Abortion before Roe v. Wade

Brut America

She was 19. She had an abortion nine years before Roe v. Wade made it legal.  Elizabeth Stone tells Brut her story.

Transcript

00:00I was numb. I was terrified. There was no place to run. There was no place to hide.

00:06I didn't know where I was. And even if I had run back and gotten my clothes and run out,

00:14what was I then going to do? Not just where was I, but I was not prepared.

00:20I was 19. I was not prepared to have a child.

00:25My name is Elizabeth Stone, and today I'm going to tell you the story of an abortion I had

00:33long before abortions were legal, when I was a 19-year-old college student.

00:55Even when I was trying to get a sort of contact, I didn't go around and announce myself.

01:02I had friends who spoke about a friend who needed something.

01:07And one night, soon before I was going to go home to Brooklyn for Christmas vacation,

01:14someone slipped a piece of paper under my dorm door.

01:20And it was a phone number. It was a New Jersey phone number.

01:24And I never knew who put it under the door, but I knew what it was.

01:28I called the phone number, and it was the phone number of a doctor's office in Union, New Jersey.

01:34So I went to the doctor's office. He said to me, are you pregnant?

01:39I said, yes. He examined me. The word abortion was never mentioned.

01:44And I knew that I would be, I had been told that I would be receiving a phone call on a payphone

01:51the next day to set up an appointment.

02:02I had been told that a driver would pick me up, but that if he thought there was any chance of him being followed,

02:09he would just drive by. A little dapper man with shiny black shoes and a winter coat got out of,

02:17because this was December, got out of the car, came around. I handed him the envelope.

02:24He opened the envelope, made sure that everything, that the $500 was in there.

02:30He then nodded, opened the car door for me. I got in the back seat of the car.

02:37He got in the front seat. In the car already were two other women.

02:42Car ride was silent. I didn't know where I was, didn't know where I was going.

02:47The driver, after about 10 or 12 minutes, pulled into an indoor parking lot.

02:55The day before I went, I had been reading the New York Times, and there was a story in the New York Times

03:02about a woman who had been found, her dead body parked in her car, had been found in front of her house.

03:10And the story went on to say that she had died during a botched abortion.

03:21The first thing I saw was a kitchen table, and every horror story I had heard about abortion,

03:30sooner or later, involved a woman getting an abortion on a kitchen table.

03:35A man came out of the door on the right, carrying an unconscious, semi-naked woman in his arms.

03:46She was like a floppy doll, and she had a tampon string trailing between her legs.

03:52And I was horrified. I was horrified that the driver was watching all this.

03:59It felt like an enormous violation, on top of many violations.

04:04He carried the woman across the hall into the second bedroom, and then after a minute or two, came out.

04:14I didn't know whether she was dead or unconscious.

04:18And then he waved us, the man, who was wearing blue scrubs, he was wearing a mask.

04:24Was he a doctor? You know, I don't really know.

04:27He waved us down the hallway, and we went into the bedroom on the right.

04:33And that was set up almost like a barracks.

04:38I mean, there were six cots, each the head against the wall.

04:44And three of the cots were already filled.

04:47This was a little bit after 7 o'clock in the morning.

04:50And so it meant that the day, the abortion day, started well before dawn.

04:58Those women had to have been picked up at around 4 or 5 in the morning.

05:02So we were the second round of the day.

05:06The room to the right that he had taken the first woman out of, I looked in.

05:12He had left the door open as he carried her out.

05:15I looked in, and I could see an examination table.

05:18And on the examination table was the sort of white paper, or maybe it was a sheet,

05:25that doctors use when they're examining someone.

05:28And it was covered in blood.

05:30It wasn't pools of blood, but it was a big, big blotch of blood.

05:35And I then understood that that was where the abortion had taken place.

05:41All this I glimpsed in an instant.

05:45I then went in, got changed, sort of.

05:49And I was not in a hurry to have this happen, but I was so anxious to get it over

05:54that I was the first one out of my clothes.

05:56And the man in blue scrubs came back and said,

06:00Okay, you, you're ready.

06:02And in the interim, he had put a clean sheet on the examination table,

06:08which would then be filled with my blood.

06:11He smelled bleach, and the bleach was pink,

06:16because that was where he put the bloody towels or sheets or whatever it was.

06:22And then he said, Okay, get on the table, count backwards from ten.

06:27I got to about eight, and that is all I remember.

06:31The next thing I remember was being in the barracks, in the cot room, coming to.

06:40Nobody talked about trauma in those days, but what we do know now about trauma

06:45is that traumatic memories remain very, very vivid for a long period of time.

06:52This was an abortion I had half a century ago,

06:55and I may not remember whether it was a paper sheet or a sheet sheet,

07:00but I remember the blotch of blood on it.

07:04There is not a woman alive of childbearing age today

07:10who remembers what it was like to live at a time before Roe v. Wade.

07:19I am someone who wanted to have children.

07:22I always knew I wanted to have children.

07:25Motherhood has been one of the most powerful experiences of my life.

07:30You don't have to have children if you don't want to.

07:32I'm not an advocate. You can have children.

07:35But I would not have been able to be a good mother as a 19-year-old college dropout.

07:42I would like everybody to know what it is, not that we're going to go back to,

07:49but we are already going back to.

07:53All over the country there have been erosions of Roe v. Wade.

07:58I think there are three abortion centers in all of Louisiana,

08:03which means somebody somewhere is standing on a street corner in a strange city

08:09at 6 o'clock in the morning waiting to go through with this.

08:13I do want everybody to be forced to imagine a dead woman behind a steering wheel.

08:20And I was a middle-class kid with supportive parents.

08:26Parents who could help me financially.

08:29A good boyfriend. Great friends.

08:32And I still was in a situation where my sense of my powerlessness was overwhelming.

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