"Repairing the Damage, Before Roe "

By WALDO L. FIELDING, M.D.
Published: June 3, 2008

With the Supreme Court becoming more conservative, many people who support women’s right to choose an abortion fear that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave them that right, is in danger of being swept aside.

When such fears arise, we often hear about the pre-Roe “bad old days.” Yet there are few physicians today who can relate to them from personal experience. I can.

I am a retired gynecologist, in my mid-80s. My early formal training in my specialty was spent in New York City, from 1948 to 1953, in two of the city’s large municipal hospitals.

There I saw and treated almost every complication of illegal abortion that one could conjure, done either by the patient herself or by an abortionist — often unknowing, unskilled and probably uncaring. Yet the patient never told us who did the work, or where and under what conditions it was performed. She was in dire need of our help to complete the process or, as frequently was the case, to correct what damage might have been done.

The patient also did not explain why she had attempted the abortion, and we did not ask. This was a decision she made for herself, and the reasons were hers alone. Yet this much was clear:

The woman had put herself at total risk, and literally did not know whether she would live or die.
This, too, was clear: Her desperate need to terminate a pregnancy was the driving force behind the selection of any method available.

The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous “coat hanger” — which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in — perhaps the patient herself — found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it.

We did not have ultrasound, CT scans or any of the now accepted radiology techniques. The woman was placed under anesthesia, and as we removed the metal piece we held our breath, because we could not tell whether the hanger had gone through the uterus into the abdominal cavity. Fortunately, in the cases I saw, it had not.

However, not simply coat hangers were used.

Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion — darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.

Another method that I did not encounter, but heard about from colleagues in other hospitals, was a soap solution forced through the cervical canal with a syringe. This could cause almost immediate death if a bubble in the solution entered a blood vessel and was transported to the heart.

The worst case I saw, and one I hope no one else will ever have to face, was that of a nurse who was admitted with what looked like a partly delivered umbilical cord. Yet as soon as we examined her, we realized that what we thought was the cord was in fact part of her intestine, which had been hooked and torn by whatever implement had been used in the abortion. It took six hours of surgery to remove the infected uterus and ovaries and repair the part of the bowel that was still functional.

It is important to remember that Roe v. Wade did not mean that abortions could be performed.

They have always been done, dating from ancient Greek days.

What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.

Waldo L. Fielding was an obstetrician and gynecologist in Boston for 38 years. He is the author of “Pregnancy: The Best State of the Union” (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971)."


This is from today's NY Times.

And Dr. Fielding is quite correct. Regardless of what the law allows medical doctors to legally do, abortions will continue to happen. They just won't happen in the safety and sterility of a medical facility. They may not even happen, for the financially mobile, in this country. But they will continue to happen. As prohibition and the war on drugs will attest, making something illegal does nothing to stop the demand.

You want to stop people from having abortions? Make birth control free, and available for anyone who asks. Make Plan B, the emergency contraceptive, free and available to anyone who asks. Blaming abortions on teenagers - and in case you were curious, the CDC and Planned Parenthood both agree that teenagers are having LESS sex now than other generations did - is irresponsible and political pandering. Adult women who are capable of making their own decisions are having abortions. Universal access to birth control, either free or at a reduced cost, should be something every woman in this country can obtain without fear of judgment. It is also not helpful to shot about overturning Roe with one breath because it is so wrong and in another scream that single mothers are bad too. You can't have your cake and eat it to. One must simply assume that if you overturn Roe, you are going to see a corresponding increase in single mothers. There are going to be men out there who are not going to step up to the parenthood plate. And I imagine you will also see a rise in adoptions, and you will also see a rise in accidental deaths from at home jobs gone awry.

The bottom line is still this: the politics of the bedroom are between the two people who share it, and aren't meant to be the talking points for our national debate on morality. We are all different. We all believe in different things. Some of us pray to different Gods. Our diversity is one of the things that we celebrate as a country. Why change it? Stop talking about abortion on tv, in the news, and in the press and keep this discussion where it belongs:

In the home.