A strong case for pro choice

The first job I had after graduating college was at a perinatal research laboratory at a medical school and university hospital in New York City. It involved an all-day surgical procedure in which we excised the fetus and uterus of an ewe (female sheep) and implanted electrodes in the fetal skull, neck, leg and eye muscles, and threaded catheters into its blood vessels and trachea. Then we stuffed the fetus and uterus back into the mother and sewed her up good as new.

A week or two later the animal was started on a regimen of various drugs of abuse like narcotics, and fetal physiological parameters including brain waves, breathing (yes, a fetus breathes, albeit amniotic fluid, not air), heart rate, blood pressure and skeletal muscle tone were analyzed. The reason sheep were used is that other species spontaneously abort after such an invasive procedure, on the other hand, you can practically play rugby with a sheep uterus and the pregnancy will carry to term.
One of my duties as a lab assistant was to spend interminable hours in the stacks of the medical library perusing journals, looking for research articles relevant to the work of the lab. This was thirty years ago, long before a few strokes on a keyboard or subscribing to an online service accomplished the same thing. After gathering up a couple of dozen references to show the boss that I hadn't spent my time sleeping off the previous night's activities, I would occasionally kill time and entertain myself by pulling old and obscure volumes of medical anomalies off the shelf, leafing through photos of birth defects, grapefruit-sized tumors, autopsies and other gross things.

One boring afternoon in the library I happened across a 1920's-era monograph consisting of scores of photos of women who had died from back-alley abortions, published fifty years before Roe vs. Wade. Abortion in those days had few of the cultural or religious connotations presently associated with it. Doctors simply regarded botched abortions as one more thing they had to deal with in the context of big city medicine. Some quietly performed abortions as part of their practice. Every so often the papers would sensationalize the story of a madame getting arrested for performing abortions in her brothel. There were no National Right to Life Committees, clinic protests and bombings, or posturing politicians capitalizing on the cultural divide.

Thirty years later some of the images from that medical text are still with me. Page after page of photos of women and girls who died from unsafe abortions, laid out on slabs in an autopsy room, many with facial features contorted from the fear and pain they were suffering when they died. Women of all different ages, colors, shapes and sizes. One in particularly stands out in my mind to this day. According to the text, she had been in her late teens when she died at the hands of a "back-alley" abortionist.
The butcher had taken a large surgical retractor, roughly the same size and shape as a six-iron golf club, and rammed it into the young woman's vagina. An accompanying photo showed her laying there, her abdomen sliced open, the crude instrument perforating the top of her uterus and protruding from her intestines.

That ruin, dispassionately splayed out over an autopsy table and depicted in a black-and-white photo in a long-forgotten yellowed medical volume, was once someone's daughter. A parent got a telephone call or knock on the door at 4 am to come to the local hospital morgue and make an identification, all because of the shame and desperation and condemnation that a young woman faced because of an unintended pregnancy.

The so-called "pro-life" movement contends that Roe was an arbitrary decision by a Supreme Court bent on judicial activism. In fact, prior to Roe, 16 states had already ratified a woman's right to abortion to protect the health or life of the mother. Two of these, California (1967) and New York (1970) legalized abortion on demand years before the court decision. Therefore, the Supreme Court, based on precedent, merely validated and accelerated the establishment of abortion rights across the land, rather than force some change in core American values and beliefs.

Thanks to that humane and enlightened court decision, women now reserve to themselves the decision to bring a child into the world. The 13-year-old who is a mere child herself, the college student still years from attainment of her degree, the woman on the verge of professional advancement in her career, and the woman who has completed her family no longer need live in fear of an unwanted pregnancy that has the potential to turn their lives upside-down.

The pro-life lobby also wants people to believe that Roe vs. Wade has increased the number of abortions by providing easy access to women who wish to terminate a pregnancy. Actually, the number of abortions in our country before and after Roe was and has remained over a million a year. The difference is that those women who used to rely on a coat-hanger, a potion provided by the neighborhood medicine woman or a girlfriend with a flashlight and a screwdriver now have access to a physician in a professional medical environment.

I don't think anyone can say with certainty when human life begins. The 230-year-old U.S. Constitution defines a citizen as anyone "born or naturalized" not "pre-born or conceived." Legal rights in America attach at birth, not conception. These include rights of personhood, such as property rights and inheritance. Restrictive abortion laws make no sense in light of history. They are a relatively recent contrivance, rooted in narrow religious viewpoint and steeped in the oppression of women.

When abortion is illegal, women die. They died by the thousands in this country before the procedure was made safe and legal. These were our sisters, daughters, wives and mothers. Why would we want to go back to those days?