is a 1992 American short documentary film directed by Dorothy Fadiman. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.The film consists of first person stories which reveal the physical, emotional and legal consequences of having or providing an abortion when it was a criminal act. The film is the first of three films called the Reproductive Rights Trilogy or “From the Back Alleys to the Supreme Court & Beyond.”
When Abortion Was Illegal: Untold Stories
Of making the film, Dorothy Fadiman said, “While a student at Stanford, I had become unintentionally pregnant. I had no money, no committed partner and my family was 3,000 miles away. I could neither find or afford a skilled provider. Abortion was illegal in California (1962), so I paid $600 to a person whose face I never saw to terminate my pregnancy. I was blindfolded throughout the procedure. Soon afterward, I began to hemorrhage and ended up on the intensive care ward of Stanford hospital with a fever of 105. I could have died, like so many women who risked the back alleys or aborted themselves. In 1973, a Supreme Court decision affirmed that most abortions would be legal. 1991, now a documentary filmmaker, I realized that some members of the Supreme Court were so anti-abortion that they could vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Most people had no idea what the dangers of the back alleys had been. I decided to make a documentary based on what had happened to me, and to so many other women. This film became the first of three in my trilogy From the Back Alleys to the Supreme Court & Beyond.”
12bunnies on December 13rd, 2017 at 12:02 UTC »
When she was young and still living in Germany, my grandmother tried to throw herself down the stairs multiple times to induce a miscarriage of my aunt.
This is a real thing.
StephenHunterUK on December 13rd, 2017 at 11:55 UTC »
There was a serial killer in Britain who posed as a backstreet abortionist and killed his victims during the 'procedure'.
symsalive on December 13rd, 2017 at 09:44 UTC »
We had to medically abort our very wanted baby two months ago. Hardest thing we have ever had to do. We had a funeral for her two weeks ago and we are emotionally still very raw. At a scan in the later half of the pregnancy a severe Diaphragmatic Hernia was discovered on the ultrasound. It turned out that our daughter had Pallister–Killian Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallister%E2%80%93Killian_syndrome). Both of us were 100% healthy adults, no history of any inherited genetic disorders, so we were in disbelief how this could have come about. After learning more, we found out that PKS is not an inherited condition, but a very rare condition that occurs when the chromosomes of two healthy adults don't combine correctly. It could happen to anyone. On top of the horrible quality of life, the main complication for her is that her lungs were not able to develop because her liver and intestines had grown into her chest, leaving no room for her lungs. We ultimately took the option to stop the pregnancy. For us it was a choice of when she would die, not if. If the choice to abort was taken away from us, we would have had to watch her suffer by asphyxiating to death in our arms of us as soon as she was born.