Since abortion has never been legal in many countries even after it was so in the U.S., a group of intrepid women set out to create “Women on Waves.” They outfitted a storage container as an abortion center, loaded it on a boat, and began a voyage that carried them from the Netherlands to Africa with many stops in between. You owe it to yourself to look at the video.
Of course they were screamed at and prevented from landing at many ports, which meant they were not able to perform abortions. So they went online with information about pills. This means that within a few years of their work, beginning in 2002, several countries they visited legalized abortion. They had energized women with their example, and that is what it takes.
As Dr. Renate Klein warns in the 4W newsletter, online, the pill “exposes women to serious adverse effects that should not be dismissed as individual mishaps” such as “incomplete termination that must be followed up by a vacuum aspiration, or otherwise it may lead to sepsis and the woman’s death.” Since the eight states where abortion is already illegal are home to our most vulnerable women, poor, black and Latina, their ability to finance a trip of many hundreds of miles to a state where vacuum aspiration is legal may be simply out of the question. And so again they are being asked to sacrifice health and even life.
And there are other reasons to doubt that pill abortion is the solution…
A few years ago, when I was researching Doris Duke’s papers at the Rubenstein Library, Duke University, I came across her extensive correspondence in the 1930’s with Margaret Sanger, the mother of Planned Parenthood.
Sanger had hoped that President Roosevelt would include birth control in the public health programs of the New Deal. He did not. Instead, he appointed a Roman Catholic, James Farley, as postmaster general. Farley maintained that it was illegal to send contraceptive information through the mail, crippling efforts to inform and supply women.
It won’t take appointing a Roman Catholic to achieve the same results today with the abortion pill. The almost destroyed U.S Postal Service will be quickly brought to heel. Louis DeJoy, appointed by Donald Trump with an annual salary of over three hundred thousand dollars and no fixed term, is already in place.
And, to me there is something sickening about women being driven to inducing an abortion with a noxious pill, often alone, with no certainty about the outcome. How have we fallen so low?
But we go on fighting.
Joyce Bogosian says
We as women must refuse to let anyone take away our rights and the freedom of our own choices. Thank you Sallie!