"..."The Worst of Times," (is) a collection of interviews with women, cops, coroners, and practitioners from the illegal abortion era. In 1948, when (one) doctor was an intern in a Pittsburgh hospital, a woman was admitted with severe pelvic sepsis after a bad abortion. She was beautiful, married to someone important and wealthy, and already in renal failure. Over the next couple of days, despite heroic efforts to save her, a cascade of systemic catastrophes due to the overwhelming infection culminated with the small blood vessels bursting under her skin, bruises breaking out everywhere as if some invisible fist were punching her over and over, and she died. Being well-to-do didn't always save you.
Her death was so horrible that it made him, he recalls, physically ill... It took him another 20 years to understand that it was not the abortionist who killed her--it was the legal system, the lawmakers who forced her away from the medical community, who 'killed her just as surely as if they held the catheter or the coat hanger or whatever. I'm still angry. It was all so unnecessary.' ...
...In the same book, a man who assisted in autopsies in a big urban hospital, starting in the mid-1950s, describes the many deaths from botched abortions that he saw. 'The deaths stopped overnight in 1973.' He never saw another in the 18 years before he retired. 'That,' he says, 'ought to tell people something about keeping abortion legal.'
eye'm thynkin': "The Worst of Times" should be required reading--every word of it out loud--before each and every Republican-led vote on abortion. Every word of it should be memorized before any anti-abortion activist stands up and proselytizes about how they are saving lives. EVERY SINGLE WORD.
Read more at Mother Jones
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