And no, I’m not going to scare you with horror stories of botched back-alley abortions. Nor the “Million Dollar Abortion Ring” that sent ripples of tragedy through the corrupted Chicago medical and legal communities. Been there, done that.
Rather, I’m here to reassure. To remind you that just as Roe v. Wade did not introduce legal abortion, so its overturning, should that happen, will not slam the door completely.
The 1973 Roe decision was not the start of legal abortion in the United States. In 1971, there were 500,000 illegal abortions, true, but also 500,000 legal abortions in the 31 states where the procedure was allowed to preserve “life and health” of the mother. Four states — New York, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska — offered abortion just because a pregnant woman wanted it, as if she were in control of her own body.
“Health” is a rather general term, vague enough for many doctors to perform abortions. Even in Illinois, where our dusty 1872 law allowed abortion “only if necessary for the preservation of the woman’s life.”
What a circus that was. Spend a few minutes ruffling newspapers from 1972 and you encounter situations like that of the 15-year-old referred to by one headline writer as “Suicide Girl.” Committed to the Audy Home by her mother, who could not afford the psychiatric care she needed, the teen ran away, got pregnant, then vowed she would kill herself if forced to have the baby.
She was again a ward of Illinois, which refused to let her go to one of the several Chicago hospitals that volunteered to do an abortion. It all wound up in court and in the news.
“I have performed abortions in similar cases at Michael Reese,” said Dr. Alex Tulsky, a gynecologist there. “This is done every day, if not at Michael Reese, then at other major Chicago hospitals.”
He observed that whether a medical condition resulted in the girl’s death, or a psychiatric one, “she’s equally dead either way.”
Still leeway enough to give rise to “therapeutic abortion.”
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