Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961–1973

290 Pages·2006·1.08 MB·English

by  David P. Cline (auth.)

Creating Choice
Palgrave Studies in Oral History
Series Editors: Linda Shopes and Bruce M. Stave
Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila,
by Sandy Polishuk; foreword by Amy Kesselman (2003)
To Wear the Dust of War: From Bialystok to Shanghai to the Promised Land, an Oral History,
by Samuel Iwry, edited by L. J. H. Kelley (2004)
Education as My Agenda: Gertrude Williams, Race, and the Baltimore Public Schools,
by Jo Ann O.Robinson (2005)
Remembering: Oral History Performance, edited by Della Pollock (2005)
Postmemories of Terror: A New Generation Copes with the Legacy of the“Dirty War,”
by Susana Kaiser (2005)
Growing Up in The People’s Republic: Conversations between Two Daughters of China’s
Revolution, by Ye Weili and Ma Xiadong (2005)
Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social
Change, by Kim Lacy Rogers (2006)
Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control,
1961–1973, by David P. Cline (2006)
Voices from This Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and Manzanar
Pasts, by Jane Wehrey (2006)
Radicals, Rhetoric, and the War: The University of Nevada in the Wake of Kent State,
by Brad Lucas (forthcoming)
Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Organizing for Equality, by Jane Latour (forthcoming)
Creating Choice
A Community Responds to
the Need for Abortion and Birth
Control, 1961–1973
David P. Cline
CREATINGCHOICE
© David P. Cline 2006.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-6813-5
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2006 by
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Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-4039-6814-2 ISBN 978-1-4039-8289-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403982896
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cline, David P., 1969–
Creating choice : a community responds to the need for abortion and
birth control, 1961–1973 / by David P. Cline.
p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in oral history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4039-6814-2
1. Birth control—Massachusetts—Pioneer Valley—History—
20th century. 2. Abortion—Massachusetts—Pioneer Valley—History—
20th century. 3. Feminism—United States. I. Title. II. Series.
HQ766.5.U5C46 2005
363.9(cid:2)6(cid:2)0974409046—dc22 2005047593
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: February 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword vii
Preface ix
Introduction 1
PART ONE The Women: Survivors of Illegal Abortions 19
ONE
Elizabeth Myer 29
TWO
Dr. Robin Dizard 33
THREE
Jean Baxter 37
FOUR
Carol C. Wall 45
FIVE
Dr. Meredith W. Michaels 51
SIX
Dr. Susan Tracy 55
PART TWO Providers of Reproductive Health Care:
Doctors, Health Educators, and Illegal Abortionists 59
SEVEN
Dr. Merritt F. Garland, Jr. 67
EIGHT
Dr. Sam Topal 75
NINE
Dr. Robert Gage 83
TEN
Dr. Jane Zapka 91
ELEVEN
Dr. Lawrence Siddall 99
vi / Contents
TWELVE
Lorraine Florio 103
PART THREE The Clergy and their Allies:
Clergy and Affiliated Lay Abortion Counselors 113
THIRTEEN
Reverend Richard Unsworth 125
FOURTEEN
Reverend Samuel M. Johnson 135
FIFTEEN
Reverend Franklin A. Dorman 145
SIXTEEN
Rabbi Yechiael Lander 151
SEVENTEEN
Elaine Fraser 161
EIGHTEEN
Ruth Fessenden 171
PART FOUR The Feminists: Feminist Lay Abortion Counselors 181
NINETEEN
Amherst Women’s Liberation’s Abortion and Birth Control Group 191
TWENTY
Springfield Women’s Health Collective 209
PART FIVE The Connectors: Uniting Medical Care,
Activism, and Feminism 221
TWENTY-ONE
Merry Boone 227
TWENTY-TWO
Ellen Story 235
TWENTY-THREE
Leslie Tarr Laurie 241
Acknowledgments 257
Notes 259
Bibliography 273
Index 275
Series Editors’ Foreword
Oral history as a disciplined practice began over a half-century ago in an effort to create,
for the record, accounts of the past unavailable from any other source. It burgeoned in
the 1970s and beyond as a means of incorporating into our collective knowledge of the
past stories of those excluded from more traditional histories. David P. Cline’s Creating
Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961–1973
falls squarely within this tradition: this remarkable collection of interviews with clergy,
medical personnel, feminists, and social activists in Western Massachusetts documents,
in the words of one of the narrators, “an amazing web” of people committed to providing
women access to birth control and safe abortions at a time when both were illegal in
that state, as well as most of the rest of the United States. For obvious reasons, the activ-
ities of this network were confidential, often covert, and largely undocumented. We are
thus indebted to Cline and his colleagues in the Valley Women’s History Collaborative
Oral History Project for making this history known.
At their best, oral history interviews also open up new interpretive perspectives,
and here too Cline’s work is exemplary. At a time when those who oppose abortion
have claimed the moral high ground, these interviews make clear that many who have
supported legal abortion also act on the basis of high ethical principles, as well as deep
social and professional concerns. And, suggesting another way to think about the
“right to life,” the chilling interviews of women who survived abortions in the pre-
Roe era included in this volume remind us that many women literally owe their lives
to legal—and safe—abortion.
For both the history it brings into view and the contemporary relevance of that
history, we are pleased to include Creating Choicein Palgrave’s Studies in Oral History
series, designed to bring oral history interviews out of the archives and into the hands
of students, educators, scholars, and the reading public. Volumes in the series are
deeply grounded in interviews and also present those interviews in ways that aid
readers to more fully appreciate their historical significance and cultural meaning.
The series also includes work that approaches oral history more theoretically, as a
point of departure for an exploration of broad questions of cultural production and
representation.
Linda Shopes
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
Bruce M. Stave
University of Connecticut
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Preface
Ask educated people to explain what led to the momentous U.S. Supreme Court
decision on Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973, and most will say that the force of
second wave feminism in tandem with the post-1950s sexual revolution swayed the
Court majority as too, the nation at large. Standard histories of the late twentieth
century, including major accounts of the legalization of abortion, uphold such a link.
Despite its merits, this commonplace view woefully ignores multiple sources of
change that converged dramatically to expand women’s reproductive rights at that
time. David P. Cline’s edited volume of oral histories, Creating Choice, challenges
reigning causal assumptions as he directs the reader not only to pertinent feminist
individuals and groups but also to those who, while not necessarily allied with
the broad feminist agenda, were no less crucial players in the reproductive rights
revolution.
The rich array of voices that gather in this informed and provocative book
epitomizes one of the most significant developments in the discipline of history in
the United States during the past several decades—the rise of oral history as funda-
mental to the reconstruction and interpretation of the past. By attending to the
experience of ordinary people, not just those our media selects for public gaze, we
learn the daily work of social change—complicated practical details of organization,
political obstacles and possibilities, spiritual and moral dilemmas, and the personal
and societal insights activists gained from their struggle. Often, as in the case of the
decade preceding Roe v. Wade, traditional documents were destroyed, particularly
when relevant to activity illegal at the time. Groups that labored in secrecy were
understandably not aware of kindred groups. Oral history becomes indispensable to
offset the purposely unwritten and to build a treasury of documentation about
groups and individuals who risked so much to grant women avenues to abortion
and,in Massachusetts, access simply to contraceptives, which were not legalized for
married women until 1965 and single women until 1972.
Oral history also forms an essential component of modern local history. For
generations, historians have recognized that certain locales cast in relief key contours
in national history, highlighting place-specific variables that often deviate from
dominant patterns elsewhere and prompt revision of customary historical narratives.
Creating Choice’s focus on Western Massachusetts during the decade preceding and
years immediately following Roe v. Wadepermits us to see close-up the crisscrossing