Catherine Starr was 17 when she attended her first demonstration to demand abortion rights in front of St. Louis City Hall. It was May 24, 1973. Just a few months earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled in Rowe against Wade.
Women have been given a constitutional right to abortion, but America will continue to argue for another 50 years. The Supreme Court’s decision last week to overturn Roe once again plunged the country into turbulence that feels too familiar to first-time survivors. Three women on the front lines of the abortion rights movement before Rowe became law and in the first years after the decision told their stories to The New York Times.
When Mrs. Starr protested that day in St. Louis, she was joined by her mother and grandmother. Three generations of women have gathered to protest Mayor John Poelker’s ban on abortions in city hospitals.
In the first days after Rowe, legal access to abortion was still difficult or inaccessible in many states. Only the previous year, in 1972, unmarried men and women were given the right to access birth control.
Rowe’s decision had come too late for Mrs. Starr. A year earlier, at 16, she was pregnant. Without the possibility of a safe, legal abortion, she said, she gave birth to a baby boy and then gave him up for adoption.
Catherine Starr, right, then 17, marching around St. Louis City Hall in 1973 with her mother and grandmother. / New York Times
“Mrs. Starr went to the rally because she wanted to be able to make sure that the next little girl who got pregnant had a chance,” she said.
“Giving up a child is like losing one to death, but in a way it’s worse because you don’t know anything about the child,” said Ms. Starr, now 66. “I had a little boy and years would pass and I sat and wondered if he was alive at all, happy or healthy?”
About 10 years ago, Mrs. Starr’s son found her and the two reconnected. The conversation was awkward at first, she said, but ultimately therapeutic. Her son said he was grateful for her decision and had a pretty good life. He also told her it was about abortion rights, she said, a pleasant surprise for her.
“Most children probably wouldn’t want to know that their mother was thinking of having an abortion,” she said. “But I did it. I was 15 when I was pregnant and 16 when I had it and I was terribly young.
“He asked me, ‘You could have had an abortion, why didn’t you?’ And I said, ‘Well, actually, I couldn’t, it wasn’t legal at the time,'” she continued. “I said I didn’t want to have an illegal abortion and once I started to feel it there, I just couldn’t do it.
The clinic worker
Susan Bileu consulted a patient at an abortion clinic when she heard screams. When she opened the door, she saw flames and a nurse on the floor holding her eyes.
An arsonist attacked a concerned women’s clinic in Cleveland on February 15, 1978, a busy Saturday.
Ms Bileu, 25 at the time, was embroiled in an escalation of violence around abortion clinics in the late 1970s. The legal challenges of thwarting abortion continued to fail. People chained themselves to the doors of the clinics and shouted at the women and staff as they entered the facilities. “It was really nasty,” said Carissa Haugeberg, an assistant professor of history at Tulane University.
At Ms. Bileu’s clinic, a man posing as a peddler slapped the assistant’s face with gasoline and set the building on fire. Ms Bileu helped remove the injured worker from the burning building. There was also a 16-year-old in the midst of an abortion. An ambulance was called and taken to the women’s hospital two blocks away.
The Concerned Women’s Clinic in Cleveland was destroyed by an incendiary bomb in 1978. Credit … A year before the Cleveland attack, a fire eroded the planned parenting clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota. Credit … Jim Moon / Associated Press
“No one changed their decision to have an abortion that day,” she said.
Ms. Bileu said she felt fundamentally connected to the abortion rights movement because of the stories her mother, born in 1917, told her, including about her aunt, who nearly died of an abortion.
“I got involved because I knew people who were struggling,” she said. “I’m not for abortion, I’m for choice. No one should be forced to have a child, and I certainly don’t want anyone to die from that. “
The organizer
Loretta J. Ross grew up in a conservative household in the 1960s. She became pregnant at 14 after her cousin raped her. Her only choice at the time, she said, was to raise the child herself or give him up for adoption. She gave birth to her son in 1969 and kept him.
The experience shaped Ms. Ross, who is now a professor at Smith College, as an activist and black feminist, she said.
“I went from being a scared teenager to being an active teenage mother,” she said, “so it had a definite effect on my mind and set me apart from the other kids at school.”
She enrolled at Howard University in 1970. Washington, D.C., was in turmoil after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mrs. Ross was killed by tear gas when she attended her first demonstration at 16. She also became pregnant again. Her older sister forged their mother’s signature on the permit card, but since Washington legalized abortion in 1971, she was able to obtain one.
Yet for Ms. Ross and her classmates, other issues were priorities, such as apartheid and gentrification. There was no sense of urgency about Ms. Ross’s abortion rights, she said, until Hyde’s 1976 amendment banning federal funding for abortion, which disproportionately affected low-income women, was passed.
For Ms. Ross, her abortion rights activities coincide and sometimes complicate her political coming of age as a black woman.
Ms. Ross spoke on behalf of the DC Crisis Rape Center in 1979. Credit … Rick Reinhardt, through the Sofia Smith Collection, special collections at the Smith College Abortion rights activists danced at a Liberty and Church Streets demonstration in Manhattan in 1981 to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion. Credit … John Sotomayor / New York Times
“When I was with the people of the Black Nationalist movement, I actually felt more feminist than not,” she said. “I would call myself a black Marxist feminist. But then when I was with white women, I just said to myself, “I’m not a feminist like all of you, so I don’t want to use the word.”
Concerns that black women are not present in the women’s movement prompted Eleanor Holmes Norton, a non-voting member of the District of Columbia, to form the National Black Feminist Organization. Although the group was formed in 1973, against the background of Rowe, abortions did not matter much in their conversations, she said.
Black women get about a third of abortions in the United States, according to the latest figures from the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights. But Ms. Ross, who was trying to help the National Women’s Organization plan a march on women’s rights, said it was difficult to involve black women’s organizations because few wanted to participate in the abortion debate.
For a second march in April 1989, which attracted more than 600,000 people, Mrs. Ross made a banner for colored women to come together to make them visible.
Over the years, she has adhered firmly to one principle. “I would definitely stand up for women’s rights,” she said.
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