What abortions were like pre Roe vs Wade

[Claddagh]

I talked to one lady who was a nurse in the 1940's. She remembers a girl who was sixteen, who wouldn't say who the father was or how she got pregnant, but got an illegal abortion. The poor girl developed an infection and had to be taken to the hospital. They had to do massive amounts of surgery to save the girl's life, but she could never have children. After that the woman became very pro-choice.

My great-great grandmother was a midwife in the town she lived in. She'd apprentice other girls on how to be midwives and wrote down how many women died from trying to get abortions performed. One of her friends died from using a knitting needle because the family couldn't afford to support another child.

[Phoebe]

My mom just recently told me that my paternal grandmother had an abortion between my dad's birth and the birth of my aunt.

My grandmother's marriage was falling apart, my dad was less than a year old (and was the reason they got married in the first place), and while she loved my grandfather, as she told my mom later on, "I felt that I had trapped [her husband] once with [my dad]...I wasn't going to do that to him again."

She had the abortion in late 1952 or early 1953. It must have taken a hell of a lot of guts for her to do that. I don't have any further details, and she passed away when I was a young teenager, so that's all I know. But I really admire the courage it must have taken for her to make that choice at a time when she could have died, been maimed, or could have been arrested for doing so.