Don’t drag Missouri women back into the dangerous past with Texas-style abortion law - Kansas City Star

“There were a number of women who would come in periodically to the emergency room after failed or botched abortions, either self-induced or by some back-alley provider. These women would come in with major sepsis (an infection in the abdominal cavity). In the absence of antibiotics, we had to place four quadrant drains, which would drain pus out of the abdominal cavity, and hopefully save them for the ability to have children later on. Some would end up sterile simply because of infections which affected their fallopian tubes. Some we were able to save but it was hard work … it was intensive care. There was an abortion ban, but it was a matter of access. If you were white and had financial resources, there was never any problem getting an abortion if you needed one. If you were not white and did not have money, you had to go to the back alley to get it done.”

Dr. Godofredo Herzog, a retired 90-year-old St. Louis OB-GYN, told me what it was like before the 1973 U.S Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision.

His stories shook me to my core, detailing what women regularly faced before that monumental case.

Turning 18 in 1972 in time to vote for president (with the newly lowered voting age of 18), I could have easily been one of those women treated by Dr. Herzog. I scrimped to find college tuition money, with no extra for a costly abortion if I needed one. I remember the whispered stories about a procedure called a “D&C,” later realizing my mother and her friends were talking about abortions.

Birth control pills had just become legal in 1972 for women, regardless of marital status, requiring states to reverse their bans on contraception. It was a time of limited options for women: Women could not get a credit card, serve on a jury, keep a job if pregnant, take legal action against workplace sexual harassment or even refuse to have sex with their husbands.

We cannot go back there.

We cannot go back to blindfolding women to keep the location and the provider’s identity secret, with women driven to back-alley quack doctors to potentially be sexually abused or killed. We cannot go back to the desperation that led one to purposefully fall down flights of stairs or use a coat hanger internally to try to end a pregnancy.

Before Roe v Wade was the law of the land, women died — women predominately of low income and of color. Their lives were casually abandoned as male-dominated legislatures and courts deemed women’s bodily autonomy to be of no value.

Now, less than 50 years after Roe v Wade, legislatures and courts are back there, dismissing and regarding women as property, as the Founding Fathers saw us.

Early in 2020, journalist Charles Jaco asked a packed auditorium in St. Louis, “Are you willing to risk prison for helping a woman obtain an abortion?”

This was not a rhetorical question.

Jaco reminded us that my former colleague, state Sen. Mike Moon, had introduced H.B. 1799 when he was in the Missouri House, defining life as beginning at conception, requiring police to affirmatively intervene and press charges to protect that “unborn child in a woman’s womb.” The auditorium was aghast.

The GOP-controlled Texas Legislature seized that premise, and in September, Gov. Greg Abbott signed an unconstitutional abortion ban into law, allowing anyone anywhere to intervene and sue.

Jaco’s question continues to haunt me, as do Dr. Herzog’s recollections about life before Roe.

For nine years, I had a front-row seat on the floor of the Missouri House where the GOP majority routinely threw women under the bus. I’ve never been so ragingly angry as OB-GYNS were disparaged and women’s reproductive options restricted every single year with the GOP’s agenda to mandate forced pregnancy.

Women have had abortions since the beginning of time. They will continue to have abortions. Nearly 70% of Americans understand that and do not want Roe v. Wade to be overturned.

Before Roe, women were maimed, and many died. If Roe goes away, they will die again.

We cannot go back there.

Jaco repeated his question to that spellbound audience: “The question you’re going to have to ask yourself when you look in the mirror, if worse comes to worst: Am I personally, me, the person staring back at you, willing to risk going to prison to guarantee a woman’s reproductive rights?”

I know my answer.

source: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-commentary/article255659976.html

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