A comrade from 1933 relates her personal experiences trying to get an abortion, and resolves that we must have free birth control clinics. The fight continues.

‘We Must Have Free Birth Control Clinics’ by J.R. from Working Woman. Vol. 4 No. 4. June, 1933.

It is the hardest thing for working class women to get information about birth control. I was pregnant and went to a doctor to present my case; that my husband has been out of work for a year and a half and we could not afford to have another child. He said he could do nothing for me because performing an abortion is illegal, so he sent me to a Mother’s Clinic.

Here they told me they could not do anything for me. Then I went to a Maternity Clinic at one of the hospitals and here I was told the same, that they are only able to do something before or after pregnancy but nothing during it.

When you want to get information regarding birth control, in any clinic of Detroit, regardless of whether you are on the Welfare Relief list or not, working part-time or full-time, you must pay $2.50 and then you will be able to get the information about birth control and also the articles needed for it.

I was unable to get satisfaction from the Professional Service or so-called Legal Service. I went to a woman who is practicing abortion illegally. Here it was my luck that I was able to keep house for her for a few weeks in return for her services.

After she worked on me I had a bad hemmorhage. It took three hours to get a doctor on Sunday. Called up several doctors: the Doctor’s Exchange and the City Doctor promised to send a doctor out at once.

The doctor came exactly came exactly 12 hours later then he sent me to the hospital. Going to the hospital in an ambulance was the roughest ride I ever had. It is no wonder so many people die on the way to the hospitals when they are taken in an ambulance because the drivers have to take the shortest route and the streets which have the least traffic and many of these streets are rough. No consideration is given to the patient.

While in the hospital I observed the injustice to Negroes. There were many rooms full of women who have female disorders. There were Negro and white women but they were not mixed in the rooms. The Negro women had a separate room which did not receive the same attention given to the white women in the other rooms. The white women were able to get the nurses’ service whereas the Negro women had to wait on each other.

The force was very limited. The nurses were rushed so they could hardly breathe. They could have used twice as many nurses as they had. It was not so bad the first day in the hospital as on the second day. The steady supervisor of this section was absent on the first day. When she came in that morning she made the nurses step, she said that there were too many patients and many of them must go home.

The hospitals of Detroit are quite crowded; they even have beds in the hallways and patients waiting in wheelchairs to be taken home. So the supervisor sent all patients home who had shown signs that they were able to walk, also who did not need cleansing or operation but were weak. Some were sent home who were even too weak to walk. I was so weak that I was unable to hold my head up without having a dizzy spell and yet I was sent home.

This is how the working class is treated in the hospitals. When the rich want information or are sick, they go to a doctor and receive the advice needed. Nothing is illegal for them because they are able to pay. The doctors and the hospitals are not interested in the public health but in the money.

The working class cannot pay so they have to suffer. They either sacrifice their lives or give birth to an unwelcomed child. The capitalist system does not only exploit the children of the working class but the child from its infancy is under-nourished due to lack of enough and proper food during pregnancy. Many mothers are not only burdened with home work but are forced into industry to help keep the wolf from the door. Under such conditions many children are born weak and are easily affected with the working class, disease, tuberculosis. And when the boy has managed to grow up somehow he becomes cannon fodder in wars that defend the property of rich men.

We, the working class women, must organize ourselves into sewing circles, health circles, into the Unemployed Councils, union auxiliaries and other organizations, to fight against the capitalist system. We must organize ourselves and fight for maternity insurance; for the betterment of present and for future generations. Let us, the working class women, put our shoulders to the wheel with the men and fight for unemployment and social insurance.

-J. R.

The Working Woman, ‘A Paper for Working Women, Farm Women, and Working-Class Housewives,’ was first published monthly by the Communist Party USA Central Committee Women’s Department from 1929 to 1935, continuing until 1937. It was the first official English-language paper of a Socialist or Communist Party specifically for women (there had been many independent such papers). At first a newspaper and very much an exponent of ‘Third Period’ politics, it played particular attention to Black women, long invisible in the left press. In addition, the magazine covered home-life, women’s health and women’s history, trade union and unemployment struggles, Party activities, as well poems and short stories. The newspaper became a magazine in 1933, and in late 1935 it was folded into The Woman Today which sought to compete with bourgeois women’s magazines in the Popular Front era. The Woman today published until 1937. During its run editors included Isobel Walker Soule, Elinor Curtis, and Margaret Cowl among others.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/wt/v4n04-jun-1933-WW-R7524-R2-col-cov.pdf