The Guttmacher Institute estimates that if the Supreme Court upholds the Texas law, twenty-six US states would quickly move to outlaw abortion once again. The situation would revert to the immediate pre-Roe years. From 1967 to 1973, dedicated activists pushed politicians to repeal anti-abortion laws while also helping women access abortions. I spoke with Downer and Phelan in 1989 as an undergraduate desperate to learn how feminists my age might respond to Webster. In the ensuing years, Phelan and Downer’s activism has become part of a well-established history of the broader feminist movement for reproductive justice. We may need to rely on the lessons of the past if abortion becomes illegal again.
In 1967, California joined a handful of states, including Colorado, Oregon, and North Carolina, that permitted abortion in limited circumstances or when continuing the pregnancy would impair a patient’s physical or mental health. That latter provision required two physicians to attest to a patient’s mental state in order for them to secure an abortion, something that women found demeaning and insulting. Phelan was angered that women had to claim that they were “mentally unstable . . . to a bunch of men who had never been pregnant.” The solution seemed clear to her: “we should teach [women] how to do [abortions] themselves.” Phelan and Maginnis developed a presentation providing both medical and legal information that they gave throughout the county in 1967 and 1968. The press often sensationalized these lectures as “do it yourself” abortion classes because they included detailed instructions about how to self-induce pregnancy loss.
In 1969, Maginnis suggested to Phelan that they write a book to disseminate abortion information to a broader audience. Phelan remembers, “I sat down at my typewriter, and for six weeks, I typed the abortion handbook. And I just typed it day and night. And before I knew it, I had galleys in my hands.” Phelan liked to envision the male physicians who controlled abortion access “sitting at a table in the hospital hearing about what these women are doing now. They’re telling each other how to do their abortions and how not to do them.”
While working to repeal abortion efforts, the Society for Humane Abortion also ran an abortion referral service. After the publication of The Abortion Handbook for Responsible Women (1969), Phelan remembered receiving a “deluge of letters from desperate women.” Phelan estimates that she provided over five thousand women with the SHA information packet that contained a list of abortion providers. The information packet also included an evaluation form to be returned after the procedure. The SHA used this feedback to weed out bad providers because Phelan felt “that was the only way we could keep the next [woman] safe.”