Redstockings abortion stories

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

The First Time Women Shouted Their Abortions
Fifty years ago, a group of women stood up in a church and talked about ending their pregnancies. The way they did so still shapes how we discuss the topic today.

By Nona Willis Aronowitz
March 23, 2019

You couldn’t just casually threaten suicide — you had to sound like you meant it, the woman onstage recalled. “You have to go and bring a razor, or whatever: ‘If you don’t tell me I’m going to have an abortion right now, I’m going to go out and jump off the Verrazzano Bridge.’”

The woman was speaking in 1969. Legalized abortion nationwide was still four years away; in New York, so-called therapeutic abortions were legal — but only if a doctor judged you mentally unfit to have a child. And so, the woman explained, she ended up seeing two psychiatrists who, to her relief, deemed her suicide threats real enough to be granted the procedure. The crowd clapped and roared at the absurdity of it all, until the woman explained that after her abortion, she was stuck in the maternity ward to recover — right next to crying babies. The crowd wasn’t laughing anymore.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opinion/sunday/abortion-speakout-anniversary.html

USA – How the first abortion speak-out revolutionized activism

USA – The First Time Women Shouted Their Abortions