Who here was alive and very aware of the time just before and just after Roe?

[Stinky The Clown]

Who knew women who suffered, or worse, before? How did you react when Roe passed?

Hopefully some will share stories from before or after?

[Walleye]

1. The sister of my best friend had an illegal abortion before I met her

She told me about it. It was horrific. You don’t forget these stories

[msfiddlestix]

2. i was 21, and pregnant. I wanted the child I was carrying, but felt liberated I had a choice in the

future, should I choose not to.

[PlanetBev]

3. I was 22 when Roe was handed down

I knew young women who went over the border to Mexico. One abortion was done without anesthesia.

[moondust]

4. In about 1971

a mutual friend informed me that one of my former HS classmates had recently performed a "coat hanger procedure." Fortunately she recovered but I don't know if any lasting damage was done.

[vlyons]

5. I'm 75 now and well remember the before part

I was in high school when birth control pills became available. Started having sex when I was in college and got birth control pills at the college med clinic. I lived in Texas and knew girls in college, who went to Mexico to get an abortion before Roe/Wade.

[agingdem]

6. Me..

I was 22 years old, 8 weeks pregnant and bleeding..my OB advised a termination but because abortion was illegal in Texas I had to find another way..my husband was a law student, working nights, and I worked two jobs so money was an issue, but we cashed in our two savings bonds, and I boarded a bus for New Mexico, suffered through a 12 hour ride, sitting on a towel, blood seeping through my pants...I was met at the bus terminal by a Planned Parenthood volunteer and was driven to a doctor's office...3 hours post-procedure, no anesthetic, I was back on the bus holding a bag of sanitary napkins...

In the years before Roe v Wade, I lost a close friend to a back-alley abortion..her uterus was perforated and she bled to death...when Roe v Wade was argued successfully, I cried tears of relief...never again would a woman have to die at the end of a coat hanger...

and now this...I worry, not for my 50 year old daughter, but for my granddaughter...we cannot go back...

[musette_sf]

7. I was 19

and I waited to have sex until it was passed. I may have been the oldest virgin in Brooklyn. There was NO WAY that some pimply creep was going to coerce me into ending up being tortured in a pregnancy jail hellhole and having my issue trafficked to greedy barren vultures.

[FuzzyRabbit]

8. I remember in the 1960s and early 70s

every day in the newspaper, on the 2nd or 3rd page, there was at least one story about a botched abortion. Usually it was a report of a young woman whose life was saved at a hospital emergency room.

Often it was a report of a young woman's bloody body found in a dumpster.

And occasionally a young woman would tell me about being sent by her parents to the home for unwed mothers, just off Sixth Avenue in Tacoma.

Sometimes a young woman just disappeared from high school or college, then reappeared several months later with no explanation.

I could tell a couple stories with good endings, starting in 1970 when Washington state legalized abortion.

[Tickle]

9. I was

around. I can remember my mother going to New York to get an abortion

[catbyte]

10. I was 19. I never had to make that choice, but I was glad I HAD a choice.

Young women have no idea just how bad it's going to get.

[BlueBloodedAmerican]

11. I was 15 when Roe was passed. I can distinctly remember several girls in high school in the

next several years after that who didn’t have to “suit up” and sat on the sidelines in PE class because they had just had abortions. This was in blood red western Kansas.

[marybourg]

12. I was a child in the 40's and 50's who lived in an

apartment building that was like a village. I remember hearing about my friend’s mother, who had 3 daughters, going to Puerto Rico for an abortion, and I remember talk about women who had to go before a panel of ( male) doctors and (falsely) testify that they would commit suicide if forced to continue the pregnancy, thus qualifying - in liberal N.Y. - for the “ life of the mother” exception.

[Stinky The Clown]

13. I graduated high school long before Roe. I also recall, later, driving a close friend from . . . .

. . . . . where we lived in southwestern Connecticut to New York where, at the time, abortion was legal. Coming from a place where coat hanger occasional had blood on them, we were so relieved the clinic was clean and well equipped. I don't recall if it was Planned Parenthood or not. I seem to recall it was not.

[Stinky The Clown]

14. To the women who shared stories, thank you.