This story is from a couple of years ago:
People knew of Geraldine “Gerri” Santoro’s cause of death—an air embolism caused by a back-alley abortion—before they ever knew her name.
On June 8, 1964, the 28-year-old married woman and her lover, Clyde Dixon, checked into Connecticut’s now-closed Norwich Motel with no vacation suitcases or change of clothes for an overnight stay. Instead, she brought a catheter and a textbook. Santoro, six and a half months pregnant, was prepared to let Dixon perform her illegal abortion—that is, until she started hemorrhaging during the process and Dixon panicked, abandoning Santoro to bleed to death on the motel floor.
It wasn’t until the next day that a maid discovered Santoro’s naked body—her torso collapsed over her kneeling legs, with only blood-soaked sheets between her and the carpet.
Santoro’s body was photographed for crime scene documentation at the time; in April 1973, nine years after her death and just half a year after the passing of Roe v. Wade, Ms. magazine published the photo of Santoro. At the time, the body was anonymous to them.
“Never Again” was the headline that ran with the story and image, which quickly became an iconic symbol of the pro-choice movement. After the passing of Roe v. Wade, the editors at Ms. thought the struggle was finally over.
“At that point, we naively believed that would be the end of the story, and that never again would women be lying on the floor in their own blood in a hotel room because of a botched abortion,” says Suzanne Braun Levine, who served as Ms.‘s first editor from its founding in 1972 to 1988. “That once the Supreme Court had made that ruling, safe abortions would be available to everyone, everywhere.”
On the other end of the phone, Levine laughs.
Now tell me this circumstance isn’t going to happen again when these misogynist monsters overturn Roe:
Born on August 16, 1935, Gerri Twerdy grew up with ten brothers and four sisters in an old farmhouse in rural, South Coventry, Connecticut. In the 1995 documentary Leona’s Sister Gerri, her family and friends recall memories of her: She climbed trees to avoid the chores she disliked, she and her best friend would sneak out of school to change out of their dress code-mandated dresses and into their jeans when playing hooky, and she always smelled like Juicy Fruit gum.
But when she was just 18 years old, in a rush to get hitched before her best friend, Gerri decided to marry a man she had met four weeks prior at a bus stop. His name was Sam Santoro, and he would go on to father two daughters with Gerri—all of whom would become victims of his physical abuse. So when she met 43-year-old Clyde Dixon, a fellow employee at the Mansfield Training School who ostensibly cared for her, she took him as her lover when Sam was living and working in California. But when Gerri found herself pregnant and Sam, unknowing of everything and with an imminent return to Connecticut to visit Gerri and their daughters, she feared for her safety.
So Gerri, or “Margaret Reynolds” according to the motel ledger, checked in to the motel room with Dixon, only to die alone after Dixon had attempted and failed to abort the fetus with a catheter.
There is nothing in that situation that couldn’t happen today. The only difference is that today, in most places, Gerri Santoro could get a legal abortion and would not have to bleed to death in some sleazy motel.
Lest you think that women like Gerri will be able to obtain medical abortion these days and won’t have to resort to such methods, think again. The states that are outlawing abortion are also outlawing medical abortion and using it or helping someone else use it can result in jail time.
A new law limiting the use of abortion-inducing medication in Texas goes into effect Thursday.
The law makes it a felony to provide the medication after seven weeks of pregnancy, putting Texas at odds with federal regulations. It also makes it a crime to send the medication through the mail.
Medical abortion is the most common way women in Texas terminate their pregnancies, according to state data.
These new restrictions reflect a growing concern among abortion opponents about the rise of “self-managed” abortions, in which pregnant people obtain the medications from out-of-state or international providers, with or without a prescription.
There’s evidence that more women turn to self-managed abortions when legal abortion is restricted. Texans have been unable to access abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy since Sept. 1, when a controversial new ban went into effect.
“Texas is looking at the ways that people are navigating around restrictions and trying to essentially make that as unsafe and as frightening for people as possible in order to deter them,” said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior legal counsel for If/When/How, a reproductive justice legal group.
They know that this is what will happen instead and they are fine with that:
