Yes, it's another sad story from a time when abortion was illegal, a time some would take us back to:
This is about my mother, who went to Alberta in 1909 with my father and my two older brothers, aged two and four. She did not want to go, but my father had homestead fever and insisted. Her chief reason for objecting was that she had had a rough time when my second brother was born and was afraid to have another child in an isolated place, one hundred miles from a doctor.
Sure enough, she became pregnant. She consulted her sister-in-law on the next farm, but either got no useful information or was afraid to try what she was told by her. Anyway, she told me that, in desperation, she went out to the fields and guided the plow, pulled by tow oxen, until she had so strained herself that she miscarried or aborted herself. She described her desperation, and said that she was not afraid to die, but she could not bear the thought of not living to see her children grow up. For two years after, she menstruated every two weeks, and worried that she might not have another child.
They went back to Toronto, broke, after being hailed out three years in a row, and I was born about fourteen months later. She was overjoyed. No one could have loved children more than she did, but her abortion was out of sheer necessity. Nowadays, she would not have been so isolated, but if abortions were to become illegal again, her desperation could lead to a similar action.
-Katherine
Oh, I know, her reason may not be justifiable to some, but I wonder what it must be like to be that desperate to put on the yolk of a plow around you stomach so that the pressure induces miscarriage...As long as there is sex, there will be women who seek to terminate pregnancies whether it is legal or not. Some anti-choicers get a thrill out of the lengths these desperate women will go to to end a pregnancy when it's illegal, in their mind it's just-deserts for women who have sex and
because Eve ate the apple yadayadayada....For a sampling of the "pro-lifers" response to a woman who posted a youtube video about her medically necessary abortion,
watch this video:
I wonder what their response to Katherine's mother would be? Really there's no need to wonder, just check out their reaction to doctor's who gave antibiotics to women they couldn't convince not to seek an illegal abortion in 1967:
The B.C. Medical Association denied Monday it authorized a doctor to give antibiotics to women before they undergo illegal abortions...
Dr. E. C. McCoy, the BCMA executive director, said that if doctors are using treatments to reduce the dangers of illegal abortions, they do so without the sanction of the association--which he said is not needed.
Said Dr. Wilson: "To say that our association has ever approved of anything like this is an absolute untruth. The story is just complete nonsense."
"No Doctor has come to the association to ask for permission on how to use antibiotics in any case," said Dr. McCoy.
McMorran [the city prosecutor] said a West End physician had received the approval of the BCMA to help reduce the dangers of illegal abortion if his efforts to dissuade the girls from seeking illegal abortion were unsuccessful...
According to the sanctioned plan, the prosecutor said Saturday, the doctor first tries to disuade his patients form seeking illegal abortions.
If unsuccessful, the doctor then gives them antibiotics to cut down the possibility of infection before they use the services of any of Vancouver's underground abortionists, McMorran told the Unitarian Church workshop on abortions."
Oh what a crime! How scandalous to anti-choice zealots that doctors would preemptively try to lessen the suffering caused by an unsafe abortion with medicine! The zealots couldn't rest until that doctor and his association must be tried for encouraging abortions! Yes these are old stories, but they shouldn't be forgotten as Republicans would return us to a time where women would swallow cockroach poison to escape the pain of a back-alley abortion:
Out of her desperation she went to a back-alley abortionist in Vancouver, who botched the job and left her with infections and constant pain. All of a sudden she could do nothing. Her health went down and down. She was also Catholic and felt terrible guilt along with the pain.
She was like this for about three months when one day the bathroom door was broken down and she was found on the floor, having consumed cockroach powder. I remember the ambulance coming and all commotion.
St. Paul’s Hospital turned the ambulance away, as it was a suicide attempt. She was then taken to a private hospital where she died an agonizing death a week or ten days later, leaving two little girls motherless.
Years later my grandmother, who then raised my sister and me, told us that Mom had been butchered during the abortion and nothing could be done to help the downward spiral of her health.
I do not want this story to be interpreted that out of having an abortion she committed suicide. She was so desperate to end the pregnancy, but the condition she was left in brought on the depression leading to the suicide. My grandmother and dad explained this to us girls.
I am now 63 years old. We must never go back to those days.
-Amanda
But Republicans don't care about these women and their stories, if they could return us to those times they would. The more poor women who can die of a botched abortion the better.
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And for something a little more heartening: