Articles of Faith II

So I've progressed a great deal with Articles of Faith, A Frontline History on the Abortion Wars. Author Cynthia Gorney has a journalism background and her reporting reads like a novel at times. The term fair and balanced has nothing on Gorney- I am continually amazed at her ability to present the information without tilting her hand in either direction. She allows you to get inside of the heads of people who have very valid, honest and genuine feelings about abortion without passing judgement or coming to any conclusions of what the reader should be feeling.

Women were putting themselves into horrific situations to terminate an unwanted pregnancies. While nothing about that fact was new it was becoming clearer and clearer in the mid 1960's, early 1970's that the archaic laws making abortion a felony needed to be changed. The exception was that an abortion could be performed on a women only if her life depended on it. There were those physicians and "others" who would perform an abortion in other circumstances and those illegal abortions were considered felonies. The law did not only apply to those who performed the actual procedure but also to anyone involved in referring a women to someone who could provide the service. Doctors were not allowed to perform an abortion or direct women to anyone who would perform one.

Women were left with no where safe to go and as a result the risks of infection, hysterectomies and even death could not stop them from aborting. Self administered methods or unqualified unhygienic procedures led women to end up in emergency rooms where physicians and nurses saw the botched abortions that came about as a result of criminalizing abortion. Networks did exist in some circumstances to shuttle women along through physicians, volunteers and ministers that took it upon themselves to provide women with the safest possible abortions. Often this consisted of individuals coming together over the devastating reality of women being maimed and killed because they wanted to end their pregnancies. It is these same individuals that lead the charge in the push to go through the state and eventually the National government to get the laws criminalizing abortion changed.