In the 45 years since Roe v. Wade, 60 million American women have chosen to legally terminate their pregnancies in safe, clinical conditions. Prior to 1973 millions had undergone abortions that were illegal and often fatal. The issue that Roe decided was not whether women would have abortions but what kind they would choose—underground procedures or medically supervised ones that protected their health.
But what if this were no longer the case? With Roe in jeopardy, whatever the outcome of the current hearings over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, we might want to consider what America would look like if the Right-to-Life forces achieved their long-term objective of re-criminalizing abortion within receptive states and, perhaps one day, across the nation. For this, we need only look back to a time prior to 1973 when abortion was a crime. One of the best guides to this era is The Worst of Times, a small book that provides a bracing reminder of what women seeking to terminate their pregnancies faced in the years before Roe v. Wade.
Although the book is 25 years old, it is perhaps more timely now than when it was written in an era when Roe appeared to be settled law. The author, abortion-rights lawyer Patricia Miller, takes us methodically through a harrowing landscape of illegal abortion that encompasses survivors, practitioners, coroners, policemen and, most devastating, the children of women who died from illegal abortions.
