What Americans Have Forgotten About the Era Before Roe v. Wade
Dr. David Grimes, who has been providing abortion care for four decades, is worried that the time period before abortion was legalized in the United States is becoming a distant memory.
“I’m 67 now, and people younger than me don’t remember what the bad old days were like. That’s why people seem so complacent about allowing those days to return,” he said in an interview with ThinkProgress.
Grimes, who currently works as a clinical professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, was in his final year of medical school when Roe v. Wade was handed down. When he was a young doctor, he treated some of the women who were injured by the unsafe abortions that were still being performed in the 1970s.
People younger than me don’t remember what the bad old days were like.
He still remembers some of the extreme cases he encountered. One patient, for example, was running a 106 degree fever after having a rubber catheter inserted in her uterus in an attempt to terminate a pregnancy. Another arrived at the hospital in a state of antiseptic shock with a dead fetus inside of her.
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