Abortion Stories for Accomplices

After decades of defending Roe, the demands issued by abortion rights activists before 1973 may surprise you.

What began as a united front suffered an irreparable split. The coalition hoping to repeal New York's criminal abortion law lost two key members in 1970 when legislators added a physician requirement to the bill. Lucinda Cisler and James Clapp, leaders of New Yorkers for Abortion Law Repeal, withdrew their support from the bill that would legalize abortion in New York state later that year. The remaining coalition members considered the law a victory, but Cisler and Clapp stood firm in their belief that only full repeal of abortion laws would make the procedure accessible to all. Cisler objected to the stipulation that only physicians should be allowed to perform abortions, arguing that inequality in healthcare coverage would keep poor women from their right to access the procedure. In her objection, she also accounts for a possible future that eerily describes our present: "This restriction would also deny women themselves the right to use self-abortifacients when they are developed." 1 or Cisler, making legalization contingent upon physician control within a healthcare system rife with inequality would not end the suffering caused by the legacy of criminalization.

To some, they may seem too radical, diluting the demand for legal abortion with other issues that threaten to hinder the cause.

In 1970, Carmen Rodríguez died from a saline abortion legally administered by a physician at Lincoln Hospital who failed to note her heart condition because her chart was missing. ²  Rodríguez was the first to die after New York decriminalized its state abortion law. Five days before, a Puerto Rican nationalist organization called the Young Lords Party (YLP) had taken over Lincoln, unfurling banners that read "Bienvenidos al Hospital del Pueblo" and establishing a mini-clinic that provided lead poisoning screenings until they were run out by the police. In the wake of Rodríguez's preventable death, the YLP condemned the abortion law for giving city hospitals greater license to abuse, and even kill the majority Black and brown patients who could not afford to go anywhere else for medical care.3 Sympathetic hospital staff and community supporters allied with the YLP to demand a community meeting where they could hold the hospital administration accountable for Rodríguez's death and reiterate their demand for healthcare that served "the people." With this demand, the protesters brought attention to the disturbing reality that legal abortion administered through a racist, misogynist for-profit healthcare system — what the YLP condemned as "butcher shops" — could result in death, especially when long wait times made later abortions necessary.4

Beyond the inequalities of the healthcare system, legal abortion in the context of sterilization abuse and hierarchies of white supremacy, capitalism, and empire made terminating a pregnancy a limited choice at best.5 Rodríguez's preventable death compelled members of the YLP women's caucus like Denise Oliver and Iris Morales to apply the principle behind the takeover of Lincoln Hospital to legal abortion: "community control of our institutions and land. This means that we want institutions, like hospitals where sisters go to have abortions, to be under the control of our people to be sure that they really serve our needs."6 Before Roe but after legal abortion, the YLP revealed the limits of legal reforms that left exploitative systems in place. Demanding community control over the hospital's mechanisms of care, they sought to transform the institutional processes that determine whether people will get better or get sicker, whether they will live and for how long.

But what if these visions, yet to be disciplined by Roe, could serve as touchstones in our post-Roe present, examples of how to be accomplices to an act unjustly deemed a crime? 

They had secured their individual freedom, but they knew it wasn't enough. On March 9, 1973, a member of the underground abortion service Jane read a statement to the press. It was written by seven members who had been arrested while performing abortions without medical licenses in a high-rise apartment on South Shore Drive in Chicago. Known as the "Abortion 7," the women had just learned that their charges—three counts each of performing abortions and conspiracy to commit abortions—were dismissed, due in large part to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision which overturned Illinois' criminal abortion law. The group's attorney had been betting that the case would be their get out of jail free card, though the fact that the majority were white, middle-class, and married—an image they were encouraged to play up—certainly contributed to the outcome.7

But rather than perform celebration or gratitude, the Abortion 7 used the press release to issue demands that exposed how Roe fell short of what was necessary to make abortion universally accessible:

To these women who learned how to perform abortions from a man who lied about being a doctor and then safely administered an estimated 11,000 procedures during the three years the service was operational, Roe — and any laws regulating abortion — appeared to keep unnecessary and burdensome restrictions in place.9 The service used a sliding scale so nobody was turned away for their inability to pay; as a result, the service treated many poor and working-class women of color. The lay providers saw from their personal experience and their patients' circumstances that legalization alone would not deliver reproductive autonomy to these women.

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In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), calls to "go beyond Roe" long cultivated by the reproductive justice movement exploded into the assertion that "Roe was never enough," a position that became much easier to defend once there was nothing left to lose. Most who identify with these slogans do so because of a story about Roe's decline rather than what came before. The anti-abortion movement's multi-decade effort to whittle the law into a shell of its former self convinced some that the law was no longer worth defending. Others decided that the landmark decision was compromised as soon as the Hyde Amendment barred the use of Medicaid funds for abortion; it passed just three years after the landmark decision and effectively made access to the procedure contingent on one's economic status rather than individual right or humanity. And just as the YLP had done before them, those activists who identified with Black feminist theories of reproductive justice and abolition pointed to historical and contemporary efforts to control poor women of color and their ability to have children. Protecting access to abortion by defending Roe was hardly the only or most pressing battle.

The stories of how different feminists envisioned abortion freedom before Roe is a rarer reference point for those admitting quietly or proclaiming loudly that we desperately need a new horizon. Roe and the decades-long abortion battle it engendered have disciplined most of our political imaginations in ways that are not easy to undo. The historical snapshots described above are meant to counteract this collective disciplining: what is it like to inhabit the pre-Roe world, and can doing so help us navigate our post-Roe reality?

The vignettes demonstrate important positions that have been buried by the decades-long mandate to "defend Roe." The first is that abortion rights activists popularized the demand for repeal. It is admittedly difficult to imagine no regulation of the procedure after fifty years of increasingly burdensome restrictions on abortion, but this is what a majority of feminists of all racial identities believed was the necessary antidote to a century of criminal abortion law in an unequal society. They disagreed about what other societal changes were necessary to make abortion a truly free choice; feminists of color argued most forcefully that abortion alone would not solve racist and capitalist exploitation. But the refrain that abortion was (or still is) a "white feminist" issue erases radical women of color from abortion activism entirely while dismissing white radicals' contributions with the same broad brush. We cannot afford to ignore these broad horizons envisioned in a world before Roe.

While repeal was embraced by liberals and radicals alike, many on the left also advocated for the demedicalization of abortion care. The American Medical Association's mid-19^th century campaign to criminalize abortion in part by demonizing immigrant and Black granny midwives has become a popular reference point since Dobbs. But this history is rarely framed as a throughline that indicts the contemporary medical establishment's dual role in the erosion of abortion rights and continuation of an inhumane system of healthcare. The anti-abortion movement's willingness to target abortion providers through legal and extra-legal means probably explains why supporters are more comfortable indicting 19^th-century AMA members rather than their 21^st-century counterparts. And yet, we have compelling evidence that the medical establishment has at best failed to champion abortion as a regular form of healthcare and at worst plays a central role in the criminalization of pregnant women and people.10 We also know that medication abortion can be safely administered without any physician involvement, but that has not stopped the Food and Drug Administration and medical organizations from gatekeeping the treatment regimen.11 The history of abortion criminalization is incomplete to the degree that it gets told through punitive laws, racist, misogynist legislators, and overzealous prosecutors alone. Physicians who betrayed rather than abetted the regime of criminalization were the exception.12 If the history of our present is to depart from this narrative, medical providers and organizations will need to proclaim en masse that laypeople can also be experts of abortion care.

What kind of accomplice will you be?

The 2022 documentary The Janes — strategically premiered on HBO Max the same month the Dobbs decision was expected — ends triumphantly with Roe v. Wade. The group's critical press release is replaced with the decision's just-in-time arrival that delivers freedom to both the Abortion 7 and all women seeking abortion care. Jane becomes a relic of a bygone era where the majority white, middle-class women that are too often made to represent the whole of 1960s abortion activism had to administer abortions in apartments and hotel rooms until lawmakers got with the program. As the film whitewashes the abortion story it tells, it also layers a threat over its explicit celebration of ordinary people doing extraordinary things: if we don't act now, we are doomed to repeat history.

To shore up the cautionary tale, the documentary strikes from the historical record one member's realization that the care these ordinary people provided was superior to what she saw in clinics after Roe. In fact, this unnamed activist observed that, "[women receiving abortions] were forced to be accomplices and because they were forced to join in, they had to take responsibility for what they did."13 It may be difficult to read these words as empowering rather than accusatory after so many decades of abortion stigma that is the anti-abortion movement's bread and butter.

But if reading these histories is inspiring, if calls to "codify Roe" seem absurd given the reproductive injustices piling up all around us, if Roe's end also seems like it could be a new beginning, then chances are that you, dear reader, are an accomplice, too. Like the abortion accomplices that came before, perhaps you believe that we deserve a broader horizon where abortion is not a crime and is a readily available, even ordinary, skill that people choose to practice from circumstances of abundance rather than desperation. Accomplices who are willing to break the unjust laws and cultural norms designed to obliterate this liberatory horizon are essential if such a vision is to become our future. In the meantime, we can bolster our courage by telling the abortion stories most likely to make accomplices of us all.

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Acknowledgments: Much gratitude to the editors of the Abortion Now, Abortion Forever cluster, Anne Gray Fischer and Laura Beth Pelner. Their astute edits, feedback, and brainstorming ensured the idea in my head got clearer and stronger once it was written on the page, and I am very grateful.

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Sara Matthiesen (she/her/hers) is an associate professor of history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at George Washington University. Professor Matthiesen's first book, Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021), reframes the decades following Roe as a labor history of family making under state neglect. Reproduction Reconceived was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for the best monograph on gender and labor from the National Women's Studies Association in 2022. Her current project is a history of non-clinic abortion and related mutual aid efforts that were built in the shadow of Roe.

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