Lest We Forget the Era Preceding Roe vs. Wade

I could tell you, on this 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade ruling, about the politics of abortion: how conservatives earn "pro-life" props by sticking it to poor women and young women with mean-spirited rules and bans; how President Bush appointed to a federal reproductive panel an anti-abortion doctor who wouldn't prescribe birth control for unmarried women; how Senate Republicans may make it illegal for teenagers in states that limit abortion for minors to travel to get abortions in states that don't. (Gee, why didn't they try that on the underage spring-break party animals who used to drive from New England to Florida so they could drink legally till they puked?)

I could tell you about the violence, too, the torching of clinics, the harassing of patients -- a Los Angeles woman who had had abdominal surgery was pummeled by "pro-lifers" until her stitches tore -- and the intimidation, the killings of doctors, nurses and staff by zealots.

But I'm going to tell you about how it was before abortion was legal, and if the "pro-life" forces get their way, this is how it will be again.

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Every big-city hospital had one -- a septic abortion ward, for women who had nearly killed themselves trying to abort a pregnancy.

Dr. Daniel Mishell is now professor and chairman of the ob-gyn department at the Keck School of Medicine at USC. In the years before Roe vs. Wade, he was a resident at Harbor General Hospital near Torrance and later at what is now County-USC hospital.

The women he treated "were the sickest patients, I'll tell you that, because of what they did and the infections they got" -- appalling infections like gas gangrene, which killed tissue and sometimes the patient. "We had ladies who got so infected they went in shock and their kidneys shut down. A lot of them did die."

At any one time, 15 or 20 women lay in the county hospital septic abortion ward, an additional half a dozen at Harbor. They were too sick to talk, but Mishell knew the common thread: usually unmarried and abandoned by the man, uniformly, suicidally desperate.

They jabbed into their uteruses with knitting needles and coat hangers, which Mishell sometimes found still inside them. They stuck in bicycle pump nozzles, sometimes sending a fatal burst of air to the heart. They'd try to insert chemicals -- drain cleaner, fertilizer, radiator-flush -- and miss the cervix, corrode an artery and bleed to death. Mishell once put a catheter into a woman's bladder and "got a tablespoon of motor oil."