The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

People sometimes ask what  a coathanger has to do with reproductive justice. As a former history teacher, it only reinforces what I believe to be the great failure of my former profession. Despite our best efforts, and god knows a lot  of us worked at it pretty diligently, Americans really don't know much about their own history.

So I'll go over it more time and yes this will be on the test.....the test to see if peoples' bodies belong to them or the State.

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You see, before Roe v. Wade desperate women would sometimes abort the fetus themselves by using a variety of sharp instruments best left in a museum of torture devices.

If you want details, look here. The results were painful, often injurious and sometimes fatal.

Abortion was a badge of shame and denial, a sort of invisible scarlet
letter impressed upon peoples' minds so that they would think
themselves evil and dirty to even consider it as an option.

If you had the money, the connections and were lucky, you could get a reasonably safe illegal abortion performed by a competent medical person. A lot of people were not so fortunate and people died from back alley abortions in alarming numbers.

Finally some courageous New York women stood up in public at "Abortion Speakouts" and told the world that yes, they had gone and obtained  abortions to terminate their pregnancies. Breaking that silence was a huge step toward legalization.

As the reproductive justice movement picked up steam, the coat hanger was chosen as the popular symbol of the stark choices facing women who wanted to control their own bodies.

As part of my volunteer work at the Washington Free Clinic in 1970, I helped young women obtain safe abortions. D.C.'s abortion laws had been tossed into a strange legal limbo by court action, so what we were doing was possibly even legal. Frankly we didn't care. We had a job to do and we did it. Nobody who came to our clinic was going to die in a back alley abortion.

There were a lot of people in the abortion underground who worked secretly to get people safe abortions whatever the legal and financial odds. The most famous was the Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation better known as Jane.

One of the former "Janes"  once told me the stark difference between then and now. In the old days, she said, they could have gone to jail for what they did. Today they could get shot or blown up by a terrorist.

Roe v.Wade was a big step in the right direction, but the road to reproductive justice is a long and confusing one. We're still finding our way.

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