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.

I knew students in high school and college who got pregnant and disappeared for a while or forever. I did not know anyone who had terminated her pregnancy. When I got back to my dorm room, I started researching the options. My dorm mate, Meg, was helpful, as was Steve Cohen, a classmate. We found out that there were two doctors who performed illegal abortions in the northeast, “kindly” Dr. Robert Spencer, who operated out of Ashland, Pennsylvania, and Dr. Nathan Rappaport, who operated in an apartment on Riverside Drive in NYC. I got the number for Dr. Rappaport and called to make an appointment. A gruff male voice answered the phone and grilled me to make sure I was not with law enforcement, then gave me a date and time to appear at the apartment with $500 in cash. Steve went with me but was not allowed to be with me in the room where the abortion was done. Dr. Rappaport had a rough-hewn male attendant helping him. I was given a general anesthetic and, when I became conscious, I was told that the procedure had been done. I was allowed to stay in the apartment until the wooziness wore off. 

As I became more lucid, Dr. Rappaport started giving me papers he had written about his life and his career giving abortions. I remember one paper entitled “Punishment is the Key”. He wrote this after he had been convicted of manslaughter and committed to prison for nine years. He told he that he had met his gruff-speaking assistant in prison.  I am certainly glad I did not know of this conviction before the abortion. Dr. Rappaport told me that he was part of the “Unholy Triangle” of Margaret Sanger, Dr. Spencer and him, the three leading proponents of women’s right to contraception and abortion. He gave me this paper and others and asked me to help him in his fight to clear his name and/or spread his fame. I paid Dr. Rappaport $500.00 in cash – there was no way he would have taken a check or a credit card – and I vowed that day to change the law so that no woman would have to risk her life in an apartment somewhere getting an illegal abortion performed by a convicted felon.

But first, I went back to New Haven with Steve, happy to be alive. That night I had intensely painful cramps and bleeding. I went to my follow up appointment with Dr. Kase, which was the next day, still having a lot of bleeding and pain. He asked how I was doing, and I reported to him that I had terminated my pregnancy, but that I was bleeding badly and feeling a lot of pain. He sat back and said: “Well, in that case, if necessary, we can do a D and C at the Hospital. I can schedule that for you, if the bleeding and pain do not stop in a few days. That would be legal.” I do not remember Dr. Kase examining me after the abortion. He could have. I just don’t remember it. He prescribed antibiotics, lest there be an infection. And I went on my way. The bleeding stopped. I did not have a dilation and curettage. I did not see Dr. Kase again. I understand that he became a “giant” in the fields of obstetrics and gynecology. 

With respect to a woman’s right to choose, my painful personal experience became my political issue. One of the first things I did was to design a questionnaire for all the obstetricians and gynecologists practicing in Connecticut asking them for their opinions on the State’s anti-abortion law. I wanted to have their views to present to the Legislature, when I appeared before the proper health committee in Hartford with a request to repeal their extremely restrictive abortion laws. Judging from my contact with Dr. Kase, I felt that he and other doctors chafed at being told by the State how to practice medicine. After all, the law prohibited doctors from giving women abortions in most instances, and most doctors did not want the government to make health decisions for them. I designed the questionnaire as part of a clinical project for Yale Legislative Services and mailed it to all the ob-gyns I could find addresses for throughout Connecticut. I got a great response, much better than what one usually gets from a mailed survey. The vast majority of the doctors who responded to the survey said they supported repeal of the anti-abortion law in existence in 1968 in Connecticut. This was a great start, I thought, but standing alone, it was not going to win repeal.  The Legislature was nearly all male and nearly all Catholic.

Enter the nascent Women’s Movement:  After my abortion in the fall of 1968, I joined the blossoming Women’s Liberation Movement in New Haven, Connecticut, I worked with hundreds of women on every political and social front to gain equality for women.

The working groups included one entitled “women’s health”. I joined that group at the outset and shared my personal experience with an illegal abortion. Almost everyone in the group either had a similar experience or had a friend or relative who had risked her life to terminate a pregnancy. One of the first things we did was to investigate where women could get safe, legal abortions. That began our “Underground Railroad” project of helping women travel to the Clergy Consulting Service in Boston, then on to a safe medical facility in Montreal for an abortion in a supportive, sterile, medically professional environment. Each of us in the group took turns answering our crisis line and helping women from all over navigate their way to Montreal. We also helped women financially, who could otherwise not afford the travel or the procedure. We knew this was a stopgap measure – necessary, but not the end goal by any means.

 As a first-year law student, I was looking for a way to tackle the restrictive anti-abortion law itself. I did not have to look far. I read about a lawsuit filed on behalf of hundreds of women in New York challenging their anti-abortion laws. I called one of the attorneys, Nancy Stearns, and talked about starting a class action lawsuit in Connecticut to challenge its anti-abortion laws.

I took the lawsuit idea to our women’s health working group. Some members were not at all keen on expending energy to file a lawsuit. It just seemed too stuffy and “establishment” to them. Even some of my women friends in law school thought there should be a more revolutionary path to take. But once I reported on the New York case and how it was being used to talk to women about reproductive freedom and to involve hundreds of women in the lawsuit in a class action, members of the group became much more interested. I was impressed that the New York lawyers had signed up approximately 300 plaintiffs, and we started out with that modest goal. Members of our women’s health group paired off in two, and we lined up speaking engagements in homes around Connecticut. I was paired with Rika Alpert. We spread news of the lawsuit by word of mouth and publicized the suit with traditional women’s groups. Soon we were being invited into homes around Connecticut to address gatherings of women from the neighborhood about the reasons for our lawsuit. At each gathering we offered to sign up women as plaintiffs in our lawsuit.

We called our lawsuit Women vs. Connecticut, but in federal court we filed under the heading of Abele vs Markle. We listed our plaintiffs in alphabetical order. Markle was the New Haven County State’s Attorney, sworn to enforce the criminal anti-abortion laws. I can still picture myself spending hours typing in the names of the plaintiffs in each of the three classes. As we kept adding more and more plaintiffs, I had to amend our complaint over and over again. Ultimately, we had more than 8000 named plaintiffs, all women who were 1) of child-bearing age, 2) in the health professions, or 3) in the counseling professions. While the typing was tedious – picture an IBM electric typewriter with the little ball and my trusty white erasing tape nearby – it was exhilarating to add new names to the ever-growing list of women willing to put their names out in public to assert their constitutional right to choice in matters of reproduction. Many women provided us affidavits which contained their personal reasons for fighting for the right to choose. Some women had the Tay-Sachs gene or some other genetic condition and already had a special needs child whom they loved but could not afford to give birth to and raise another one. One woman had lost her two-year-old, when she accidentally fell into the neighbor’s swimming pool and drowned. The guilt and pain were so great that she and her husband chose not to have another child.

We enlisted 6 women attorneys, including Katie Roraback of the ACLU, for our thousands of women plaintiffs, and we filed our lawsuit on March 2, 1971, in the federal district court for the District of Connecticut. A lone federal judge, T. Emmett Clarie, decided that we lacked jurisdiction to bring the case, so he threw us out of court without convening a three-judge panel. Okay, this was a minor setback, but our Women vs. Connecticut plaintiffs were not going to be denied. We promptly filed an appeal with the Second Circuit Court of Appeal, which hears its cases mostly in New York City. We did not expect a warm welcome from Judge Clarie, who was reputed to be a devout Catholic. I’m sure that had nothing to do with his dismissal, if true. As noted, Katie Roraback, duly fortified by our research, led the charge to the Second Circuit. The argument went really well, and as of December 13, 1971, we were recognized by Judge Mansfield of the Second Circuit as having jurisdiction to make our claims before a 3-judge panel in Connecticut. Well, some of our plaintiffs were given that right – the Second Circuit judges decided that women of childbearing age did not have an immediate cause of action and that many of them would not ever have standing to challenge the anti-abortion laws, unless they became pregnant and were threatened with prosecution. But the other two classes – health professionals and counseling professionals, both of whom faced prosecution under the anti-abortion laws – clearly had standing, said Justice Mansfield in his opinion.

At the oral argument before the three-judge court in Abele v. Markle, our lawyers wiped the floor with the male lawyers representing the State of Connecticut and the nine State’s Attorneys. On April 18, 1972, Judge Lumbard, writing for the majority, ruled that Connecticut’s anti-abortion laws were unconstitutional. Judge Newman wrote a concurring opinion, and old stick-in-the past Judge Clarie dissented. We won!! I was a full-fledged lawyer by then and had officially joined the lawsuit as one of its lawyers. Victory was so sweet! Of course, the men representing Connecticut appealed the decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. And we won again!! The men running Connecticut thought there had been too much winning by Women vs. Connecticut, so their standard bearer, Governor Thomas Meskill (who was short and carried his own step stool to wherever he spoke), convened a special session of the Connecticut General Assembly to pass a law to protect the “rights of the unborn children”. Never mind that our lawsuit was designed to protect the rights of all women and all children, born and “unborn”, to use their biologically incorrect phrase.  Unwittingly, Gov. Meskill gave us another forum, the State Legislature, to appear in great numbers and to make our cogent statements on behalf of the women of Connecticut. There again, in the legislative hearing room in Hartford on May 19, 1972, one woman after another gave compelling reasons for not criminalizing abortion and for acknowledging a woman’s fundamental right to choose. And, no surprise, the proponents for denying women this basic right were all men. The men in the Legislature passed Meskill’s new anti-abortion law. We went back to the same three judges to challenge that law.

With a mixed feeling of relief and déjà vu, 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.

And now we must mobilize again to win back our right to reproductive freedom and justice for all. As a leader with Grandmother for Reproductive Rights (GRR!), I invite all the generations after me to join with your elders to ensure that this generation and future generations have the same reproductive freedom that we fought so hard for – and won! -- in the 1960s and 1970s.