She was 19. She had an abortion nine years before Roe v. Wade made it legal.
Elizabeth Stone tells Brut her story.
Elizabeth Stone tells Brut her story.
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00:00I was numb. I was terrified. There was no place to run. There was no place to hide.
00:06I didn't know where I was. And even if I had run back and gotten my clothes and run out,
00:14what was I then going to do? Not just where was I, but I was not prepared.
00:20I was 19. I was not prepared to have a child.
00:25My name is Elizabeth Stone, and today I'm going to tell you the story of an abortion I had
00:33long before abortions were legal, when I was a 19-year-old college student.
00:55Even when I was trying to get a sort of contact, I didn't go around and announce myself.
01:02I had friends who spoke about a friend who needed something.
01:07And one night, soon before I was going to go home to Brooklyn for Christmas vacation,
01:14someone slipped a piece of paper under my dorm door.
01:20And it was a phone number. It was a New Jersey phone number.
01:24And I never knew who put it under the door, but I knew what it was.
01:28I called the phone number, and it was the phone number of a doctor's office in Union, New Jersey.
01:34So I went to the doctor's office. He said to me, are you pregnant?
01:39I said, yes. He examined me. The word abortion was never mentioned.
01:44And I knew that I would be, I had been told that I would be receiving a phone call on a payphone
01:51the next day to set up an appointment.
02:02I had been told that a driver would pick me up, but that if he thought there was any chance of him being followed,
02:09he would just drive by. A little dapper man with shiny black shoes and a winter coat got out of,
02:17because this was December, got out of the car, came around. I handed him the envelope.
02:24He opened the envelope, made sure that everything, that the $500 was in there.
02:30He then nodded, opened the car door for me. I got in the back seat of the car.
02:37He got in the front seat. In the car already were two other women.
02:42Car ride was silent. I didn't know where I was, didn't know where I was going.
02:47The driver, after about 10 or 12 minutes, pulled into an indoor parking lot.
02:55The day before I went, I had been reading the New York Times, and there was a story in the New York Times
03:02about a woman who had been found, her dead body parked in her car, had been found in front of her house.
03:10And the story went on to say that she had died during a botched abortion.
03:21The first thing I saw was a kitchen table, and every horror story I had heard about abortion,
03:30sooner or later, involved a woman getting an abortion on a kitchen table.
03:35A man came out of the door on the right, carrying an unconscious, semi-naked woman in his arms.
03:46She was like a floppy doll, and she had a tampon string trailing between her legs.
03:52And I was horrified. I was horrified that the driver was watching all this.
03:59It felt like an enormous violation, on top of many violations.
04:04He carried the woman across the hall into the second bedroom, and then after a minute or two, came out.
04:14I didn't know whether she was dead or unconscious.
04:18And then he waved us, the man, who was wearing blue scrubs, he was wearing a mask.
04:24Was he a doctor? You know, I don't really know.
04:27He waved us down the hallway, and we went into the bedroom on the right.
04:33And that was set up almost like a barracks.
04:38I mean, there were six cots, each the head against the wall.
04:44And three of the cots were already filled.
04:47This was a little bit after 7 o'clock in the morning.
04:50And so it meant that the day, the abortion day, started well before dawn.
04:58Those women had to have been picked up at around 4 or 5 in the morning.
05:02So we were the second round of the day.
05:06The room to the right that he had taken the first woman out of, I looked in.
05:12He had left the door open as he carried her out.
05:15I looked in, and I could see an examination table.
05:18And on the examination table was the sort of white paper, or maybe it was a sheet,
05:25that doctors use when they're examining someone.
05:28And it was covered in blood.
05:30It wasn't pools of blood, but it was a big, big blotch of blood.
05:35And I then understood that that was where the abortion had taken place.
05:41All this I glimpsed in an instant.
05:45I then went in, got changed, sort of.
05:49And I was not in a hurry to have this happen, but I was so anxious to get it over
05:54that I was the first one out of my clothes.
05:56And the man in blue scrubs came back and said,
06:00Okay, you, you're ready.
06:02And in the interim, he had put a clean sheet on the examination table,
06:08which would then be filled with my blood.
06:11He smelled bleach, and the bleach was pink,
06:16because that was where he put the bloody towels or sheets or whatever it was.
06:22And then he said, Okay, get on the table, count backwards from ten.
06:27I got to about eight, and that is all I remember.
06:31The next thing I remember was being in the barracks, in the cot room, coming to.
06:40Nobody talked about trauma in those days, but what we do know now about trauma
06:45is that traumatic memories remain very, very vivid for a long period of time.
06:52This was an abortion I had half a century ago,
06:55and I may not remember whether it was a paper sheet or a sheet sheet,
07:00but I remember the blotch of blood on it.
07:04There is not a woman alive of childbearing age today
07:10who remembers what it was like to live at a time before Roe v. Wade.
07:19I am someone who wanted to have children.
07:22I always knew I wanted to have children.
07:25Motherhood has been one of the most powerful experiences of my life.
07:30You don't have to have children if you don't want to.
07:32I'm not an advocate. You can have children.
07:35But I would not have been able to be a good mother as a 19-year-old college dropout.
07:42I would like everybody to know what it is, not that we're going to go back to,
07:49but we are already going back to.
07:53All over the country there have been erosions of Roe v. Wade.
07:58I think there are three abortion centers in all of Louisiana,
08:03which means somebody somewhere is standing on a street corner in a strange city
08:09at 6 o'clock in the morning waiting to go through with this.
08:13I do want everybody to be forced to imagine a dead woman behind a steering wheel.
08:20And I was a middle-class kid with supportive parents.
08:26Parents who could help me financially.
08:29A good boyfriend. Great friends.
08:32And I still was in a situation where my sense of my powerlessness was overwhelming.