Historical Perspectives on Women's Lib & Abortion
Below is a group of videos all covering abortion, women’s liberation, the ERA, and feminism from a mix of historic angles. They range in length, perspective and content, but hopefully provide some historical grounding into the continuing battle around women’s bodies and lives. Please return to this post to read some of my thoughts about why it is important to watch historic newsreels and TV shows.
This first documentary is well worth devoting half an hour of your time to. From the website about this 1971 documentary:
The film tells the illegal abortion stories of two women, one middle class and one working class, in pre-Roe v. Wade Massachusetts. Both Sue and Marie describe the fear, anxiety, financial strain, and health consequences of illegal abortion. Using statistics available at the time, the film highlights the lethal consequences of restrictions on birth control and access to abortion. More than 800,000 women had illegal abortions in 1970: 300,000 suffered complications and up to 8,000 died. Poor women of color were 90% of those who died, and their maternal mortality rate was (and is) four times that of white women.
Women’s voices of the time demand reproductive justice and adequate health care for all as they lay out some pervasive racist and economic inequities in the US and worldwide. Activists and community groups call for safe and affordable abortion, access to birth control, maternal care, and health care for all. They demand an end to forced sterilizations and experimental drug trials conducted on poor black and brown people.
When the US Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision affirmed the constitutional right to abortion, Planned Parenthood and other organizations opened clinics to provide the health care, birth control, and abortions that improved and saved countless women’s lives. But decades of anti-abortion pressure have forced many of these clinics to close, especially impacting low-income women and families. The year 2021 alone saw nineteen states pass 106 measures restricting abortion access, the largest such number in a single year. Twenty-six state legislatures are prepared to radically restrict or ban abortion if the Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade.
A powerful reminder of the conditions and demands that inspired the movement for abortion rights fifty years ago, Abortion and Women’s Rights 1970 speaks to the need for safe, legal abortion and the broader fight for reproductive justice today.
Several TV shows and segments that offer interesting period perspectives on these subjects:
Newsreels and ads: