Response to Roe V. Wade Podcast
Digg This![A Note from Podcast Coordinator: Not long ago we posted a podcast regarding the anniversary of Roe V. Wade. Our own Sue Kettner posted a comment that I found to be so insightful I would like it to be a post on its own. So we are elevating it to the front page.]
My thoughts after listening to the interview with American Life League’s Judy Brown and Cathy Thompson from the Religious Coalition For Reproductive Choice: I believe there were some points forgotten or missed and felt compelled to respond with my recollections about abortion.
I was just three months old on the day of the Pearl Harbor Attack…December 7, 1941. I was 4 years old the year the US dropped Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I reference these dates so a reader will know the decade I was born into and some sense of where the US was during that decade.
I first heard the word abortion on a newsreel in the movie theater at about age 5 or 6. Movies were cheap entertainment and my parents took the whole family at least twice a week. We saw reports of the war and shots of Roosevelt and Churchill and later Truman during those news reels. The news reels also reported on organized crime and how various well known organized crime bosses were being charged with providing abortions. Now, what I (at 5 and 6 and 7 years of age) thought was that abortion was a terrible thing that organized crime people were doing to vulnerable women in America. The crime figures were usually charged with providing abortion and tax evasion. As a child, I didn’t understand what tax evasion had to do with it.
After the war ended and there were less newsworthy events linked to organized crime, I didn’t see or hear the word abortion again until I was nearly an adult. In high school, sometimes when a girl got pregnant, her boyfriend wanted her to “get rid of it.” Usually no one knew what that meant or how that was possible so she continued to be pregnant. Many times girls went away. An enlightening book about the era is “The Girls Who Went Away, The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V Wade” by Ann Fessler.
One point not clear in the interviews was when contraception became available. Contraception wasn’t new in the 1960’s.
My mother used a diaphragm and breastfeeding to achieve the birth spacing in our family. My father was familiar with condoms…which he called “safes” – a word used during the war I’ve learned.
Did they have access to birth control? Yes. My father knew the store to go to in our township to purchase “safes” which were behind the counter and not openly discussed. My mother was able to get contraceptive care through her physician, most likely because she was married. The thing that happened in the early 1960s was that birth control pills were developed and sold. They were easy to use and extremely effective. The speakers were right…now the American woman could effectively control her fertility. I took some of those early birth control pills for 5 months in 1962. I took Enovid E and it cost $1.69 in the drug store. After using those birth control pills, I went on to have healthy pregnancies and healthy babies. When my family size was complete, I used birth control pills again. Countless women in my generation used birth control pills and most of them worked outside the home eventually.
Another element:
The American woman moved into the workforce outside of her home out of necessity during World War II. She went back to being a woman focused solely on the work of her family after the war. However, women had learned from that war experience that they could do the work in the factory and in the office and they were good at it. They also filled many important roles in the medical community and had done so for decades. Financial necessity and personal interest sent women back into the workforce armed with a tool that would help them postpone pregnancy, achieve birth spacing and limit the size of their families. Fewer children in a family and Mom’s income helped the family maintain their health and raise and care for their children.
I was already working outside the home by the time Roe v Wade happened in 1973. I came to work at a family planning provider in 1975. Some states had abortion available at that time. Sometimes women needed to travel outside of Wisconsin to obtain an abortion. Within a few years, first-trimester abortion became available in Wisconsin. Women from most parts of the state still had to travel to Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay or Appleton. They needed a checkup 3 to 4 weeks after the procedure. By 1978 our family planning agency was providing on-site clinics and women came to the local family planning provider for their checkup rather than going out of town again. The confidentiality provided by the family planning clinic was essential to women and their families.
The statewide family planning providers in Wisconsin have prevented thousands and thousands of abortions by providing accessible, affordable, effective contraceptive methods. Today, those family planning providers have another tool to help prevent the unintended pregnancy. That is Emergency Contraception (EC). If taken as soon as possible after any unprotected sexual contact, EC can prevent pregnancy quite effectively. …Sue Kettner Family Planning Health Services
