Jade Macmillan and Joanna Robin in Washington DC
Sat 25 Jun 2022
A woman lies dead on a motel room floor, her naked body hunched over a blood-soaked towel.
She died alone, abandoned by her lover after a failed self-induced abortion in 1964.
Her name was Gerri Santoro.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-26/before-roe-v-wade-gerri-santoro-galvanised-abortion-movement/101168136
Nov. 29, 2021
By Sarah Wildman
In 2012, Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old married dentist, appeared at Ireland’s University Hospital Galway in pain. She was 17 weeks pregnant and miscarrying. According to Dr. Halappanavar’s husband, hospital staff said that there was no saving the pregnancy, but they refused to intercede because her fetus still had a heartbeat. She was told her only option was to wait.
Dr. Halappanavar became feverish. By the time the fetal heartbeat faded away, she was in organ failure. Two and a half days later, she was dead.
Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/opinion/heartbeat-abortion-bans-savita-izabela.html
Allowing English women to take the abortion pill at home is good news – and now we're coming for you, Northern Ireland
Harriet Marsden
25 August 2018
As landmark women’s health text Our Bodies, Ourselves put it in 1970, abortion is “our right ... as women to control our own bodies. The existence of any abortion laws (however ‘liberal’) denies this right.”
Those rights are advancing in some parts of the UK, and stalling in others. The latest development is that women in England will soon be able to take an abortion pill at home: a small but significant step forward that many welcome. Yet in Northern Ireland, women still face draconian laws and life in prison for daring to access their reproductive rights.
Continued: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/abortion-pill-at-home-northern-ireland-pregnancy-a8507811.html
What would the world be like without Roe v. Wade?
Lisa Belkin, Chief National Correspondent
Yahoo News, Jul 26, 2018
Brandishing a wire coat hanger, New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon took the podium at a rally against the nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court earlier this month. Kavanaugh is thought to satisfy Donald Trump’s pledge to appoint justices who will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Nixon’s voice shook as she predicted that a newly conservative court would take the country back to a time when women — including her own mother — resorted to self-administered abortions with, yes, coat hangers, or to illegal and unlicensed practitioners to end their pregnancies.
“We must never, ever, ever, go back to a time when any woman feels she has to make this kind of a choice,” she said, raising the hanger high. “And this is why we must fight.”
Continued: https://sports.yahoo.com/world-like-without-roe-v-wade-175227534.html
Abortion Is Not Murder
Even if we granted the most generous possible terms to the anti-abortion camp, even if we pretended the fetus was fully rational and contemplating Shakespeare in the womb, abortion would still not be murder.
By Jennifer Wright
Apr 13, 2018
It is not surprising that Kevin Williamson, who called for women who had abortions to be hanged (because they are, to his mind, murderers), was recently fired from The Atlantic.
It ought to surprise us that he was hired at all.
Continued: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a19748134/what-is-abortion/
How a Harrowing Photo of One Woman's Death Became an Iconic Pro-Choice Symbol
by Amanda Arnold
100 years
Oct 26 2016
In 1973, Ms. magazine published a haunting photo of a woman named Gerri Santoro, who'd died of a back-alley abortion. At the time, no one could have predicted what an impact it would have on the pro-choice movement, or how many decades later we would still be fighting to keep women from having to seek out illegal procedures.
People knew of Geraldine "Gerri" Santoro's cause of death—an air embolism caused by a back-alley abortion—before they ever knew her name.
On June 8, 1964, the 28-year-old married woman and her lover, Clyde Dixon, checked into Connecticut's now-closed Norwich Motel with no vacation suitcases or change of clothes for an overnight stay. Instead, she brought a catheter and a textbook. Santoro, six and a half months pregnant, was prepared to let Dixon perform her illegal abortion—that is, until she started hemorrhaging during the process and Dixon panicked, abandoning Santoro to bleed to death on the motel floor.
Continued at source: Broadly/Vice: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/how-a-harrowing-photo-of-one-womans-death-became-an-iconic-pro-choice-symbol
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