In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (18 page)

Women of my generation still need to bear witness; we still carry the traumas. For my first abortion in 1960 I took the Cuba option that had scared O’Reilly. Here’s what I remember: Banging on a door during the midday siesta in a strange neighborhood in Havana. Wriggling my toes a few hours later, astonished to be alive. Boarding a small plane to Key West and hitchhiking back to New York bleeding all the way. Bleeding? I must have been hemorrhaging. In which state did I leave the motel bed drenched with my blood?

No movement is without heroic antecedents. In 1962
Sherri Finkbine, the host of
Romper Room
, a franchised television show for children in Phoenix, Arizona, went public with her insistence that the medical establishment owed her a legal abortion. That was the year thalidomide, a tranquilizer prescribed for morning sickness, was found to deform the fetus. Finkbine, pregnant with her fifth child, had taken the drug. A therapeutic procedure was approved for her at a Phoenix hospital, but when she gave an interview to a newspaper reporter, the nervous doctors reneged. Finkbine stubbornly pressed her case in an avalanche of media attention. With time running out, she flew to Sweden for a legal termination. Her public
odyssey ended her television career, but it opened the door to a national debate.

Four years later Patricia Maginnis, a survivor of three illegal terminations, two self-induced, founded the Society
for Humane Abortion in California. Working with Lana Clarke Phelan and Rowena Gurner, she put out an abortion handbook of practical advice and took the brave step of offering referrals through the mail. Her mimeographed list of Mexican clinics bore a startling legend: “A woman has the right to control her own body.” Few people knew the electrifying phrase had been voiced by Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, at the turn of the century.

I was vacationing in London during the summer of 1967 while Parliament was moving toward passage of an extremely liberal Termination of Pregnancy bill. Nothing about this remarkable event had appeared in the American press, so I wrote a piece for
The Village Voice
and enjoyed watching
The New York Times
play catch-up. By then I’d been to Puerto Rico for my second and third illegal abortions.
Voice
writers seldom shrank from first-person journalism, but it never occurred to me to tell my own story. The movement was to pioneer that strategy two years later. In 1967 I wrote simply that Britain’s move toward legalization exemplified the civilizing influences one found in that country.

That year the Reverend Howard Moody of the Judson Square Memorial Church in Greenwich Village added
abortion referrals to his long list of humanitarian missions. Two years later the liberal Baptist with a powerful commitment to social justice had inspired a loose federation of ministers and rabbis in six cities. Moody’s Clergy Consultation Service sent women to local abortionists who passed its stringent tests, and also had working arrangements with doctors in London and Puerto Rico. Here and there at the major colleges, students increasingly found they could count on someone, another student or the wife of a professor, for a solid referral.

I wrote about the Clergy Consultation Service for
New York
magazine. The feminist movement was beginning to make itself heard, and my piece reflected a certain new surliness that was abroad in the land. One clergyman I interviewed had preened with self-importance, which
did not sit well with my growing militance. I appreciated the fact that men of the cloth were risking arrest to help desperate women, but women were becoming infused with the urgent desire to help themselves.

Improved technology was reducing abortion’s medical dangers. Dilation and curettage with a local pain blocker had become a quick, relatively painless procedure for abortion seekers under three months pregnant. The vacuum aspirator, developed in China, where condoms and diaphragms were unavailable, cleaned out the uterus by suction instead of scraping. Elsewhere in the world, saline abortions for more advanced pregnancies were proving effective, but few American doctors dared to explore the technique.

February 1969 was an important month in the abortion struggle. Larry Lader, a biographer of Margaret Sanger, summoned a handful of professionals in law and medicine to the Drake Hotel in Chicago for the organizing conference of
NARAL, the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws. (NARAL became the National Abortion Rights Action League in 1974.) The conferees targeted specific states where they believed the repressive codes could be knocked down. New York, with its liberal constituency, was a top priority. Bills ranging from modest reform (in cases of rape and incest) to outright repeal of all criminal penalties were already in the legislative hopper.

Betty Friedan, one of the main speakers at the Chicago NARAL meeting, reflected the changing political climate. At NOW’s founding convention in 1966, she had bowed to a clique that insisted abortion rights were too divisive, too sexual, and too controversial for the fledgling organization, but since then a groundswell of younger members had stiffened her spine. NOW was being inundated by “kids,” one member observed. The “kids” from New York, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere pushed through an abortion plank at NOW’s 1967 convention.

And the “kids” were forging ahead with their own tactics. On the same wintry day in mid-February when NARAL’s founders were traveling to Chicago for their first conference six state legislators held a public hearing in Manhattan on some proposed liberalizing amendments
to the New York law. Typical of the times, the six legislators were men, and the speakers invited to present expert testimony were fourteen men and a Catholic nun.

On the morning of the February 13 hearing, a dozen infiltrators camouflaged in dresses and stockings entered the hearing room and spaced themselves around the chamber. Some called themselves
Redstockings, and some, like Joyce Ravitz, were free-floating radicals who were practiced hands at political disruptions. Ravitz, in fact, had been on her way to another demonstration when she’d run into the Redstockings women, who convinced her to join them.

As a retired judge opined that abortion might be countenanced as a remedy after a woman had “fulfilled her biological service to the community” by bearing four children, Kathie Amatniek leaped to her feet and shouted, “Let’s hear from the real experts—women!” Taking her cue, Joyce Ravitz began to declaim an impassioned oration. Ellen Willis jumped in. More women rose to their feet.

“Men don’t get pregnant, men don’t bear children. Men just make laws,” a demonstrator bellowed.

“Why are you refusing to admit we exist?” cried another.

“Girls, girls, you’ve made your point. Sit down. I’m on your side,” a legislator urged, raising the temperature a notch higher.

“Don’t call us girls,” came the unified response. “We are women!”

The hearing dissolved in confusion. When the chairman attempted to reconvene it behind closed doors, the women sat down in the corridor, refusing to budge.

Stories appeared the next day in the
Times
(“Women Break Up Abortion Hearing”), the
New York Post
(“Abortion Law Protesters Disrupt Panel”) and the
Daily News
(“Gals Squeal for Repeal, Abort State Hearing”). Ellen Willis slipped out of her activist guise to do a report for Talk of the Town in
The New Yorker
. Nanette Rainone filed for WBAI radio and the Pacifica network. Barely a month old, Redstockings, with an assist from the radical floaters, had successfully dramatized the need for “woman as expert” in the abortion debate.

Five weeks later, on March 21, 1969, Redstockings staged a
public speak-out, “Abortion: Tell It Like It Is,” at the Washington Square
Methodist Church, a hub of antiwar activism in Greenwich Village. For some Women’s Liberation founders, the speak-out was the movement’s finest hour. “Astounding,” is the way Irene Peslikis puts it. “It showed the power of consciousness-raising, how theory comes from deep inside a person’s life, and how it leads directly to action.”

Peslikis had organized the panel and coached the women who were willing to speak. “The idea,” she says, “was to get examples of different kinds of experiences—women who’d had the babies that were taken away, women who went to the hospital for a therapeutic abortion, women who’d gone the illegal route, the different kinds of illegal routes.”

Three hundred women and a few men filled the church that evening as Helen Kritzler, Barbara Kaminsky, Rosalyn Baxandall, Anne Forer, and a few other brave souls passed a small microphone back and forth. Baxandall broke the ice with a touch of humor. “I thought I was sophisticated,” she joked into the mike. “My boyfriend told me if he came a second time, the sperm would wash away, and I believed him.”

Another woman recounted, “So there I was in West New York, New Jersey, and the doctor had these crucifixes and holy pictures on the wall, and all he wanted was nine hundred dollars. I took out a vacation loan and I’m still paying it off.”

Judy Gabree hurtled forward. “I went to eleven hospitals searching for a therapeutic abortion. At the tenth, they offered me a deal. They’d do it if I agreed to get sterilized. I was twenty years old. I had to pretend I was crazy and suicidal, but having the abortion was the sanest thing I’d done.”

More women added their personal testimony. I was one of those who kept quiet. Irene Peslikis had asked me to be one of the speakers, but I chose an easier path and played
Village Voice
reporter. My front-page story, “Everywoman’s Abortions: The Oppressor Is Man,” was the only substantive coverage the landmark speak-out received. Someone retyped it in Chicago for the
Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement
newsletter, which carried the news to activists around the country.

Another
journalist, in aviator glasses and a miniskirt, was taking notes in the church that evening. She hovered near Jane Everhart, a NOW member, and whispered, “What’s going on?”

Everhart whispered back, “Sit down and listen!”

Gloria Steinem was a friend of Women’s Liberation in 1969, but she had not yet thrown in her lot with the movement. Her plate was already overflowing with causes. Gloria spoke out against the war in Vietnam on the late-night talk shows, raised money for liberal Democrats and for Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers, and wrote earnest pieces on all of her issues for the popular magazines. Genetically endowed with the rangy limbs and sculpted features of a fashion model, Steinem glided through the rarefied world of radical chic expertly building her political connections. Beneath the exterior of the celebrity journalist was a woman who yearned to save the world.

Steinem received a shock of recognition when a Redstocking quipped, “I bet every woman here has had an abortion.” Hers had been done by a Harley Street practitioner in London during the late fifties after she’d graduated from Smith. Later she would say that the speak-out was her feminist revelation, the moment that redirected her public path. That night, however, she was working on a tight deadline. She threw together a hasty paragraph for the political diary she wrote for
New York
magazine. “
Nobody wants to reform the abortion laws,” she explained in print. “They want to repeal them. Completely.”

The Redstockings abortion speak-out was an emblematic event for Women’s Liberation. Speak-outs based on the New York women’s model were organized in other cities within the year, and subsequent campaigns to change public opinion in the following decade would utilize first-person testimony in a full range of issues from rape and battery to child abuse and sexual harassment. The importance of personal testimony in a public setting, which overthrew the received wisdom of “the experts,” cannot be overestimated. It was an original technique and a powerful ideological tool. Ultimately, of course, first-person discourse on a dizzying variety of intimate subjects would become a gimmicky staple of the afternoon television talk shows, where the confessional style was utilized for its voyeuristic shock value. Back then, personal testimony was a political act of great courage.

As time speeded up during 1969, rallies and marches brought pro-abortion sentiment into the streets. Referral services directed by clergymen were augmented or replaced by referral services run by activist women. Bills to repeal restrictive abortion statutes were introduced in state legislatures by women, and lobbying efforts were directed by women. As it turned out, lawsuits brought by women attorneys provided the winning strategy in the intensified struggle.

Nancy Stearns was “ready for women’s stuff” in the summer of 1969. The young attorney with horn-rimmed glasses lived in Greenwich Village on a modest budget that allowed few concessions to fashion. Noticing one season that skirts were climbing to mid-thigh, she shortened hers with a pair of scissors to keep in style. Stearns had chosen a low-paying job in advocacy law to advance the cause of civil rights. After receiving her M.A. in political science at Berkeley, she had spent a year in Atlanta with SNCC, stuffing envelopes, answering the phones, and going to jail for a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter. When SNCC began to purge whites from its staff, she did some fast thinking and concluded that “the only way a white person could do anything that wouldn’t piss people off was to get a skill that they needed. At that point the skill seemed to be a law degree.” Stearns enrolled at NYU law school and got one.