Must Read: a reflection on the days before Roe

Dr. Waldo Fielding revisits memories of the time before Roe v. Wade. There are a number of important reminders in it, the first being that women seeking abortions were, and still are, in dire straits. These are not women making an idle choice (the arrogant assumption underlying state laws requiring women to view an ultrasound before an abortion). The patients he saw were not women seeking abortion, but those seeking treatment for the consequences of unsterile, back alley abortions:

The patient also did not explain why she had attempted the abortion, and we did not ask. This was a decision she made for herself, and the reasons were hers alone. Yet this much was clear: The woman had put herself at total risk, and literally did not know whether she would live or die.

This, too, was clear: Her desperate need to terminate a pregnancy was the driving force behind the selection of any method available.

The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous “coat hanger” — which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in — perhaps the patient herself — found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it. …

However, not simply coat hangers were used.

Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion — darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off. …

The worst case I saw, and one I hope no one else will ever have to face, was that of a nurse who was admitted with what looked like a partly delivered umbilical cord. Yet as soon as we examined her, we realized that what we thought was the cord was in fact part of her intestine, which had been hooked and torn by whatever implement had been used in the abortion. It took six hours of surgery to remove the infected uterus and ovaries and repair the part of the bowel that was still functional.

Fielding's conclusion is particularly important:

Roe v. Wade did not mean that abortions could be performed. They have always been done, dating from ancient Greek days.

What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.

This is but one of the issues at stake in the 2008 elections. McCain would send women back to their pre-Roe risks, while Obama (or any other Democratic candidate, had he or she won) will work to protect women's right to control their bodies and to make their own medical choices, including choices regarding abortion, without government interference. I hope that the Clinton-backers who are threatening to bolt the party will remember that.

I also hope that we can take a minute to thank the brave doctors who helped women through these trying times, and those brave souls who stand up against death-threats today, working to help women in truly dire circumstances. Thank also the activists in the '60s and '70s who helped women find abortion providers who had medical training and used sterile equipment. There were still risks, since that underground economy could only exist by bribing cops and paying off the mafia, which tended to prevent doctors from sticking with it for long.

It was a hard time to be a woman. Married women with medical problems had to seek black market doctors, or flee the country to more accepting jurisdictions, to obtain a life-saving medical procedure. Young women had to brave death from rusty coat-hangers, a punctured bowel or a fatal embolism simply to rest a bit of control from their rapists or abusers.

We live in a better world because of Roe v. Wade, and because of the forces that resisted the deadly laws that Roe overturned.