Most abortion providing physicians are now either approaching age 65 or already past the conventional retirement age. Many continue to care for women seeking abortion because there is no one to replace them. And because they remember. [video links]

Dr. Mildred Hanson provided women with abortion care before Roe v. Wade.  

If you saw ... the morbidity and mortality rates from illegal abortion and the number of unwanted pregnancies, it was obvious that something needed to be done. No amount of proselytizing or theorizing about the sanctity of unborn life was going to change that reality.
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Abortion is a part of medical care, and people who seek abortions are every bit as ethical, as Christian--as godlike, if you will--as those who don't have abortions. And I really believe that with all my heart. And the people who do abortions are every bit as ethical and as kind and loving and godlike as those who think abortion is wrong.
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When you talk about the abortion deaths that occurred in pre-Roe v. Wade days, young people today don't believe it. Young doctors today do not believe it. ...  We just cannot let that happen again.

We saw women who were desperate to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, who would resort to whatever it took to end that unwanted pregnancy, and sometimes they actually put their life on the line. They went to illegal abortionists. They bled to death. They died of infection, or they did self-mutilation procedures in an attempt to end the pregnancy: coat hangers in the uterus, slippery elm in the uterus, potassium permanganate in their vagina--anything they could think of.

Dr. Harry Jonas remembers his experiences as a young physician in Missouri.

When I was a first-year intern at the Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, the first patient I had was a woman who'd had 11 children and had self-aborted herself, because she couldn't get a legal abortion, with some instrument of some kind. And I was in charge of her case, as a young intern, with her intestine coming out of her vagina because she'd perforated the vagina with the instrument. And she had massive infection, multiple abscesses in all the vital organs in the body and she died.

I still remember that patient. I remember exactly what she looked like. I remember the bed she was in on Ward 1418 in Barnes Hospital. I remember seeing her in the emergency room when she came in, and she told us that she was desperate because she had a husband that was gone most of the time and a troublemaker. And she could not raise another child. She could not feed another child. She had not been able to find any doctor that would help her. I'll never forget that.
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Many [women] ended up with illegal abortions, and many of them died. And for 25 years prior to Roe v. Wade in my state of Missouri, the most common cause of death in women of childbearing age was death due to infected, illegal, self-induced abortion.

Dr. Eugene Glick is perhaps best known as the author of the authoritative text Surgical Abortion.  But Dr. Glick has his pre-Roe memories, as well.

I remember one woman had taken a coke bottle, broken it off, fired the end of it so she made her own speculum. And she put the neck into the vagina and then got it against the cervix, and then somehow or other managed to get this rubber tubing up inside. And she got quite ill.

I remember getting introduced to something called septic abortion. It is a condition that is caused by the breakdown of bacteria in an infected site. I remember a woman losing the tips of her fingers because of the endotoxic shock causing the blood vessels to shrink down. It was just terrible.

They were denied the medical help to save their life unless they confessed. Detectives came in and were questioning. Whenever we got a hint that it might be illegal, or the causation was some sort of illegal operation, we had to report it.

I'd say, "You're going to die if you don't tell us. You're going to die and it's going to be terrible." That's a horrible thing for a doctor to have to scare the hell out of his patient in order to save her life. It's terrible, but that's what we did. That's what we had to do.
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The image that I retain was that of a 31-year-old Mexican-American woman who died of endotoxic shock with her husband and four or five children around. I see the bed. I see the kids crying and I see the husband crying. It's a strange condition, this endotoxic shock. Your ability to reason and talk is fine. You just don't have any blood pressure and have a blue coloration. We know they're going to die and yet they haven't lost it. The last thing that goes is the brain. The kidney is shut down. The heart's going a little irregular and there's nothing we can do, because the bacteria and clots have gone throughout the body into all the blood vessels of all the vital organs, and yet they're talking to us. It's a sense of helplessness.

The candor of Dr. William Harrison of Fayetteville, Arkansas, has ignited a recent firestorm of condemnation among the Religious Right. But he has a long memory, too.

After embarking upon his medical career in the late 1960s, he originally opted to specialize in obstetrics because of the joy he experienced at the birth of his own children. But then came what he calls a career-transforming experience.

"I was assigned a patient who was a middle-aged black woman," he explained. "She was a very sad-looking woman. When I asked what was wrong, she said she had a tumor in her belly. I examined her and quickly determined that it was a far advanced pregnancy."

"She looked at me and she began to cry. She said, 'Oh, God doctor, I was hoping that it was cancer.' I didn't tell this story for years and years, because every time I tell it, I cry."
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Then came a litany of patients who had undergone horrific, botched procedures. One woman had used such a caustic substance on herself to terminate her pregnancy that when she arrived at Harrison's clinic she had no vagina.

"If you saw the hundreds of patients who have suffered such serious trauma in trying to self-abort, you would soon realize that there has to be a more humane way of dealing with unwanted pregnancies."

But this death-dealing version of a "pro-life" philosophy is what many Christians claim to want. Even without the reversal of Roe v. Wade, their vision of an America free of the "taint" of legal abortion is already coming to pass -- a dark vision crowded with the ghosts of America's past.

In November PBS's "Frontline" presented a preview of the America that the Religious Right wants restored in an excellent documentary on the lack of reproductive freedom in Mississippi today: The Last Abortion Clinic, viewable online at the PBS website.   And in a story about that film, Whistling past the Graveyard, I have written of how access to abortion care already is being eroded in other states, including mine.

Even in the major metropolitan area of Dallas, "moral values" TRAP laws are driving women and teenage girls into deep and dangerous waters. Two or three women a week finally make their way to our clinic only after having tried everything from self-injecting multiple vials of Methergine, to ingesting up to 30 tabs of Cytotec (10 times the therapeutic dose when used as the stage-two drug in medical abortion), to taking or doing just about anything else you can think of, including punching their abdomens purple. Some of the women who try to abort themselves are from countries where abortion is illegal, and they already "know" and accept that abortion is dangerous.

But it could be worse, and in some places it is. What follows is from a friend who is an abortion provider in yet another southern state, and who saw "abortion wards" up close and personal before 1973.

Our local university medical hospital tells me they see 12-20 patients per year already who have either self-induced or had illegal abortions. Some make it, some don't. These are underage and/or poor women mostly and a few daughters of pro-life families who can't be seen entering a clinic or going against what their parents believe. So we're already living with this at that level and know it will increase when Roe falls. As a matter of fact I've already been approached to help them organize an 'abortion ward' -- like in the old days -- as they know their caseload will mushroom.
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I know other 'private' docs and hospitals are experiencing the same but just like in pre-Roe days, mum's the word. Most people don't even realize hospitals had abortion wards before Roe. Just like what's happening today, it simply wasn't talked about openly.

We deal occasionally with a patient who's attempted to self-induce (through use of caustic douching or ingestion - most common being taking an entire bottle of quinidine tabs chased with castor oil). When the quinidine dosers call, we get involved with getting them to E.R. before their cardiac rhythm is interrupted -- then if the pregnancy continues, we provide abortion care at little or no charge -- as patients are usually poor.
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To know now how safe and simple this care is and deal with the fallout from criminalization (knowing that those injuries and infections were totally avoidable -- except for the religious right, ignorant, backward, etc., etc., etc.), going back to holding women in my arms while they die a totally preventable death is not something I aspire to and not sure I can hold up to it.

Yet another abortion provider in the Deep South courageously appeared in the "Frontline" film and spoke for all of us.

Historically, you will find information about a woman called the Red Rubber Catheter Lady. She would travel at least 200 miles coming out of Arkansas, ... and for $200, she would insert a catheter in a woman's uterus, a pregnant woman's uterus, and leave her. And the reason that you could find the documentation for this is that these women would end up in emergency rooms bleeding and septic, with a red rubber catheter still hanging out of their uterus.
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Abortion is not a fundamental right for many, many women, particularly for poor women and rural women. There's no doubt about it that it is as though abortion is illegal.
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So what the state has done is basically subjected a class of women, poor women, to forced maternity on behalf of the state.

And they can do it because they can get away with it. These are voiceless and faceless women. They don't have representation in the legislature or really in Congress. No one's speaking on their behalf. And in that example, to some extent, it is like the pre-Roe days. ...
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[W]ell, I know what poor women would do if Roe was overturned. They would go back to aborting themselves, or they would go back to the Red Rubber Catheter Lady who inserts a catheter in a pregnant uterus and leaves the woman. And it's so senseless, because this is basic human health care.
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I think that most women and men are asleep. I don't think they realize what's going on. And in that respect, I think that the assault on abortion rights is very clever; it's very smart. And we are losing. ...

Yes, we are losing.  Only Saturday I took a call from a young woman who has been pregnant for 16 weeks, now one week too many for a woman who wants to have an abortion in a Texas clinic.  I explained the law, and offered her the only help I could: referrals to three ambulatory surgical centers in a state the size of France. She asked, "How much will it cost, about $700?"  I told her that the cost in any of the ASCs to which I could refer her would be about twice that much.  And then she very softly said, "Thank you, but if it's that much, don't even give me the numbers. I'm going to get rid of this no matter what I have to do, but at least when I do it myself it's gonna be free."  She didn't sound upset or angry, only quietly and absolutely determined.

Then she said goodbye.  And then, with my face in my hands, I cried.

God help her. And God forbid.