Writing the History of Legal Abortion

Writing the History of Legal Abortion Johanna Schoen (bio) I started to research the history of legal abortion in the early 2000s, when the papers of a North Carolina abortion provider, Dr. Takey Crist, fell into my lap. Crist had wanted to donate his papers to an archive, and I volunteered to help him. Indeed, I ended up organizing his entire collection and, following that, the collections of a number of other abortion providers.1 When I began this work, I could not conceive of a world in which the U.S. Supreme Court might overturn Roe v. Wade. The providers I met, by that time all in their sixties and seventies, were full of passion and fervor about the 1970s, when they had taken the political moment to open the first legal abortion clinics. They were strong believers in a woman’s right to choose, to control her body, to determine her future. In addition, politics looked different twenty years ago. One of the first abortion providers Crist introduced me to was his friend Susan Hill, who owned the National Women’s Health Organization (NWHO), the largest group of free-standing abortion clinics after Planned Parenthood. As a twenty-four-year-old social worker, Susan had helped to open an abortion clinic in Florida two weeks after the Roe decision. Even the judges appointed by Republican presidents, she told me in the early 2000s, tended to be fair when she met them in court. By the late 1970s, she had founded the NWHO and was opening clinics in some of the most under-served areas in this country, including, in the early 1990s, the “Pink Clinic” in Jackson, Mississippi, which became the defendant in the Dobbs case.2 To open her clinics and to keep them open and services unobstructed, she had spent her life in court.3 I could not imagine a Republican Party interested in alienating a large voting block and losing abortion as the easy political rallying point [End Page 22] it had been since the 1980s. Clearly, I was wrong—which just shows that you should never ask a historian to predict the future. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court did overturn Roe with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, I was no longer surprised. I was also twenty years older and more cynical. When I first began to research legal abortion, I was fascinated with the stories of young feminists who, in the early 1970s, had had no doubt about their ability to open abortion clinics and offer health care to women across the country. Their political commitment and compassion were deeply moving; they believed that their actions could change the world. Of course, sometimes their political convictions were also didactic and funny. For a few years, while I taught at the University of Iowa, I sat on the board of the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City, the longest running feminist health collective in the country. When I confessed to one of the directors that I had never seen my cervix—in the world of women’s health clinics this was seen as a prerequisite on the path to a feminist consciousness—she assured me that I could call on their services any time. I never took her up on this offer. As a historian, I was interested in the fault lines that existed in the world of abortion care. I wanted to tell the heroic stories of young women activists who had overcome sexism and patriarchy to establish women’s health clinics and the stories of young male doctors committed to legal abortion care who had dared their colleagues to integrate abortion into their OB-GYN clinics. I also wanted to know what decades of harassment had done to the abortion provider community and how members coped with it. Had the relentless antiabortion propaganda changed their feelings about their work? And if so, how had they responded to these changes? Learning about antiabortion politics and harassment was easy. The papers of Takey Crist and Susan Hill were full of antiabortion materials—pamphlets and leaflets handed out on picket lines, letters by antiabortion activists to convert or threaten

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