A week doesn’t seem to pass without news of another legislature considering action to limit or deny abortions in its state. And the subject is front and center at the Supreme Court in its current session. If the Court should decide to overturn Roe V. Wade it has been estimated that some 26 states would enact anti-abortion statues.
Every time I hear about this issue, read about it or see it discussed on television my mind jumps back more than fifty years to a primitive, dank and musty duck blind on a creek in Talbot County. It is so long ago that I cannot remember exactly where it was. But a conversation in the blind on that fall day stands firm in my memory.
We had a beautiful view of the creek and a small, secluded, peaceful bay where ducks and geese often gathered. And right in the middle of the bay was a small island—perhaps two acres or so—about a half mile out from the blind. It was abandoned, overgrown with wild shrubs, reeds and grasses, and mature trees typical to an Eastern Shore landscape. And, sitting at dead center, was a tumbledown, two-story house with a couple of outbuildings nearby. None of the weathered clapboards on the property had felt the swipe of a paintbrush for decades.
It was my first visit to the blind—one of those waterside outlooks that required a good set of boots because, on each rising tide, the moldy plywood floor flooded. My host had invited a local resident to join us. He spoke up in a quiet moment when nothing was flying.
He pointed out the various characteristics of our site and its pluses and minuses insofar as hunting waterfowl was concerned. And then he pointed to the little island. He may have called it by name. If he did, I cannot remember what it was.
“See that place over there?”, he said. “That’s where the women went for abortions years ago. They would hire a fellow to row them out there, at night. They were afraid to use an outboard. Too much noise. When they got there someone they called “Doc” would take care of them.”
“Was he a real doctor?” I asked. “No, just someone who knew how to do that sort of thing,” he said.
Today, more than a half century after that encounter, the recollection of my hunting companion’s story and the memory of that long-abandoned island come rushing back to me as I learn of legislators considering laws that would make it impossible for legitimate, trained health practitioners to provide abortions for women whose personal circumstances are such that they feel compelled to choose such treatments.
For more reasons than anyone can imagine, and for more years than anyone can count, women have sought abortion assistance. The question before us today is this: Will we, as a nation, allow those women to terminate pregnancies openly, legally and safely, or will those who need such care have to return to the darkened shoreline, looking for the rowboat, that will take them to the island for a procedure performed by “Doc?”
We are likely to have some answers before the end of this new year.
Ross Jones is a former vice president and secretary emeritus of The Johns Hopkins University. He joined the University in 1961 as assistant to President Milton S. Eisenhower. A 1953 Johns Hopkins graduate, he later earned a Master’s Degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Jim Richardson says
The title you chose for your essay demanded that I read it.
It saddens me that legal abortions may soon be a thing of the past in many parts of our country. As we becomes more and more conservative and less and less forgiving, poor young women living in many states will have no recourse than to seek unsafe abortions in back alleys performed by untrained technicians. The repercussions from this insanity are unimaginable. Apparently it’s okay to reject vaccines because of the freedom to make choices about our bodies, but when it comes to abortion, the rules suddenly change. Like prohibition, this attempt to control women’s bodies cannot be enforced in the end and will be rightfully rejected. The tragedy is that many innocent poor women may die in the interim.
Deirdre LaMotte says
Perfectly said. This is about the far right Bible thumpers controlling women. Period. Actually,probably not. This is about those in power getting the Bible thumpers riled.
They love to do this about gay marriage, African American actual history in our nation, and anything else to tease those they need to get excited.
How would these men-in state legislatures like vigilante
vasectomies? Hee, Hee.
Linda Houchens says
Such an eloquent story and argument for continued legal abortion. However all that is legal is not necessarily moral. Abortion is still the murder of a tiny life with a beating heart regardless of the circumstance of its conception.The advent of ultrasounds has proven that. The answer lies in educating the pregnant women and convincing them of the baby’s right to life. If they don’t want their child there is someone put there who would live to have them. Choices For Life Pregnancy Center in Easton offers free care and counseling to pregnant moms and babies. Abortion is not a necessary choice. Women who have them often suffer regret and deep emotional scars for many years afterward.
Deirdre LaMotte says
A woman’s eggs, wether utilized or not, are hers. Her
uterus is hers alone, wether to carry her own fertilized egg or serving as a surrogate for another woman. Religious institutions, government institutions, and strangers have no legitimate interest in what any woman decides to do with her reproductive life. If I had a child who could only live if given my blood or my organs, no
one by law can make me do this. No matter how many innocent lives it would save.
The cardiac activity people are calling a heartbeat is electrical signals from the collection of cells that will eventually control the pace of the heartbeat. At this stage an embryo is not much bigger than a grain of rice and certainly does not have a heart.
That is why Roe was a compromise.
I am stunned that anyone would want to live in a society where government can force a woman to continue
a pregnancy she does not want. It is inhumane and misogynistic.
People who think they occupy some higher moral plane makes me sick. The opposite is true; because of anti-choice zealots, the level of human suffering, pain and misery will rise. That is immoral