I was there when abortions were illegal. When I went to college they were illegal. While I was in college, they became legal. But before that…
College girls (we were freshmen, what, 18 or so?) who became pregnant had several choices, besides suicide. For abortion you: a) found a back-alley doc in the nearest big city b) waited until spring break, scrounged a car or a bus ticket or a plane ticket, and went to Mexico.
What happened when you got to those clinics was roughly the same in both countries, as far as I know. You probably had little pain medication.
Aspirin — did you bring your own? All the tales I heard were full of a sea of pain.
The doc would get you in the position, crank you open, and then begin to stuff cotton gauze into your uterus through the cervix. I suppose some dialiation was done to make this possible. If you don’t know what a uterus or cervix looks like, Google is your friend, there are pictures out there, but far too many are icky, pictures of sick cervixes, so keep looking for a healthy one. In nature they are gorgeous, pink, shiny… and the os (the opening in the cervix, which is at the end of the pear-like uterus) is closed.
If you’ve ever seen a woman having pain during a period or child birth — well, same muscles, organs, nerves — that kind of pain is what these young girls experienced. Mind-searing pain, white-hot pain. The kind that stops your body in its tracks, sends you into shock.
OK! Now that the gauze is stuffed inside you, you can go… back to some sleazy flea-bitten room you’ve rented in whichever country you’re in. You wait. 24 hours? 48 hours? I forget. Then you go back into the “clinic”.
Now the “doc” grabs onto the gauze, and pulls it back out. Men, just imagine the gauze being pulled out of your organ, and how enjoyable it would be. ANYTHING going in or out of the os is horribly painful. When women pass tiny clots in their periods they’re in pain.
When the gauze has been removed, you can go back where you came from. Enjoy the car, bus, train, or plane ride.
The results of this procedure could be:
–quite a bit of tissue has been removed
–the fetus is disturbed greatly, and you’ll begin to mis-carry
–both the above, plus likely:
–you’ll get an infection from left-over tissue, but possibly be able to blame it on a “miscarriage” and get treatment from a legit medical facility. Uh, if you have insurance or access to one.
I watched a girl and her roommate down the hall from me my first year in the dorm. They had gone to get the pregnant girl an abortion in Mexico. She came back with a raving infection. They tried to deal with it on their own for days. But failed, of course. It was so far beyond horrible.
She finally sought treatment at the med center on campus, and she lived.
