“We Have Had Abortions”

Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Nathan Connolly: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Nathan Connolly: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explores the history behind the headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne Freeman: And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians. Each week, along with our cohosts, Ed Ayers and Brian Balogh, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Joanne Freeman: Now, there is no shortage of famous Supreme Court decisions, Marbury v. Madison, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education. But few of them are as currently controversial as the decision in Roe v. Wade, which decriminalized abortion.

Nathan Connolly: Ever since the ruling was decided in 1973, it’s been simultaneously contested and celebrated. Now, Roe v. Wade is in the news again. States, including Alabama and Missouri, have passed laws that pose a direct challenge to the Roe decision. While others, including Illinois and New York, are shoring up abortion rights for women in their state. All this talk is leading some to ask, are we close to seeing the end of Roe?

Joanne Freeman: On this episode we explore the history behind a case whose details are often forgotten or misunderstood.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll examine what women had to go through to find a safe abortion before the landmark ruling.

Joanne Freeman: And we’ll hear the story of the real woman behind the most famous pseudonym in American legal history, Jane Roe.

Joanne Freeman: If you walked by a newsstand in the spring of 1972, a bold headline on the first issue of Ms. Magazine might have caught your eye, “Women Tell the Truth About Their Abortions.” The brainchild of feminists Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Ms. Magazine helped pioneer a growing landscape of feminist media. That spring, Ms. decided to make the issue of abortion rights front and center.

Kathy Spillar: It was actually quite a short article, two pages, the title, “We Have Had Abortions.”

Joanne Freeman: That’s Kathy Spillar. She’s executive editor of Ms. Magazine.

Kathy Spillar: It was signed by 53 American women who were inviting women all across the country to join them in a campaign for honesty and freedom. They listed their names and declared that they had had abortions, many of them illegal, some of them legal because they lived in states that had loosened up their abortion restrictions so that you could secure an abortion. But as they pointed out, even in those states where a woman could find a legal abortion, they frequently had to go through humiliating interviews. They had to, in some cases, declare mental illness to be able to be approved to have an abortion.

Kathy Spillar: They had to seek approval as opposed to making a decision that you wanted to access this healthcare and be able to do that without any judgment, without any social stigma, and without any danger. They laid all of this out in really just one page and said they wanted as many American women to join them as possible because they were going to deliver all of these names to the White House and to every state legislature. They were going to also tell feminists in other countries that were fighting similar laws and had already begun similar kinds of petition campaigns to remove the restrictions on access to abortion. Clearly, even from the beginning recognizing not only how central the issue was for American women, but how central this issue is and was then for women all over the world.

Joanne Freeman: As part of their effort to get women to sign the petition, the article included an invitation for women to submit their own stories.

Kathy Spillar: There was a cutout coupon that said we oppose the laws that make abortion illegal, many of them endangering women’s lives. Sometimes women died from abortions and that you would sign this and publicly join millions of other American women in demanding a repeal of all laws that restrict our reproductive freedom. You would send that into the offices of Ms. Magazine in New York City and they were collecting these coupons to present as petitions to government officials not only in the United States but to share with women all over the world.

Kathy Spillar: Remember, this was the time that in the early ’70s, women were now getting into college after the passage of Title IX in 1972. There was increasing realization that we had to secure better laws against sex discrimination in the United States. This was the time that women were fighting and organizing for greater rights and that this would be in the very first issue of Ms. Magazine, its first major campaign that Ms. ever launched, really speaks to how the feminist movement was making progress in the demands they had of lawmakers and the solidarity really. I mean, it was a way to gather women together no matter where you lived, that you were part of this bigger effort to secure rights for women.

Joanne Freeman: Kathy has an original copy of the issue. So when we reached her at the offices of the Feminist Majority Foundation, we asked her to list some of the women whose names appear in the article.

Kathy Spillar: Gloria Steinem, who is the founding editor of Ms. Magazine, Billie Jean King, very famous obviously at that time tennis champion, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who was also a co-founder of Ms. Magazine. I’m looking here. Susan Brownmiller, Karen DeCrow, who would go on to be president of the National Organization for Women, or she might already have been president. She was an attorney in New York and would have known the founders of Ms. Magazine. Barbara Tuchman, a famous historian, Susan Sontag, and then many women whose names are probably not known, but who joined that early campaign to launch this whole effort.

Joanne Freeman: The article resonated with women across the country, and it helped shape the ongoing debate about women’s access to abortion.

Kathy Spillar: The very first issues were just snapped off the newsstands as fast as they could put them out and with women writing in to the headquarters of Ms. Magazine that finally they knew they weren’t crazy. After Ms., you realize that it’s not you. It’s not that there’s something wrong with you. In fact, there’s something wrong with the laws or with society at large in its treatment of women. So it’s usually just a great relief that women had when they would pick up an issue of Ms. Magazine. I have a feeling this was a major way by word-of-mouth as women saw this article and the other articles in Ms. Magazine, that it really began to spread very fast.

Kathy Spillar: This is also in the context that there were major efforts going on at the time to decriminalize abortion all across the country. It shined a bright spotlight on this critical issue from a feminist perspective, from a woman’s perspective. At that time, many, many physicians were speaking out. There were massive efforts ongoing and I think that what this did was put a face, a woman’s face, on this issue. It absolutely help light an even larger fire for the repeal of these dangerous laws.

Joanne Freeman: You’ll hear more from our conversation with Kathy Spillar at the end of the show. For now though, let’s learn about what it meant to criminalize abortion for women and for their doctors.