Sex with the Sound On

When Curtis Boyd remembers offering abortions before Roe v. Wade, he emphasizes his patients’ sheer determination. One of the first abortions he performed was for a poor white woman in her late teens from East Texas. Wearing a feed-sack dress and makeshift sandals, she came to Boyd when she was eight weeks pregnant. “I need you to do me an abortion,” she said. Curtis told her the procedure was illegal. “Don’t matter—you got to do me one,” she responded. Despite his initial trepidation, Curtis became resolved. “I’m going to do it,” he thought to himself. The following morning, he admitted the young woman to the emergency room, claiming that she had an incomplete, spontaneous miscarriage. Curtis performed a dilation and curettage without issue. He asked the patient to come back to his office a few days later, but he never saw her again.1 Reading these words on the page offers a window into the past. But hearing Curtis’s recollections in his own voice opens the door to a qualitatively different reckoning with the historical record.

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