"Desperate pregnant women will have abortions. Making abortions illegal again will just sacrifice women with no money and resources to get safe abortions."
By Lynne Foster Shifriss
BLOOMINGTON, IN — If the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the State of Texas’ new abortion law succeeds, I will still keep donating and raising money for women’s reproductive rights. When the Covid situation allows, I will resume volunteering to escort women into the Planned Parenthood clinic safely, making small talk to drown out the screams of protestors.
That’s because I am old enough to remember.
Roe vs. Wade did not happen until I was a sophomore in college, in 1973.
But when I was in high school, my mom told me this story. Mom had gone to work when I was in junior high so that my sister and I could go to college. There was another woman in the office. Mom did not know her well. But she called Mom one day, begging her for help. She was on the floor of a motel room, bleeding a lot. She had had an abortion there. But now, she was alone.
The man had told her he loved her. She slept with him. When she got pregnant, he dumped her. She had no family willing to help her.
My mom was able to get her to the emergency room. She lived.
Mom said, when she told me the story, “You know, I’m a Republican. But we can never let men decide these things for us.”
And then, during college, I had a dismal summer job, folding and bagging clothes that had been returned at Lane Bryant’s, a huge clothing company in Indianapolis.
Across the table was a woman just my age, 20. She was married, with a five-year-old child. Her husband beat both of them, sometimes with a coat hanger or other instruments. She told me that the year before, when she found out she was pregnant again, when abortion was still illegal, she was terrified. Her minister told her it was her duty to stay with her husband. But she dreamed of getting away, of taking her child and starting over someplace far away. She aborted herself with a knitting needle, puncturing her uterus. She nearly died.
After I went back to college in the fall, I asked her to bring her child and come for a weekend. She said, “We can’t really be friends. Our lives are different.”
But our lives were not just different because I got to go to college. My mom and dad would always have supported me. They might have been furious if I had become pregnant without being married, but they would have done everything they could to help. Or I could have borrowed money and gotten an abortion.
People with money can always figure out a way. But women without supportive families, without money, cannot.
Here in southern Indiana, when I was escorting at Planned Parenthood, we saw plenty of women who had come from Kentucky, where Louisville has the only abortion clinic in the state.
So when that law passed in Texas, I googled to see where there are abortion clinics in Illinois. Because you can bet that other states will do the same kind of thing, and Indiana is likely to be one of them.
A few years ago, some of us were at the Indiana Statehouse, advocating on behalf of Planned Parenthood. A friend of mine said to a state rep, “Why do you sign onto these laws to make getting an abortion more difficult? You know that the state will be sued and it will be found unconstitutional, and all you’ve done is cost the taxpayers of Indiana a few hundred thousand in legal fees.”
The rep said “It’s saving babies.” But it isn’t. Desperate pregnant women will have abortions. Making abortions illegal again will just sacrifice women with no money and resources to get safe abortions.
The day after the 2016 presidential election, I said to my husband, “We’d better make sure the cars are in good shape.” He asked why. And I told him that it looked likely that I’d be driving women to Illinois.
And I am still ready, if that need arises. Because I remember.
