Sally Field, the actress whose iconic roles range from Gidget to Norma Rae to Mary Todd Lincoln, is warning voters about the dangers of electing a president who doesn’t firmly support a woman’s right to abortion that is safe, legal and quickly obtainable nearby.
She made a video describing how, at 17, her doctor drove her to Tijuana in Mexico, handed her some money and told her which building to enter. She endured molestation from a man prepping her for the procedure, followed by an abortion without anesthesia.
My experience was similar but not nearly so harrowing.
As a pregnant 17-year-old in 1969, the only doctor I’d ever seen was an elderly pediatrician. Knowing I couldn’t turn to him or to my parents left me one option: an illicit, black-market abortion arranged through a word-of-mouth network that stretched 30 miles from the South Side of Chicago to the suburbs.
Friends drove me into the city for my evening appointment. We entered a bungalow indistinguishable from all the others in the neighborhood and sat down in the living room. Our host offered us drinks made from Tang (an orange-flavored powder) and vodka. Then he excused himself and went downstairs to the basement.
When he returned, he was wearing a formerly white, knee-length lab coat like doctors wear, although he was not a doctor. The front of it was covered in old, dried blood stains. He stood in front of me, counting the wad of bills I handed him from my purse while I stared at those stains. Getting that money had required begging, borrowing and stealing. I was gambling that he wouldn’t turn me away because I was $50 short of the $500 he’d expected.
He didn’t, but I had to swear to him I would send the 50 bucks as soon as I could.
He led us downstairs. Most of it was a dark, but furnished basement. A closet off to one side had been turned into an operating room. He gave me three injections of who-knows-what, and I soon became insensible, waking only once while in the closet to feel one of my friends stroking my hair and assuring me it would be over soon. Later, she told me she’d thrown up twice, that our host had performed abortions on two other girls while I was there and that the mother of one of them had been screaming at him that her daughter was bleeding too much.
I was lucky. I felt no pain, wasn’t sexually assaulted and suffered no injuries threatening my health or even my life. That is the way every abortion should be. Which is why they must be safe, legal and readily available wherever a woman lives. Unless, of course, you wouldn’t mind your own wife, daughter or sister having to rely on unsafe, illegal and hard-to-get surgery in another country or in somebody’s basement.
Subversive Speech 