TRANSCRIPT:

1966, the year I turned 21, right? Yeah, that’s right, I spent a month in jail in that summer because of my convictions for breaking the law during the Civil Rights protests of 1964 and 65.

Those convictions were appealed and went through the courts for a while. But it wasn’t until 1966 that I was ordered to go to jail and serve a 29 day sentence, which to me was like another adventure because I had family and friends who had been in jail for other things. I knew it wasn’t a great place, but if anybody had to be there, I might as well see what it was like. But in any case, I was ordered to do it. Some of my friends who had been arrested with me had moved out of the state by then and did not serve that time. And when I went in to serve my time, I was the only civil rights arrestee at that time, serving my time in San Francisco.

So I’ve talked about some of my experiences in jail before. It was an experience I did not enjoy, but I was grateful to have and I’m even more grateful now because there’s lots of great stories to come out of it. But really, I learned a lot in those 29 days. And one of the things that happens when you go into jail is that they give you whatever meds you’re allowed to have.

The only medicine I asked for was something I was taking at the time for pre-ulcer stomach condition. I neglected to ask to continue to take my birth control pills because I didn’t want my personal life to be a part of their business. So when I got out of jail, I had been off the pill for a month and I, in my young and rash ignorance, didn’t remember or didn’t know that the first month you take birth control, you’re still fertile.

So, in that first month after getting out of jail, I was married — not that that makes any difference– but my husband and I got married that summer after living together for two years, and so I got pregnant and I didn’t realize it until pretty late into the pregnancy. But by November of 1966, I knew that I had a pregnancy that I was in absolutely no position to take to carry to term.

No way I could be a mother. I knew what happened to people who went into the adoption system because some of them, it happened in my family and the lives of kids who were not born into a family that I knew about were pretty atrocious. Adoption was something that was a mess. Besides, in any case, my husband and I both –he left it, he knew that this was my decision to make and that he would support me, help whatever decision I made. It didn’t take much for me to realize that I needed– I needed– to have an abortion. And 1966 was a very long way to 1973. There was no place in the United States where abortion was legal or available legally, and in California, what most women did after trying to cause their own abortion to happen – which I did, I tried everything I could think of to make it happen – a lot of women went to Mexico for abortions. But their stories were not always great ones, either. Because if you could come up with the money to get to Mexico, that’s one thing. And once you got down there, God knows what would happen because people in Mexico didn’t have many rights, either, in poverty in Mexico.

But I happened to learn from a friend who had moved to San Francisco from Detroit that there was a courageous OB-GYN doctor, a Black man who had agreed to be part of an underground fund to provide safe, illegal abortions to women who came to him. But if I went to him, I’d had to take my wedding ring off because he would not provide an abortion to a married woman.

I think maybe the proviso had to be that the husband had to have some say or something. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I didn’t mind taking my wedding ring off. It wasn’t really a big part of my identity anyway. So I flew to Detroit and I can say his name out loud now, I couldn’t then: Dr. Edgar Keemer, who became an open public advocate for women to have the right to abortion later, when the struggle became a big one, and who came out as an abortion provider himself before Roe. He agreed to perform the abortion for me. And he did. And I had friends in Detroit who put me up during the process. It was for me, at that time, until the women’s movement started to bring people out of the closet as having had abortions, it was something that I didn’t talk about with anybody except the people who helped me get there and who knew I was there and took care of me while I was there and helped me get home. It was just what you did. I knew that was what you did because I grew up pre-Roe and I grew up with a mother who helped others get abortions when they needed to have them.

It was something that the women in the housing project I lived in helped each other with. The codeword was “coat hanger.”  If anybody said there’s a coat hanger happening down the street, women would get together and go down the street to help the woman through it. And that’s just what women did. It’s what women did. And it’s what women still do in places where abortion is not available for either because the restrictions that state legislatures have already put on it are so much in power or because they live far from where there’s a clinic or they can’t– they can’t for all the reasons that we know are escalating.

It’s what women do. Women help each other through these things and God knows we are being pushed more and more in that direction because making abortion illegal, as the Phyllis Schlaflys and the current anti-choice people are out to do, does not mean that it doesn’t happen. It means rich women can go wherever they need to go to Europe or wherever and get the services that they need.

But poor women will be forced, either to carry a pregnancy to full term and then not have any support for the child who’s born because those support have been taken away, or they will seek a way to terminate a pregnancy which could lead to their own death or terrible injury to them. And we will help each other through this because we have to if that’s what we’re forced to do.

Abortion will never stop happening. Contraception will never stop happening. Women will help each other get what women need because it’s what we do, no matter what restrictions are put on it. Now, women also, as we saw back in the pre-Roe days, will fight like the dickens to make it legal and to keep it legal once it happens.

I have to say that back in 1971, 72, some brave women started to come out as having had abortions. I remember one in particular, a woman named Pat Grogan, who was the first woman I knew personally who was willing to come out. And in the course of asking people to support the actions against abortion laws to tell her own story. It was like a kick in the butt to me.

If she can do this, then I should also. And then the fact that my provider had come out as a supporter of abortion rights made it easy for me to tell the whole story. So I did that then, though I haven’t talked about it much since Roe because it seemed like, you know, this was a struggle that we had taken the next step forward in.

Although, of course, you never take for granted anything that you’ve won. Never.