In reference to abortion rights...
When I was a child here in Philadelphia, a story unfolded which affected the way people felt about a woman's right to a safe, legal abortion for decades. Long before I reached the age when I even began to fully understand the mechanism of reproduction I had had this tale, this true horror, etched into my brain, so that when I "came of age" as we used to say, I didn't know much, but I knew that women should be entitled to this procedure upon their own initiative and that it should be performed in a sterile, competent, medical environment.
So it seems that a well-known young, dazzlingly beautiful red-headed young lady of Jewish heritage met and married a motorcycle policeman from Florida. It made front-page news in the papers here in Philly: he was the son of a fuel distributor in Chicago and later claimed that his bride had told him that her father was a butcher.
In fact, her father was a fabulously wealthy vice-president of the Food Fair chain of supermarkets which had been extremely successful in competing with Acme, Penn Fruit, and A&P. Soon after the union, the bride had a change of heart and moved back to Philadelphia where her mother was concerned that the young lady was pregnant. The mother took her daughter to a physician who stated that he could not determine if someone were six weeks pregnant and the daughter wound up in an apartment of a bartender and his wife, a beautician where she died from complications of an attempted abortion. Search of the apartment found all kinds of instruments and medicaments associated with the procedure as it was being performed by wholly untrained personnel. There were several trials and although the husband/bartender/abortionist received a 3-10 year sentence, both he and his wife were paroled after less than a year. The mother was judged to have suffered enough and was given probation - the judge having stated that the memory of how her daughter died was sufficient punishment.
Two points I would like to make:
1. The story as I related it is almost exactly word for word how it was told to me by my mother, my aunts, and neighbors. It was Philly folklore for years and when abortion was legalized in Pennsylvania, the story was revisited in the newspapers and on talk radio, which, BTW, was very big here in the Sixties and Seventies, primarily on CBS owned WCAU-AM 1210, now a largely hate-radio station no longer owned by the network. This became an oral-history, passed down and sideways among the population of those who understood the implications of the move forward. Parenthetically, I do not believe that most activists in those days could even conceive of the backwards steps society is taking in this regard at this time.
2. This family had "all the dough in the world" and could have sent the daughter to Europe to a clinic which practiced surgical abortions, but they did not. They took a local referral and lost their child. This made news: one can only imagine how many others had the same outcome and never were heard from again.
Coincidentally in recent years, I have become acquainted with several ladies who were friends with the young girl who met such a sad end. As dentists, we meet everyone sooner or later, and in what is really such a small town as Philadelphia it is not unusual to be no more than one or two people removed from just about anyone. When I have discussed this story with these ladies, they just sadly shake their heads and say that it all happened for no reason.
A cruel lesson learned at that time...it will have to be relearned again and again and again. The inhumanity and lack of empathy is pervasive and endemic to the society. It is a sickness unto itself.
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