Abstract
Could he have driven any faster? On September 10, 1970, William Day, a senior premed student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass Amherst), drove as fast as he could to Holyoke Hospital. Earlier that day he and his 21 year-old girlfriend Nancy Kierzek had finally decided that they had to do something about her pregnancy, then at three months. They were both students and couldn’t imagine having and raising a child. Nancy would start showing soon and they knew they had to do something now. William had taken basic anatomy classes at UMass and had been studying the limited materials he could find on performing an abortion. Plus, they didn’t know where else to turn.
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Notes
Linda Gordon. The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2002. p. 299.
C. Thomas Dienes. Law, Politics, and Birth Control. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1972. p. 324.
Major works on the subject of illegal abortion in the United States are Leslie J. Reagan’s When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997) which uses court records instead of oral histories,
Laura Kaplan’s The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Abortion Service (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995), which is essentially one woman’s memoir of a feminist collective in Chicago that began performing lay abortions, several works by Rickie Solinger, and Carole Joffe’s Doctors of Conscience.
An essential text on the legal history behind the Roe decision is David J. Garrow’s Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (Maxwell Macmillan International, New York, 1994). However, much of the existing historiography does not emphasize the related battle for legalized access to birth control that in some states preceded and in many states coexisted with the fight for abortion rights.
Alessandro Portelli. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1991.
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© 2006 David P. Cline
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Cline, D.P. (2006). Introduction. In: Creating Choice. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982896_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982896_1
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