating and I absolutely would get an abortion.

It was quite a shock to me to go through the triumph of delivering babies and handing them back to mothers who clearly did not care about these babies and did not want them from the start. People who, when handed their babies, would turn their face to the wall where they already had four or five children, and a single room apartment in New York, in the middle of squalor, and they could not give the kind of care essential for a child to thrive.

She wanted to be sterilized after. The time came for the delivery...The surgeon was Catholic. I said, “This woman has nine children, she‘s blind, and she certainly shouldn‘t have anymore.” He said, “Well, there‘s no law against having children” and wouldn‘t do it.

Womxn don‘t need permission!!! 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🤬

It was the first time I had really come up against discrimination of the kind that was incomprehensible to me...The people on these committees were really at that time and at that place viewing women as reproductive machines.

They still do. And we are NOT.

It all depended on who you were. As long as you were the banker‘s daughter, the doctor‘s daughter, the golf buddy‘s daughter, it was always taken care of.

Womxn will always need abortion(s). But who will get them?

The first thing the doctor down there did was send them for an X-ray to see what was in their belly—to see if there were knitting needles, hooks, catheters up their belly...

Nothing will stop a desperate womxn. Nothing.

For many respondents, their increasing recognition of the immense pressures illegal abortions were putting on already burdened hospitals further illustrated the irrationality of abortion restrictions.

How about zero restrictions? 💙 How about just trusting womxn? 💙

We had a woman who somehow or other managed to get a catheter into her cervix and poured turpentine down there and literally cooked the lining of her uterus...It was like she got gasoline in there and lit it. We had to take her uterus out.

OMG. Abortion is vital healthcare! #keepabortionsafefundedandlegal

Other doctors reported seeing women in emergency rooms who had used not only the proverbial coat hanger, but also Lysol, broken Coke bottles, catheters, and a variety of other objects. “I have taken everything out of the human vagina that one can imagine ever fitting in there.”

Zero access is UGLY. #keepabortionsafefundedandlegal

They saw their colleagues on the one hand denounce “filthy abortionists,” yet at the same time constantly be on the search for reliable providers of illegal abortion to whom to send their patients or family members.

Anti-choicers are always such hypocrites! The reality is, is that all peoplx need access to abortion healthcare.

With birth control, as with abortion, social class was decisive in obtaining services: women with resources, such as an existing relationship with a private physician, had a better chance of obtaining these forbidden services.

Birth control is for ALL womxn! Access is vital for all!

It was not until 1937 (more than twenty years after Sanger and other birth control activists had raised the issue) that the AMA officially endorsed contraception as an element of “normal sexual hygiene in married life,” while reaffirming the principal that birth control services should remain under strict medical supervision.

Ummm, what?!!!🖕🏻

Abortion represents a threat to male authority and the “traditional role” of women; abortion is a symbol of uncontrolled female sexuality, and an “unnatural” act. Above all, the aborting woman is a selfish and self-indulgent.

Patriarchy has always feared a womxn in power; especially sexual power.

The drive to criminalize abortion, which started in mid-century and peaked by the early 1880s, when all the states had enacted antiabortion statutes, stemmed from a variety of motivations, including societal anxiety about the declining birth rates of Anglo-Saxon women in comparison to those of newly arriving immigrants.

⬆️This is one of the many ugly faces of white supremacy.

I am personally not concerned as to whether life begins with two-cell, four-cell, or eight-cell division but I ~am~ extremely concerned with the quality of life that will result from the division. We should be more concerned with the welfare of living teenagers and women than with the future of a few embryonic cells.

PREACH!

It was the combination of her patient‘s demands and the hypocrisy of her physician colleagues; the results of botched abortions she saw in the emergency rooms and the lack of compassion expressed by those on her hospital‘s therapeutic abortion committee; the different options available to rich and poor patients, and her observations in the developing world that led her to an intense period of thinking and studying about abortion.

I remember one abortion I did that caused a lot of discussion—a young woman who had two sons; she had breast cancer that had metastasized, her life expectancy was short. She got pregnant from a diaphragm failure. It was a matter of increasing her life expectancy to interrupt that pregnancy. I remember how heartless some of those people were when we were discussing that case.

Abortion IS necessary healthcare!