USA – How the first abortion speak-out revolutionized activism

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

19.10.2022

Commentary

Featured

Abortion: Tell It Like It Is

Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz

Barbara Kaminsky

Center for Constitutional Rights

Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion

history of abortion activism

National Organization for Women

New York Radical Women

New Yorkers for Abortion Law Repeal

Redstockings

Redstockings abortion stories

The personal is political

Thomas Laverne

women's abortion stories

Abortion rights: history offers a blueprint for how pro-choice campaigners might usefully respond

BMJ 2022; 378
doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o1846
Published 26 July 2022
Agnes Arnold Forster, research fellow

In October 1971, the New York Times reported a decline in maternal death rate.1 Just 15 months earlier, the state had liberalised its abortion law. David Harris, New York’s deputy commissioner of health, speaking to the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, attributed the decline—by more than half—to the replacement of criminal abortions with safe, legal ones. Previously, abortion had been the single leading cause of maternity related deaths, accounting for around a third. A doctor in the audience who said he was from a state “where the abortion law is still archaic,” thanked New York for its “remarkable job” and expressed his gratitude that there was a place he could send his patients and know they would receive “safe, excellent care.” Harris urged other states to follow the example set by New York and liberalise their abortion laws.

Continued: https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1846

I Helped Women Get Abortions in Pre-Roe America

To think we’re going back to that world makes makes me angry and sad.

By Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Atlantic
June 4, 2022

When I was 16, I helped desperate women get abortions. This was in the sliver of time between New York State’s 1970 legalization of abortion and the Roe v. Wade decision three years later, which allowed women in every state to choose whether to continue their pregnancies. I answered phones for the Women’s Abortion Project at its headquarters in a shabby, unheated meeting space of the Women’s Liberation Center, on West 22nd Street in Manhattan.

Before New York made abortion legal, the project had been part of an underground, directing women to two or three gynecologists who, for reasons of conscience, wanted to perform safe abortions. From 1970 onward, these doctors continued this medical work in the open, and the Abortion Project continued to collaborate with them.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/an-abortion-activists-experience-in-pre-roe-america/661175/

04.06.2022

Clergy Consultation Service

Ellen Gruber Garvey

Redstockings

Roe v. Wade

Women's Abortion Project

Women's Liberation Center

USA – Abortion Without Apology

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 – Unhelpful Arguments That Downplay the Importance of Abortion on Demand

Book excerpt: Unhelpful Arguments That Downplay the Importance of Abortion on Demand

Jenny Brown
Sept 30, 2019

The first shot in the feminist abortion wars was fired in 1969 in a New York City Health Department auditorium, where a panel of male psychologists, doctors, clergy, and lawyers (and one woman, a Sister Mary Patricia) debated exceptions to New York’s law forbidding abortion. They were discussing whether a woman should be allowed to have an abortion if her health was in danger, or if she had been raped, or if she had already given birth to four children.

A shout came up from a woman in the audience: “Now let’s hear from the real experts on abortion!” Then, “Repeal the abortion law, instead of wasting more time talking about these stupid reforms!” Then, “We’ve waited and waited while you have held one hearing after another. Meanwhile, the baby I didn’t want is two years old!” More women stood to object and testify. “Why are fourteen men and only one woman on your list of speakers—and she a nun?” The committee members “stared over their microphones in amazement,” wrote Edith Evans Asbury in the New York Times. The chair tried to shush the women, arguing that everyone was really on the same side: “You’re only hurting your own case.”

Continued: https://jezebel.com/5-unhelpful-arguments-that-downplay-the-importance-of-a-1838619064