An illegal abortion killed my great-great-grandmother. A century later, what's changed?
In 1921, my great-great-grandmother Anna died because abortions were illegal.
She got pregnant — with her 11th child — when she was 40 years old, a full-time homemaker, married to a produce peddler in New York City.
The family was already poor. I imagine that she feared she couldn’t feed another child.
This story has haunted me throughout this past year, ever since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to legal and safe abortions.
During that time, I have read about many women telling the complicated stories of their abortions, even in years when abortion was a constitutionally protected right.
What if I got pregnant against my will?
My story is different. I am frightened by what might happen to me.
I’m 16 years old, a junior in high school, looking to the not-so-distant future in which I’ll be attending college far from home. What if I were to get pregnant against my will? What if I were to get pregnant in my teens, without the means of raising a child?
Republican lawmakers in my home state of Arizona have tried to impose a Civil War-era law that bans most abortions. Doctors would face criminal penalties for performing the procedure, even if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest.
It frightens me what would happen if they succeeded.
My ancestor must have died in great pain
My great-great-grandmother’s abortion was a family secret for generations. My father’s parents and other family members believed, and told him, that she had died in a car accident.
Then one of my aunts did some online research and discovered her death certificate that told a very different story.
The document, signed by the assistant medical examiner of the NYC Department of Health, reveals that “the chief and determining cause” of my great-great-grandmother’s death was suppurative peritonitis said to have resulted from criminal abortion.”
After I Googled “suppurative peritonitis,” I imagined how my great-great-grandmother — a short, curly-haired woman who spoke mostly German — must have suffered from the pain of this lethal infection in her abdomen.
Another family member had a safe abortion
Another family member was luckier, as I recently learned.
She also got an abortion, at 18, but unlike my great-great-grandmother’s, hers was a safe, legal medical procedure, and because of that she is still with us today.
For her abortion, as she has told me, she and her mother got in touch with Clergy Consultation Service, an organization in the pre-Roe world that flew women outside the United States to get safe procedures.
She went to London and returned in good health.
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These stories make me wonder: If I were to get pregnant and need an abortion, what would happen to me?
Would I have to risk a secretive, unsafe procedure? Would I have to leave the state or even the country?
Young women need this freedom back
As I look toward my future, I want the world to go back to the way it was, when women were free to make our own choices about how and when we would start a family, taking on the enormous responsibility of caring for a baby.
That’s why, when I visited the office of a member of the Arizona congressional delegation earlier this year with a group of classmates, I pleaded with a staff member — inspired by the story of my great-great-grandmother — to fight for abortion and reproductive rights.
It’s her story that both haunts and motivates me as I join with other young women my age to raise our voices to get back this freedom, this human right, that has been taken away.
Sophia Rick Yudell is a rising junior at a metro Phoenix high school. Reach her at syudell12345@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Illegal abortion killed my great-great-grandmother. What's changed?
