Fifty-three years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade, capping off a series of rulings—the legalization of birth control, the enforcement of laws against sex discrimination— that transformed women’s opportunities and American life itself.
It’s hard to overstate the ways society benefitted from this decision. Women surged onto college campuses and into the workforce. Deaths from unsafe illegal abortions became practically nonexistent. Researchers have found that women who are able to get abortions when they need them end up far better off than women who continue unwanted pregnancies on a variety of measures: They are more likely to leave abusive partners, less likely to rely on social welfare programs, more likely to be financially stable, and are in better mental and physical health. Their children (most women who have abortions are already mothers) do better than the children of women forced to continue subsequent pregnancies. They are less likely to die of pregnancy-related causes. And men who are able to delay fatherhood until they are ready benefit, too: They make more money, are more likely to go to college, and also enjoy the advantages that come when one is able to chart one’s own course in life.
The era of legal abortion in America gave women what feminists have insisted was always right: Sovereignty over our own bodies, and the right to decide what happens within them.
But that era of female freedom didn’t even last 50 years.
In 2022, the Supreme Court, stacked with conservative appointees, overturned Roe v. Wade. Now, the rights of women in America change when we cross state lines. Hundreds of women have narrowly avoided death because they could not get pregnancy-related care in states where abortion is outlawed, with many losing their uteruses or ovaries, bleeding out, needing to be put on ventilators, going into septic shock, or winding up in the ICU. Some have died.
Before Roe was decided, Americans were debating the legality of abortion. The fault lines were not nearly as deep, nor as clear, as they are now. Republicans were divided on the issue. Some conservative religious organizations, including the Southern Baptist Convention, either supported abortion rights or hesitated to take a strong stance; many clergy members who saw the toll illegal abortion was taking worked alongside feminist activists to help pregnant women in crisis access safe procedures. White Evangelicals emerged as an anti-abortion force largely because it was politically expedient—their initial goal was maintaining racial segregation—and it would be several years before opposition to abortion became a uniting ideology on the right. For feminists, abortion rights were urgent, as was simply breaking the silence about the ubiquity of the procedure. In 1969, feminist activists held an abortion speak-out in New York’s Washington Square Methodist Church, a pivotal moment. A year later, New York State legalized abortion; a small handful of others followed.
In those years—the late 1960s and early 1970s—women were increasingly speaking not just about their views on abortion, but about their experiences with it. And many of them were doing so on the pages of Playboy. While many may find it odd—Playboy hasn’t exactly been perceived as a feminist powerhouse— its commitments to sexual libertinism and personal freedoms meant that it was the first major, national magazine to advocate for legal abortion on demand. And so women wrote in: About how their bright futures were compacted down to little more than “sour milk and dirty diapers” by pregnancies they were forced by law to continue; how the memory of horrifying illegal procedures became “the price I still pay for one lousy midsummer night’s madness;” how getting safe abortions allowed them the freedom to study, to find love, to mother well.
Many of these letters still live in Playboy’s archives. On what would have been Roe’s 53rd birthday, the magazine is publishing a handful of them to give readers some insight into what the country was like without legal abortion—all women felt they had to gain, and all today’s women are losing.
A CASE FOR ABORTION
From the December, 1965 issue.
I read with disgust [a] letter on abortion in the September Forum. I want to present a case for abortion without recourse to statistics or examples of human misery, neither of which can move the rock of dogma.
There is an unalterable fact that the bodily functions of women, including reproduction, belong not to the state, church, parents or husband, but to themselves. Therefore, the state should not deny a citizen the right to terminate a pregnancy unwanted for any reason. The reproductive system is merely biological, a physiological fact that deserves no particular respect as compared to the welfare of an adult woman. Our laws giving precedence to the unborn over the living, thereby causing incredible suffering to the individual and to society, are unenforceable, and should be changed.
Although legal abortion is the final answer to population problems, this consideration is not in itself the reason for liberalizing existing laws. It is time for women to be treated as rational adults making life’s decisions rather than allowing the insensate embryo to control events. Too long, women have been op- pressed, exploited and punished by governments in the matter of reproduction.
Our abortion laws are at odds with constitutional rights when “maternity without appeal” creates a threat to life, liberty or happiness of the individual. People should have the right of choice in matters of procreation or we should abandon further talk about the “freedom” in our country.
ABORTION, AMERICAN STYLE
From the November, 1966 issue
I needed an abortion but was not fortunate enough to locate a medical doctor willing to perform this simple operation. Although many doctors are sympathetic with the problem, they dare not risk helping you. My choice, therefore, was to either bear a baby totally unwanted by both myself and the father or go to a rundown house in a slum area, where, for $200, an old woman “helped” people like me if they were less than two months pregnant. It was not an easy decision to make. It was not a matter of
whether I thought abortions right or wrong, for morally I thought it wrong to have an unwanted, unloved, fatherless child. Nor did I desire to heap shame and disgrace upon my horrified family (who insisted they would not stand by me if I chose to have the child). What terrified me was the thought of perhaps risking my life in the hands of that woman.
Finally, in desperation, I decided even possible death could not be worse, so I went through with it. The experience turned out to be even worse than I had anticipated. The house was filthy and the “operation” was performed on a dirty bed on old newspapers. This horrible memory is the price I still pay for one lousy midsummer night’s madness. How different this might have been if laws had permitted me to go to a hospital where my own doctor could have attended me.
CASE FOR ABORTION
From the October, 1965 issue
I have been a longtime devotee of The Playboy Philosophy, and now I am concerned with its practical application.
Case history: Female; 21; I.Q., 135; three years of college; 3.76 average on a 4-point scale; ambitions to do something, with obvious abilities. Married at 19 with confidence in the use of contraceptives. Birth control pills played hormone havoc with emotions. Not uncommon. After two months, switched to diaphragm. Failure. Not uncommon either. Complicated pregnancy and difficult delivery. Resentment.
Under psychiatric care since discovery of pregnancy. Still depressed and suicidal. Baby now seven months old. Practicing abstinence. Where is the sweet life of the young couple in love working to fulfill their ambitions? It never had a chance. My husband works every weekend and an average of three nights a week to meet the bills. My life is sour milk and dirty diapers.
This is my case for legalized abortion in the United States. Europe is out of the financial reach of so many like me.
ABORTION-LAW NIGHTMARE
From the September, 1968 issue
Recently, my girlfriend became pregnant. I took her to a doctor, who gave her shots that were ineffective. We then visited a nurse, who tried to induce miscarriage but also failed.
Three days after the visit to the nurse, my girl miscarried spontaneously. I took her to our campus infirmary, where she developed an infection requiring treatment in a hospital. Somehow, a policewoman got into the ambulance that was taking my girl to the hospital. She subjected my girlfriend to a barrage of questions that she was in no condition to withstand. The girl said enough to incriminate herself and me, and now the police are trying to find out who helped us.
Yesterday, after the police interrogated me for three hours, I was frightened into signing a statement telling almost everything that had happened, but I would not reveal the names or the whereabouts of the doctor and the nurse. The police tried to persuade me that these people were evil, self-seeking racketeers who were exploiting my girlfriend and me. I don’t see it that way, because the doctor took little money, the nurse none at all. They were merely trying to help a girl who had threatened … suicide because her parents would have made life hell for her if they had found out she was pregnant. Toward the end of my session with the police, one officer asked me if I ever attended church. When I answered no, he turned beet red and charged out of the room. Such was the reasonableness of my inquisitors.
Their language throughout the interrogation was offensive.
I have obtained legal advice, but I’m mainly worried about my girl pulling through this in good condition. The police were on her neck all the while she was so ill and they have continued to plague her ever since she began to recover. Tomorrow my girlfriend and I will be fingerprinted, photographed and taken to court. The cost of the lawyer is high; the emotional price is higher. She is on the verge of insanity or suicide and I am on the point of running away with her, as far from this 20th Century version of the Spanish Inquisition as possible. The abortion laws are perpetuated and enforced by legislators and by policemen who cannot tell the difference between good and evil.
GUILT-FREE ABORTION
From the July, 1968 issue
Some years ago, I was forced to obtain an illegal abortion. I went to a doctor for a checkup and he discovered that I was pregnant. Since I wasn’t married and the doctor was a friend of the family, he told my mother. The boy who had made me pregnant was not in a position to marry me. Furthermore, I had been exposed to X rays at an early stage in the fetus’ development and had reason to believe the child would be deformed.
My mother took me to a doctor who performed the abortion. He was neither a butcher nor a money grabber. In fact, he is a prominent physician with an attractive office in a good neighborhood. He charged us $115.
I am now married to the man who had made me pregnant. I am in perfect physical health and am planning to have children in a few years. I feel no guilt or depression about having had an abortion, because my mother and my husband-to- be were so understanding. The man who described abortion as a “moral evil” about which people should feel guilty (The Playboy Forum, February) is wrong. It is the attitude of the unwed mother and of her loved ones that determines whether abortion will leave a burden of guilt.
PREGNANCY TERMINATION
From the July, 1970 issue
Several months ago, I found myself pregnant for the eighth time. I have had four children and three miscarriages. One child died of pneumonia at the age of two. This has taught me the value of life—all the more precious because it can be snuffed out so easily. But to have given birth to another child would have meant wrecking the lives of my family and others dependent on us. My choice was either to change the lives of these living human beings or to remove a group of cells a potential human being from my body. I’m not sorry that I had the abortion and I don’t feel that I committed a murder. I am only sorry that it cost my husband so much money and that I had to become a criminal in the eyes of the law in order to do what I felt necessary.
ABORTION HUNTING
From the July, 1971 issue
After reading the recent letters in The Playboy Forum about abortion, I would like to share my experience with you. I am 20 years old and a junior at a university in Texas. I had an affair and became pregnant and, abortion being illegal in the state of Texas, was forced to seek a doctor who would perform an illegal operation. The search proved fruitless, in that none would guarantee me that I would have no complications. One doctor said he would help me for $500 in cash, but he would not guarantee that infection wouldn’t set in, and he insisted that I must have at least a week of bed rest afterward. The various other quacks I ran into were no more reassuring.
Thinking that perhaps Planned Parenthood in my city could assist. I called them. They helped me contact a problem pregnancy referral service, which immediately began to make all the necessary arrangements for a legal abortion in New York State. Everything was explained fully to me over the phone; all I had to do was make my own plane reservations. This was on a Friday and, on Monday, I flew to New York. I was met at the airport by the agency there, taken to my motel, picked up Tuesday morning and taken to a clinic. When the simple 10-minute operation and the recovery period of an hour or so were over, they again picked me up and returned me to the airport. I was on a plane for home by six o’clock that evening. I experienced no pain, and the people I met at the clinic, both doctors and nurses, were wonderful to me. All this cost less than $450.
I only wish that more girls who find themselves in this situation could know that there is qualified, legal help to be found.