Roe, Wade and Fadiman

i had the pleasure of meeting Oscar and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman yesterday, during an intimate screening of her documentary CHOICE: Then and Now.

groovy shirt worn by an anonymous woman

it told the tales of women, most of them in their seventies and eighties, who obtained abortions in back alley clinics from the 1930's through the 1960's. while their individual stories were emotionally captivating, what i found most interesting was the way the film situated the question of abortion historically.

as long as i can remember (or at least the 23 years since 4th grade), our society's dominant narrative about abortion has consisted largely of two unequivocal facts:

1) abortion was "illegal" until the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision; and

2) there has been an ongoing cultural rift as pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates duke it out in various state legislatures and appellate courts.

the problem of constructing the story in this way is that implies the legalization of abortion represented some revolutionary turning point in the great tide of History and, in doing so, makes it easy for anti-abortion advocates to call upon the conflated specter of patriotic Puritanical morality as an essential, transhistorical aspect of American identity and culture.

this is not the case.

abortion before "quickening" was legal in the United States up until the mid-1800's when, in an unfortunate (non)coincidence, the rise of Victorian morality intersected with the professionalization of medicine and the concomitant founding of the AMA. the doctors (men) began to push out traditional women's caregivers, like midwives and herbalists (women), by dismissing them as quacks:

satirical cartoon from 1793

the point in all this (assuming i have one) is that sometimes, when the lethargy of late afternoon mixes with the undertow of summer, it's necessary to tether ourselves to the anonymous stories of forgettable people, and appreciate all the histories lost to History.