Warning: This post contains a graphic description of an unsafe abortion in the years before Roe v. Wade. 

When I was a young woman in 1964, my friend became pregnant. Her parents, had they known, would have disowned her which meant in those days that she’d be thrown out of the house with nowhere to go, and no means to support herself. The young father of her baby was nowhere to be seen. She opted to terminate the pregnancy without her parents’ knowledge.

No birth control was available except for condoms which most men felt were beneath them. She went to a woman known to perform these terminations who took her into a back bedroom that was filthy. She used an elongated coat hanger and pushed it as far as it would go and then began to scrape each side of her insides left right up and down for what she said seemed like an hour. When she was done, there was blood everywhere. She was to meet me at a local area hang out. When she got there, she was pale and weak. She went to the bathroom and was in there for some 20 minutes when I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I got the owner to unlock the door and she was slumped over sitting on the toilet full of blood. She was pale as a ghost with no color in her lips at all. I thought she was dead.

She was rushed to the hospital, and what she was trying to avoid became a necessity. Her parents were informed, and they did what she assumed they would do, they disowned her. She was released from the hospital and committed suicide by slicing her wrists in the bathroom of the hospital. I often thought about what might have happened if she had been forced to raise an unwanted child with no means while being a mentally unstable person, and the fate of that child. I later became a registered nurse and have always been an advocate for women’s reproductive rights, and especially the safe termination of an unwanted pregnancy.