Ann Hill, a 1968 abortion, and Women v. Connecticut
Ann Hill had an abortion in 1968, in the fall of her first year as a student of Yale Law School. Her powerful and beautifully told story–which is not only about that experience but about the long and passionate life of activism she has led since–is now up in GRR!’s Archive of Abortion Stories from our Elders and also! Excitingly! featured on an episode of Slate’s groundbreaking podcast, Slow Burn.
So how did this:
My second or third day at Yale law school I realized I had a problem – my period was late, and I was getting nauseated in the morning. I went to Dr. Nathan Kase, a New Haven ob-gyn, to find out if I was pregnant. He confirmed that fact. As I sat in his office after the exam, I told him “You might expect that this is not good news for me…” He cheerily replied: “Oh no, most women are thrilled to find out that they’re pregnant.” I said that as a first-year law student, unmarried and without financial means, I was ill-equipped to carry the pregnancy to term. I was in my first trimester, no more than six weeks pregnant, and I asked him if he would terminate the pregnancy. He told me that it was against the law to do so, unless I went before a hospital committee at Yale New Haven Hospital and the committee decided that termination was necessary to save my life. He said that process would take weeks, and there did not appear to be a likelihood of success in my case. He scheduled me for a follow up visit and washed his hands of the whole discussion.
Lead to this:
…we welcomed the ruling of the three-judge court (again 2 to 1) on September 20, 1972, that Gov. Meskill’s new anti-abortion law was unconstitutional. This time Judge Newman wrote for the majority, finding unequivocally that “a fetus is not a person within the meaning of the fourteenth amendment.” Abele v. Markle was headed to the United States Supreme Court – yay! In those years, we still looked forward to getting our cases before the Supreme Court. That Court heard the arguments from the lawyers in Roe v. Wade (Texas) and Doe v. Bolton (Georgia) in October 1972, and on January 22, 1973, it ruled in both cases that the Texas and Georgia anti-abortion laws were unconstitutional. Can I hear an amen? Not so fast – the Connecticut Attorney General asked the Supreme Court to reconsider, given all the “impressive” “medical and scientific evidence present in the Connecticut case” that supported their claim that life begins at conception. It was apparently not that impressive, in that the Supreme Court denied Connecticut’s petition for rehearing on April 16, 1973, and remanded Abele v. Markle back to the Connecticut District Court, which issued a final ruling on the case on April 26, 1973. Yay! We won again! Or so we thought.
You’ll have to listen (or read the transcript), or check out our archive — the only one of its kind, more urgently needed than ever, and supported by our communities and fearless reproductive rights advocates like you.
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