In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the longstanding precedents of Roe v. Wade, representing the largest blow to women’s constitutional rights in history. A series from Ms., Our Abortion Stories chronicles readers’ experiences of abortion pre- and post-Roe. Abortions are sought by a wide range of people for many different reasons. There is no single story. Telling stories of then and now shows how critical abortion has been and continues to be for women and girls.
The fall of Roe will continue to strain abortion access nationwide. We cannot, we must not lose the right to safe and accessible abortion or access to birth control.
Share your abortion story by emailing myabortionstory@msmagazine.com.
Editor’s note: These stories have been excerpted and lightly edited for clarity. They contain graphic descriptions of sexual violence and rape.
The ‘butcher’ spared no time in removing most of my clothing and laying me naked on a metal table in an empty tomb-like room upstairs.
Georgene Summers
The year was 1958, long before Roe v. Wade became part of our lives. I was just 17 years old and it happened the very first time I ever had sex with my then-boyfriend. A few months later I had symptoms of the flu, which would have been better than the truth. I was pregnant.
We were so naïve and thought we were in love. My mother made up her mind immediately and began to search for a “doctor” that would give me what was an illegal abortion—a butcher who worked in the shadows without assistance, anesthetics or sterile conditions. Usually, when you could find one in the alleyways of a city, either they had lost their license to practice because they killed someone during a procedure, or they never had one to begin with. She searched far and wide before finding a “butcher” and paid little attention to his “resume.”
It was a time when desperate women and girls were using wire hangers and other draconian methods to abort a fetus, many ending up bleeding to death on hospital lawns. Within a week I was summarily dumped off at the “butcher’s” lair and left for an indeterminate time. Little did I know it then, but I was about to descend into proverbial hell.
I never knew this butcher’s name, only the killing field location: a derelict house next to a vacant lot in Los Angeles. Inside this aging eyesore, were the same signs of disrepair now translated into the furniture and drapes that hung by wisps. The “butcher” spared no time in removing most of my clothing and laying me naked on a metal table in an empty tomb-like room upstairs.
I was now half-naked, and imprisoned on this metal apparatus, with no one around but the “butcher.”
“Bite down on this and don’t scream, the neighbors will hear you.”
Terrified, I obeyed, bit down on the towel and screamed as if I were being murdered anyway. My innocence died that day. The pain was unbearable as he worked to insert something inside of me. Then I felt something warm and moist on my private parts. I couldn’t believe it and kept trying to focus on the momentary cessation of the pain.
Once the abuse and the pain ceased, I found myself sobbing on a small bed in a tiny room. His very pregnant niece came in to comfort me and told me she would never allow her uncle to touch her and instead was having her baby at St. Anne’s Home for unwed mothers. Her words made me so sick I went into the bathroom and threw up. Later that night I snuck down the long and darkened hallway, past the aroma of death and alcohol to the telephone. A long string protruded from in between my legs.
On a tiny table there was a black rotary dial phone with a heavy lead-like receiver. The dial clicked as I called home and every ring shattered my eardrums.
At last, someone picked up the phone and I heard my mother:
“Mother, mother it’s me. Please come and get me. He is going to kill me, I know. I want to come home,” I cried desperately.
“No, we are not coming to get you until this is over.”
The silence was deafening as a dial tone rang in my ears. I fell into the soft mattress and wept for what seemed like months. A sharp pain woke me once again.
This time I staggered to the bathroom. Then I saw it, the long white string that was dripping between my legs. I tugged on the white string. Suddenly, this thing fell out of me and lay there in the toilet beneath me. This thing had a large rubber piece on it that looked like part of a kitchen baster. I was terrified and fell asleep worried that I would have to suffer unimaginable pain again. The next day I went home.
Home was never the same after that day and night. I harbored such resentment, such unbridled anger that I couldn’t forgive and couldn’t forget. I was forced to return to the butcher’s lair on two more occasions. The first, because I nearly bled to death after the procedure that left me dazed and terrified. The second, the bleeding stopped totally, and I needed to go back to the butcher for treatment. I remember that day as if it were yesterday. This time my parents enlisted the aid of my then-boyfriend, asking him to come to the house as backup.
I was so terrified that I locked myself into the bathroom and refused to open the door. Fear and terror were the only friends I had at that moment. My father tried climbing through the small bathroom window to “rescue” me. I picked up a blue glass jar of bath salts that was sitting on the counter and heaved it through the windowpanes, narrowly missing him. Reluctantly, I came out of the bathroom and went once more to the House of Horrors. Weeks later, I learned a girl had died on the butcher’s table the day after my third visit to him.
The truth is there was no alternative then, and there seems to be few today. I even had nightmares about lying on a slab in the coroner’s office as my parents wept by my side.
This time I woke out of my tormented sleep to the sounds of the street. Cars racing past, motorcycles on one wheel, dogs barking, chatter. All around me, incessant meaningless chatter. I couldn’t shake it from my mind. Where was I and what was happening around me?
I opened my eyes and saw the ceiling bearing down on me. My hands reached out but there was nothing but air around them. My breathing got heavier. The room was sparse but familiar. I kept hearing voices chattering from every side. Then a single voice, a low monotone saying, “You’re fine now. There is nothing to worry about. You will be bleeding for the next day or two, no longer than that and then you will be just fine and dandy.”
Suddenly, I realized where I was: in Purgatory. I was in Hell! I was lying face up on the cold metal table he used to torture and maim. I had been on that cold wet table twice before. Just like a dead person, placed into a cabinet at the morgue. Confused and startled, I sat up, suddenly throwing the towel on the floor beside me.
“What the hell are you doing to me?” I screamed.
“Nothing, nothing at all,” he whispered.
I wanted to scream at him and say, why did you have your tongue on my pussy two weeks ago? Was I alright then? What were you looking for? Why did you do that? Do my parents know what you did to me? You molested me, you perverted Butcher.
I was dazed from the pills I took to relax me before going to him that third time, but then no one could blame me for being upset and anxious. I had nearly killed my father with the blue glass bath salts bottle that I heaved through the bathroom window that morning.
I felt like I was going mad, losing my mind. Where was I and what the hell happened to me? Is this Kansas, or am I home yet? Where in the hell is Toto? I am going insane for sure. I am barely 17 years old, and I am going insane. Someone, please rescue me, please.
Fast forward to 2024 and I wonder if I am going mad or losing my mind or both. Here we are 66 years later, and the government would take away women’s rights as they had done in the ’50s. Instead of protecting our right to freedom of choice, they would have women go through what I went through and perhaps die in the process. This is draconian and unacceptable. I believe in Roe v. Wade and a safe method to freedom of choice. If the government bans abortions totally, then women will be forced to resort to back-alley butchers, coat hangers or dangerous—even deadly—cocktails to try and abort the fetus. This is totally unacceptable and cannot be allowed to happen. We must NOT turn back the clock, but rather move forward with empathy and compassion.
I knew that it was the only decision for me as the baby was unplanned. I was too young and my spirit had to be eternally free to create and experience my own type of utopia.
Anonymous
It was 1979 in England and my live-in lover of the time and I were making passionate love. Suddenly, after he’d ejaculated, he exclaimed, ‘Oh no! The condom broke!’
I gasped ‘Oh no! I’m in the middle of my cycle!’ We were both 23 years old and our relationship was coming to an end after five happy years. If I’d continued with the pregnancy, I’d have been eight months pregnant during my university final exams and would probably have had to re-sit them.
Never having dreamed of motherhood and looking forward to a love-filled life of liberty, eroticism and female independence, I soon walked over to our doctor’s office who said she would sign the paperwork, allowing my abortion. Then, I cycled to our local community hospital where the surgeon also signed the paperwork, also allowing my abortion. Both medics said that as I was so healthy, as was my lover of five years, that they expected our fetus, if I wanted to continue with my pregnancy, to create a very healthy baby.
At nine weeks after conception, I had the abortion and it was free of charge, on the National Health System (NHS). Such operations remain legal and free in Great Britain. Staying in hospital for two nights, the nurses advised me NOT to mention my abortion as some other patients on the ward were there for fertility tests/treatments.
The night before the procedure, the nurse gave me a sleeping pill and as I became sleepy, I shed a few tears. But, I knew that it was the only decision for me as the baby was unplanned. I was too young and my spirit had to be eternally free to create and experience my own type of utopia.
Now I’m 67 years young and SO thrilled that England made it SO easy for me to decide my own future. My friend had given me the book ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ which I cherished. If I had had that baby, I’d now have a 44-year-old daughter/son and maybe a grandchild or two.
I am SO very thankful that I wasn’t pushed into being a mother. As a nanny, school teacher, private tutor and children’s party entertainer, I’ve been a fabulous influence on kids I’ve met. I’ve enjoyed most of them but never wanted to take any of them home.
My heart and soul are still very joyful as I CHOSE everything I wanted to do with my life…
EVERY WOMAN around the world deserves the SAME CHOICES as ME…
—Anonymous
