Roe

Well, It’s Happening

Long before the Supreme Court decided that a woman’s right to an abortion was a privacy issue, I helped a few friends obtain illegal abortions. They had no choice. I almost had one myself, but chickened out on the steps of the abortionist’s old row house in Newark, New Jersey.

Prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, most women I knew had a secret contact closeted away in the flap of her wallet or scotch-taped to a page in her locked diary. The Supreme Court ended that phase of our lives. No longer would we meet in secret and whisper in corners about where to go for an abortion. 

One year I drove a group of friends from New Jersey to a roadside motel outside of Baltimore. There were two girls to a room. It cost two hundred bucks, paid for with babysitting earnings or waitressing tips. Where did I get the abortionist’s name and number? I have no idea. But I do know this: in the 1960s my friends knew I could and would help them.

The Roe v. Wade decision came as a surprise. I had paid attention, written to Washington in support of the decision and sent plenty of letters to the editor. But I never expected Roe to become the law of the land. It seemed preposterous. Born-again Christians had just started flowering in the 1970s. Hell, I was one myself. I even joined a Christian cult. But anti-abortion wasn’t the primary cause at the beginning of the Christian Right movement. They took aim at teaching creationism in the schools and working against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. To the Moral Majority, the ERA was—and still is—a threat to what they call traditional family values. And I call traditional patriarchal values.

“We certainly can’t have women exercising the same rights as men!”

In the five decades that the right to choose has been law in the United States, a steady, ever-escalating squall has been battering its shutters. I know women and men who have worked tirelessly to keep abortion legal, as if any day now the Supreme Court would unlatch and reverse their 1973 decision. I never really believed it would or could happen. It just seemed preposterous.

Well, it’s happening.

A leaked memo written in early 2022 by Supreme Court Justice Alito tells us the Court is on the brink of reversing Roe.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” writes Alito.

There are enough conservative judges on that bench to reverse Roe when they vote sometime before the end of the 2022 session. Abortion laws will go back to the states. Contact information will once again be squirreled away in secret places. An underground railroad of frightened teenage girls will stream into Illinois where abortion is legal. And when we send them back home, there’s no telling if they’ll be discovered and arrested for the crime of having an abortion.

As for me, I will make a bed for any girl who manages to find her way to my door.