America before and after Roe v. Wade

Catherine Starr was 17 when she attended her first rally for abortion rights outside City Hall in St. Louis. It was May 24, 1973. Just a few months earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled on Roe v. Wade.

Women gained a constitutional right to abortion, but America would continue to argue about it for another 50 years. The Supreme Court’s decision last week to overthrow Roe has once again propelled the country into turmoil that feels all too familiar to those who experienced it for the first time. Three women on the front lines of the abortion rights movement before Roe were the law and in the early years after the verdict told their stories to The New York Times.

Toe me. Starr that day in St. Louis protested, her mother and grandmother joined her. The three generations of women rallied to protest Mayor John Poelker’s ban on city hospitals from performing abortions.

In the early days after Roe, legal access to abortion was still difficult or unavailable in many states. It was only the year before, in 1972, that unmarried men and women were granted the right of access to birth control.

The Roe decision came too late for me. Starr. A year earlier, at 16, she was pregnant. Without the option of a safe, legal abortion, she said, she gave birth to a baby boy and then gave him up for adoption.

Me. Starr went to the rally because she “wants to be able to make sure the next girl who gets pregnant has an option,” she said.

“Giving up a child is like giving one up for death, but in a way it’s worse because you know nothing about the child,” she said. Starr, now 66, said. “I had a little boy, and years would pass and I would sit back and wonder if he’s still alive, is he happy, is he healthy?”

About 10 years ago, Ms. Starr’s son found her and they made contact again. The conversation was initially uncomfortable, she said, but eventually therapeutic. Her son told her that he was grateful for her decision and that he had a pretty good life. He also told her he was in favor of abortion rights, she said, a pleasant surprise for her.

“Most children would probably not want to know that their mother was thinking about having an abortion,” she said. “But I have. I was 15 when I was pregnant, and 16 when I had him and I was terribly young. ”

“He asked me, ‘You could have had an abortion, why did you not do it?’ And I said, ‘Well, actually, I could not have, it was not legal at the time,’ “she continued. “I said I did not want to have an illegal abortion and as soon as I started feeling him there, I just could not do it.”

Susan Bilyeu was counseling a patient at an abortion clinic when she heard screams. When she opened the door, she saw flames and a nursing assistant on the floor holding her eyes.

Ms Bilyeu, then 25, was swept away in an escalation of violence around abortion clinics in the late 1970s. Legal challenges for wart abortion continued to fail. People chained themselves to the doors of clinics and shouted at women and staff members as they entered the facilities. “It was really quite nasty,” says Karissa Haugeberg, assistant professor of history at Tulane University.

By me. Bilyeu’s clinic found a man posing as a delivery worker splashing petrol on the assistant’s face and setting the building on fire. Me. Bilyeu helped carry the injured worker out of the burning building. There was also a 16-year-old amid an abortion. They called an ambulance and took her two blocks further to the women’s hospital.

“No one changed their mind about having an abortion that day,” she said.

Me. Bilyeu said she felt fundamentally connected to the abortion rights movement because of the stories her mother, born in 1917, told her, including about her aunt who almost died of an abortion.

“I got involved because I knew people who were struggling,” she said. “I am not pro-abortion, I am pro-choice. “No one should be forced to have a child, and I certainly do not want anyone to die from it.”

Loretta J. Ross grew up in a conservative household in the 1960s. She became pregnant at 14 after her cousin raped her. Her only choice at that point, she said, was to raise the child herself, or give him up for adoption. She gave birth to her son in 1969, and kept him.

The experience has me. Ross, now a professor at Smith College, formed as an activist and a black feminist, she said.

“I went from a scared teenager to an active teenage mom,” she said, “so it had a definite impact on my consciousness and it separated me from the rest of the kids at school.”

She enrolled at Howard University in 1970. Washington, DC, was in turmoil after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Me. Ross was tear gas when she attended her first protest at 16. She also became pregnant again. Her older sister forged their mother’s signature on the consent slip, but because Washington legalized abortion in 1971, she was able to get one.

Yet other issues for Ms Ross and her fellow classmates were priorities, such as apartheid and gentrification. There was no sense of urgency around abortion rights for me. Ross did not, she said, until the Hyde Amendment was passed in 1976, which banned federal funding for abortion, which affected low-income women excessively.

For Ms Ross, her activism on abortion rights coincided and sometimes made her political coming of age as a Black woman difficult.

“When I was with the people of the Black Nationalist movement, I actually felt more feminist than not,” she said. “I would call myself a Black Marxist feminist. But when I was with white women, I was just like, ‘I’m not a feminist like you, so I do not want to use the word.

Concern that black women do not have a presence in the women’s movement is what prompted Eleanor Holmes Norton, a District of Columbia delegate from the House who does not have the right to vote, to co-found the National Black Feminist Organization. Despite the formation of the group in 1973, amid Roe, abortion did not play a major role in their conversations, she said.

Black women receive about one-third of abortions in the United States, according to recent data from the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights. But me. Ross, who tried to help the National Organization for Women plan a women’s rights march, said it was difficult to get black women’s organizations involved because few wanted to get involved in the abortion debate.

For a second march in April 1989, which drew more than 600,000 people, Ms Ross made a banner for women of color to gather around to make themselves visible.

Over the years, she has stuck to one principle. “I would definitely stand up for women’s rights,” she said.