Ginsburg’s Dissent May Yet Prevail

The justice argues that equality, not privacy, is crucial in the abortion right. By Cass R. Sunstein,Chicago Law School April 20, 2007 - IN THE LONG RUN, the most important part of the Supreme Court's ruling on "partial-birth" abortions may not be Justice Anthony M.…

My Turn: I Had That Now-Banned Abortion

I needed that now-banned procedure known as 'partial-birth' abortion. Why the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw it was a dark day for American women. By Ilene Jaroslaw, President/Chairwoman, Newsweek April 23, 2007 April 23, 2007 - It was Friday afternoon at nursery school and Simone…

Dr. Bert

The patient was in a private room. I even remember the room number, 724. That was one of the gold coast rooms. The woman, in her early or mid-thirties, was married to someone really important, with a lot of connections. She came in with severe…

Dr. Don

Dr. Don, a physician in Colorado in the 1960s: As for the attitudes of the medical community toward these women who got coat hanger abortions, it's not that the doctors were judgmental or hostile as much as they were kind of contemptuous. The attitude was…

Susan X

Dr Harvey Lothringer is a doctor who served four years in prison for performing an illegal abortion on a 19-year-old  woman who died during the procedure. He dismembered her body and flushed it down the toilet. Imagine being 18, pregnant scared to death-it was very…

Emma Goldman

Thanks to Marilyn Cole-Greene for sending the article "Immigrant Women and Family Planning: Historical Perspectives for Genealogical Research" by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, DBRS, from which this excerpt was taken. It appeared in the June 1996 "National Genealogical Society Quarterly. " Women uneducated in modern scientific…

Immigrant Women and Family Planning

"Like her urban sisters. the frontier woman (from 1880 to 1920) frequently used folk remedies to bring about a delayed menstrual period, regardless of the cause. Due to laws against distributing contraceptive products and information, menstrual "regulators" were advertised in rural newspapers like the "Nebraska…

Gerri Santoro

Once anonymous, this woman found dead from an illegal abortion on a motel room floor in June, 1964, has been identified by her sister. She was Gerri Santoro of Connecticut, a mother of two facing her third pregnancy. Santoro and her two daughters had been…

Connecting Up the Dots

By Anna Quindlen Newsweek Jan. 24 issue - There is now only a single abortion clinic in Mississippi. Once there were seven. There are nearly 3 million people living in the state. No other state with only one abortion clinic has as many residents. Mississippi…