What Abortion Was Like Before Roe Vs. Wade

Why women were blindfolded before being taken to doctors’ offices

Statue of blindfolded Lady Justice / Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Doctors brave enough to do abortions before Roe vs. Wade had to take extreme measures to avoid going to jail.

One of the most eminent providers was T.R.M. Howard, the surgeon, civil rights activist, and president of National Medical Association, a black doctors’ counterpart to the American Medical Association. Howard created the Friendship Medical Clinics to provide medical services, including abortion, for Black patients who had trouble obtaining them elsewhere.

Howard might have faced arrest and prosecution before Roe vs. Wade decriminalized abortions throughout the United States in 1973. He and other doctors had to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid exposure, or so the activist and civil rights volunteer Heather Booth learned when a fellow University of Chicago student asked whether she could find someone to do an abortion for his sister, who had considered killing herself because of her pregnancy.

A doctor who antagonized J. Edgar Hoover

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