Abortion Before Roe: Is the Past a Prologue for the Roberts-Alito Court?

But what has not always been guaranteed is whether they can do so legally, with the medical care necessary to protect their health--or if they must seek illegal, "back-alley" abortions.

In the years just before abortion became legal in 1973, hospital wards were filled with women seeking abortions--who either had been injured or become sick obtaining an illegal abortion under dangerous conditions, or who had tried to induce the abortion themselves.

Desperate women used a number of dangerous means to terminate pregnancies. Some sought abortions from back-alley abortionists, with usually humiliating and sometimes deadly results.

Other women tried to induce abortions with homemade means--such as a bleach douche, or inserting sharp instruments into her cervix. This is why the now almost forgotten image of the wire coat hanger became the symbol of the abortion rights movement.

"In Chicago, at Cook Country Hospital, there were about 5,000 women a year coming in with injuries bleeding resulting to illegal abortions, mostly self-induced abortions," Leslie Reagan, the author of When Abortion Was a Crime, said in an interview. "They had an entire ward dedicated to taking care of people in that situation. Those wards pretty much closed up around the country once abortion was legalized."

Some women were able to obtain legal abortions by traveling out of the country--or, later, to the handful of states where anti-abortion laws had been repealed. This, of course, required money. "There was such a huge range of what was possible for anyone who felt the need for an abortion--from superb medical care in a hospital to doing it themselves at home with drugs or some kind of instruments, and people injured and dying," says Reagan.

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