The Worst of Times

Underground abortions: a patient, doctor, abortionist, and detective tell their stories

By Patricia G. Miller, published on May 01, 1993 - last reviewed on August 30, 2004

Abortion is one of the most explosive topics of our times. In her quest to make sense of it all, Pittsburgh lawyer Patricia G. Miller spent two years interviewing abortion survivors, practitioners, coroners, cops, and children of women who died--all ordinary people who happened to live during a time when abortion was illegal. Here are four firsthand accounts of their experiences, each of which sheds a "bright, painful light" on an issue that won't go away.

MARIE:

In 1957 I was living in Pittsburgh. I had graduated from high school a little more than a year earlier--the first person in my family ever to do so--and was working as a secretary. We were West Virginians. I was one of thirteen children, and we were what are known as "country people."

When I first set foot in the door of my high school, I vowed that I would graduate, even though no one in my family had ever done that. I was not going to get pregnant before I got an education and I was absolutely not going to live the kind of poverty-stricken life I watched my mother and older sisters live.

I graduated from high school still a virgin, so I felt I had a good chance of surviving the trap all the women in my family had fallen into. When I was nineteen or twenty, I met a sophisticated older man. Ray was twenty-five years older than I was. He had been married and had children older than I was. In addition to his maturity and sophistication, he had, by my standards, a great deal of money. With him, I embarked on my first sexual experience.

In those days there was really no birth control--at least so far as I knew. Ray told me that if you douched every time after you had sex, you wouldn't get pregnant. What did I know? I did what he told me. Now we know that douching is one of the most dangerous things in the world to do after having sex. It doesn't get rid of the sperm, it just washes it into places where it's more likely to meet the egg.

At that time, I had no attitudes, religious or otherwise, about abortion. In fact, I don't know that I had ever even heard the word growing up. I never was aware that this was an option people had. When I was in high school, I was aware of pregnancies before marriage, but the couple always just got married. It never occurred to me that people could do anything else.

Then I had that morning so many women face--when you look in the mirror and say, "Oh, my God!" You spend your time running to the bathroom, hoping against hope to see that magic spot of blood, but it doesn't happen. Finally, you reluctantly admit that it just isn't going to.

Ray said, "Of course you have to have an abortion." The only thing I'd ever heard about abortion was listening to my mother talk about jumping off kitchen tables, failing down flights of stairs, and taking hot baths--or maybe cold baths. I never really knew that there was any other way to have an abortion. Ray said, "Oh no, it's not like that. There are other ways." Ray was very--what shall I say?--well-connected. Many of his close friends were gangsters and people who lived outside the law. Ray said he knew of a good person to go to, and the reason he was good was because that's where all the gangsters took their girlfriends and their wives. Anyone involved in organized crime seemed to do nothing but the best, so this abortionist was sure to be "the best money can buy." It certainly made sense to me.

Ray made all the arrangements and told me that he and another man would pick me up and we would drive to Youngstown, Ohio. At the appointed time, at night, Ray and his friend Lloyd picked me up. I had met Lloyd before. He was a convicted murderer. I don't know how he had killed, but he'd served his time. He was out of jail, working as a bookie.

That late-night car trip to Ohio happened many years ago, but I can see it as vividly as if it was yesterday. I sat in the front seat of this shiny new big black Chrysler Imperial with Ray in a black cashmere coat on one side of me and Lloyd, the murderer-turned-bookie, sporting an elegant camel's-hair coat, on the other. All the way to Ohio, the two men talked exclusively to each other, mostly about sports or gambling. I sat silent between them, feeling like I was no bigger than a candle flame in the dark. I felt almost nonexistent, like I was in some other world. The trip had a strange quality of unreality about it.

I was beyond fear--truly beyond it, I was so terrified I couldn't move or speak or even think. I just huddled there in the front seat. I didn't know where I was going or what was going to be done to me. I had no idea. Was someone going to cut my head off or cut my belly open? Either was equally possible in my mind.

When we got to Youngstown, Lloyd drove to a very rundown part of town. The houses all had a ramshackle look about them. We pulled up behind a rundown old house. It was frame and looked like it hadn't been painted in at least 25 years. The two men sat in the car, and I went up to the door by myself. I supposed I was expected, so no introduction was necessary.

An old black man with springy white hair opened the door. I found myself standing in a small room with a wooden kitchen table in the middle. Although the table needed a new paint job too, it had seen a paint brush more recently than the exterior of the house.