Before Roe vs. Wade, Women Tried Everything
By Ji H Chong
A&F Editor

Roughly 70 people from the 5-Colleges and off-campus packed into the Women's Union Friday evening to see the cast of Women Tried Everything: Stories From Before Roe vs. Wade dramatically retell the true horror stories of people who were interviewed about how illegal abortions before Roe vs. Wade drastically affected their lives. The final event in a series that made up Abortion Awareness Week, the play was arranged as a series of monologues, including reenactments of doctors recounting some of the most desperate abortion attempts they had seen during their practice and of women talking about their own illegal abortions, accompanied by visual images projected onto a screen.

Dr. Edith Porter, played by Elizabeth Bartlett SC '06, remembered a patient (given the pseudonym Joan) who tried to abort a pregnancy by inserting the metal tubing of a ballpoint pen into her cervix when she was four months pregnant. After waking up from a nap, she could no longer find the pen. Dr. Porter and her colleagues were unable to find any evidence of the pen themselves, even with an X-ray. However, shortly after Joan gave birth to her child five months later, Dr. Porter found that the pen had gone through the wall of Joan's uterus and pierced her bowel six times.

Debby Brand '05, who co-directed the play with Sarah Wheeler '05, played the part of Linda, a woman whose sister was denied an abortion by a hospital committee even though she was mentally unstable:

"We petitioned the hospital's 'abortion committee' with her case. But apparently, lots of women were pulling the ol' 'I'll-kill-myself-if-I-don't-get-an-abortion' routine. That wasn't enough for the pricks on the committee, so she was denied."

"Well, being stubborn as a mule, she got herself some valium or something and really did try to kill herself. I spent three days watching her comatose body before she woke up, pissed that she was still alive."

Even though her sister eventually did receive clearance from the committee for an abortion, Linda felt that the trauma of the prolonged ordeal was what led her sister to kill herself just two weeks later.

Throughout the performance, images were projected onto a screen in one corner of the WU by artistic director, Dieu Ha '05. All of the photographs were her own original work and she said she arranged them to "follow the play but also to provoke thought." "It offered visual accompaniment but was meant not to detract," she said. For example, during the monologue titled "Susan's Band-Aid," the stark images on screen were of the interior of an old automobile with a band-aid on the windshield that was perhaps similar to the one that 21-year old Susan approached in a Howard Johnson's parking lot, following a tip from a relative on where to find a competent individual to perform an illegal abortion.

Since the original dramatic telling of the stories, which were compiled and edited by Brown medical school student Elizabeth Schoenfeld in 2001, the play has spread to college campuses and churches nationwide to remind people, especially younger audiences, of what it was like when abortion was illegal before the Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973. The play came to Pomona when Wheeler, who had seen the first play in Providence, Rhode Island, and had already been considering putting together a production met up with Amber Hallet '05, the organizer of Abortion Awareness Week. Obviously, the play fit in perfectly with Hallet's vision of the week's events designed to "get through to people and educate them." In fact, the theme of the week was "It's Time to Share Our Stories."

Afterward, everyone involved with the production of the play expressed satisfaction with the turnout and participation in the week's events overall. Wheeler felt that the play was especially significant not only because this year is the thirty-year anniversary of Roe but also because the current political climate threatens to take away a woman's right to choose. Likewise, audience member Chi Ha '02 shared a similar opinion on the current debate over abortion. Asked why she decided to come see the play, she said, "I came to support a very important issue that is in danger given the trends under the current administration as well as the overall complacency I see in the American public."

And as the stories in the play consistently stressed, making abortion illegal would not prevent abortions from actually occurring. Instead, it would drive women to risk their own lives as they "try everything" for an abortion, including sticking pens into the cervix, throwing oneself down a flight of stairs, and overdosing on LSD and other drugs.