Ted Getzel Works

Before Roe (1964)

I remember my former girlfriend, she had broken up with me months earlier, but I still loved her dearly, drenched in sweat, writhing in pain as peritonitis ate out her insides, the victim of a back alley abortion. She refused to tell her mother what was really wrong, because she was afraid of what her mother would think of her. The family doctor thought she had some kind of intestinal infection. She was dying. She pleaded with me through cracked lips not to tell her mother the truth. I kissed her on the forehead and reassured her. Then I went into and told her mother the truth. They rushed her to the hospital. Miraculously she survived. That was what it was like before Roe.