Echoing history, reliance upon travel rises for abortion care post-Dobbs

Restricted access adds logistical, emotional and financial burdens for patients, advocates say

BY: KELCIE MOSELEY-MORRIS
JUNE 22, 2023

When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision one year ago, people of childbearing age in states across the country suddenly faced what seemed like a new prospect — having to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles from home to get an abortion.

But historians say it is merely continuing a long tradition of pregnant people seeking out the sometimes lifesaving care they need wherever it can be found, and other people helping them along the way.

Continued: https://missouriindependent.com/2023/06/22/echoing-history-reliance-upon-travel-rises-for-abortion-care-post-dobbs/

She was out in front of the fight to legalize abortion, but few know her name

October 11, 2021
Sarah Handel, Ailsa Chang, Matt Ozug
NPR - 16-Minute Podcast, with Transcript

Abortion-rights activist Patricia Maginnis died earlier this year at age 93. She's a lesser-known figure in the movement, but her ideas — which started as fringe — became mainstream.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:
There was a time in most places in this country where if you got an abortion,
you could face interrogation by police, which meant decades ago, the vast
majority of people seeking abortions in the U.S. had to go underground for a
doctor or secretly perform the procedure on themselves or simply leave the
country.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/11/1045084662/she-was-out-in-front-of-the-fight-to-legalize-abortion-but-few-know-her-name

11.10.2021

When Abortion Was a Crime

Patricia Maginnis, Pioneering Abortion-Rights Activist, Dies at 93

In the years before Roe v. Wade, she helped shift the debate away from the rules governing abortion providers to women’s right to control their bodies.

By Katharine Q. Seelye
Sept. 4, 2021

Patricia Maginnis, one of the nation’s earliest and fiercest proponents of a woman’s right to safe, legal abortions, who crusaded for that right on her own before the formation of an organized reproductive-rights movement, died on Aug. 30 in Oakland, Calif. She was 93.

Her niece Semberlyn Crossley said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/us/patricia-maginnis-dead.html

USA – They Called Her “the Che Guevara of Abortion Reformers”

They Called Her “the Che Guevara of Abortion Reformers”
A decade before Roe, Pat Maginnis’ radical activism—and righteous rage—changed the abortion debate forever.

By Lili Loofbourow
Dec 04, 2018

There was nothing remarkable about the small woman carrying a box of leaflets—certainly nothing to justify the clutch of reporters waiting for her across from San Francisco’s Federal Building on a July morning in 1966. Still, there they were. She arrived at exactly 9 a.m., greeted them, and began distributing fliers to anyone who passed. There were two of them: One was a yellow slip of paper titled “Classes in Abortion,” listing topics like female anatomy, foreign abortion specialists, and police questioning. The other—which she gave only to the assembled journalists and the five women who signed up for her class that Wednesday evening—described two techniques for DIY abortions. “I am attempting to show women an alternative to knitting needles, coat hangers, and household cleaning agents,” she told the reporters, adding that she had notified San Francisco police of her whereabouts and plans.

Continued: https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/12/pat-maginnis-abortion-rights-pro-choice-activist.html?fbclid=IwAR3BPV4zD2olxZfKz946KlEQNmkUyN1x5kbV8IV_os8B-CScIShArXir_ag