Editor’s Note: Claudia Dreifus contributes to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the Nation. She also teaches journalism to graduate students in the sciences at Columbia University. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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On Friday, members of the right to life movement converged on Washington to mark the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. They were also celebrating last June’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision which abrogated it.
Among my friends – many of them veterans of the 1970s women’s rights campaigns – there’s no celebration.
The Roe decision of January 22, 1973, effectively legalized abortion throughout the United States. On a human level, it freed women of child-bearing age from the pain and danger of illegal abortion.
I went to college in the pre-Roe era of the early 1960s. I still remember what it was like to be a young woman in a time when malfunctioning birth control could destroy one’s future.
If that happened, illegal abortion—often in the underground world of criminality and with physical danger—was, for most of us, the only option.
Young people are sexual; young people get pregnant. In my college circle, one routinely heard the most horrific stories: operations in motel rooms, surgeries without anesthesia, abortionists who’d raped women seeking their services. Strange as it seems today: this was common. I had a friend who developed a pelvic infection after a back-alley abortion; she was rendered infertile.
I found myself pregnant in 1964. I was 19. At first, I tried to self-abort. I failed. A friend of my mother’s connected me with a doctor in Pennsylvania.
On the way there, I felt terrified. What if he wasn’t a genuine physician? Would I contract an infection like my friend did? The thought that I might die kept repeating itself. As I drove through the bleak January landscape of rural Pennsylvania, I thought “Whatever the risks, you must do this. There’s no turning back.”
I’d drawn the lucky card. He turned out to be a real physician. I had the operation under anesthesia and with proper medication. He provided abortions because he believed in it, never charging more than $100. His community…
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