Ellen Willis

Fifty years ago, under the banner of a group known as Redstockings, women gathered in a West Village basement to share their abortion stories, a radical act that ripples through movements today.

BY JOY PRESS
OCTOBER 19, 2022

“I can tell you the psychological and sociological effect the law has had on me: It’s made me angry!” a woman yelled across the crowded auditorium of the New York City Health Department.

It was February 13, 1969, and a phalanx of female protesters had dramatically interrupted the staid proceedings of New York State’s Joint Legislative Committee on the Problems of Public Health. The issue under discussion was whether or not to liberalize the state’s 86-year-old criminal abortion statute and allow for legal abortion in cases where a woman’s physical or mental health was at risk, or when she was a victim of rape or incest.

Continued: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/10/abortion-stories-speakout

Abortion Without Apology

December 2, 2019
Posted by Meaghan Winter

Discussed in this essay: Without Apology: The Struggle for Abortion Now, by Jenny Brown. Verso, 2019. 208 pages.

IN 1969, THE NEW YORK CITY HEALTH DEPARTMENT hosted a panel of 15 speakers—14 men and one nun—to discuss the possibility of creating narrow exceptions to New York’s strict anti-abortion laws for women who had been raped or faced other special circumstances. In the midst of the proceedings, an action group from the feminist organization New York Radical Women stood up to dispute the event’s very premise. The protesters shouted that they did not want to bicker over exceptions to sexist laws that controlled women’s lives; they wanted full reproductive freedom. A month later, the action group—now known as Redstockings—held its own hearing. There, 12 women, addressing an audience of several hundred, talked about their abortions. This abortion speak-out, the first of its kind, helped draw conversations about abortion, long shrouded in secrecy and shame, into the public sphere.

Continued: https://jewishcurrents.org/abortion-without-apology/

USA – How the first abortion speak-out revolutionized activism

USA – Abortion Without Apology