Maybe you don’t remember the days before January 23, 1973. Maybe you were not even born. But some of us do. Some remember it far too vividly.
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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“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.”
I was 14 the day Roe v. Wade was decided. I probably didn’t notice it. Like so many people now, I didn’t care about the political process. But I do remember the horrible stories of what happened to women who got illegal abortions. Gods, don’t let us go back there again.
Full Article at: Talk To Action – God Forbid
An Aging Trans Woman 
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