FOR MANY women in Britain today, the horrors of back-street abortions remain as a vivid memory. years since the Abortion passed and there are few abortions now. But if Tory MP John Corrie's parliamentary Bill is passed, thousands will be turning once again to the back streets.
By further restricting the already inadequate legislation, numbers of women will fail to secure a legal abortion.
of the main Corrie's Bill, to illegal after 20 weeks' pregnancy, will particularly affect young who can least cope with an unwanted pregnancy.
When she was 19, Jeanne Saint had an illegal abortion. That was in 1966, a year before the present Act was passed. It was the experience oi that operation' which led her into the National Abortion Campaign, which she is now a voluntary worker in the campaign's office.
Saint told
Sheridan about her abortion.
, I knew I was pregnant two days after late, and I told my mother. We decided to try various things until my next period was due and then if nothing happened I'd tell my father.
I tried hot baths, running up and down stairs, but my period didn't CULLIN My JEANNE SAINT: I'd walk steps then double up' immediate reaction was: "Poor little bugger. What can we do to help her?" I was bloody lucky with both my parents.
My father had a chemist friend who got me some pills, which didn't work. Then he got the address of an FAROOQ Chaudry, who has worked as a porter at Churchill Hospital, Oxford, for four years, wes seized there by two police officers Tuesday of last week and taken to the detention centre at Heathrow.
This arrest came without warning, and without the knowledge of either Farooq's employers or his NUPE, which learned of it from a fellow worker who saw the arrest take place.
Farooq came to Britain in 1972, a fact which the family in with whom he then testified, so he qualifies under the amnesty for 'illegal' immigrants who abortionist, Durham, • I[ IS 12 come to London.
Act was My abortion illegal rather Hotel. I clauses in pumped the stuff into me. make abortions women, we'd agreed on.
lots of exercises. for Geoffrey period was pain in my life.
the lavatory, then that gin, douches, round and father's two days without any sleep.
lumps of congealed blood.
baby. I went to see the WHICH abortion scene in it, going to happen to me.
women, 1 knew absolutely all that different today. discovered weeks Britain in "73.
Farooq has of proof is on Farooq.
NUPE, Oxford branch.
2pm.
union, Thatcher's development:
stayed has dealing with "overstayers'.
The new retired nurse in and arranged for her to was front street than back street. My father booked a suite in the Strand Palace him and his secretary, who came along to keep me company. I was scared shitless.
I lay down on the floor in the bathroom. This woman had a bowl of what looked like soapy water, and she inserted a tube into my womb, then Then I got up and nearly passed out. After that for a while nothing much happened. We spent the ni aht at the hotel and I bled a little. The ext day the woman rang and asked: the package arrived??' It was a code I said it was a very small package, and she told me not to worry, but do That was the last I saw of her. I think she was paid £70.
I went home and did some violent gardening. My father took me for a walk on the common, and it was then that the contractions started. It was absolute agony. I've never had such I'd walk three steps then double up. It took ages to get home. I'd sit on losing a bit of blood, stopped I'd walk my mother's bedroom, till I'd get another cramp and go back on the loo. I did that for It was awful. I thought I was going to die. Finally, after about two days, it was more or less over. For a month after that I bled heavily and lost big I was so desperate that I would have done anything not to have a film Alfie, nasty back-street while I pregnant, and it just seemed to me like She a part of life. That it was something that happened to women, and it was Seeing that film I thought that was the way it was and how it had to be. It never occurred to me that there could Be an alternative. Like so many young her nothing about anything, and I don't think it's year, for example, that my sister who was then 18 had been sleeping with a guy for and through sheer ignorance used no protection at all.
entered before January '73. But the Office claims he entered no documentary evidence to show he was here before then, which means he is now due for deportation. The Home Office does not have to prove that he does not qualify under the amnesty — the onus His case has been taken up by Trades Council, Oxford CRC, and the local ANL On Saturday a from Oxford travelled to Heathrow to join the CAIL picket (see page 2), and next Saturday a rally is being held at the CRC, Cowley Road, Oxford at The detention centres, under M.
patronage, nOW looking forward to a boom. Latest government bas begun to implement its promise to fugther tighten immigration controls by giving extra powers to the police in arrangement, planned under J. Callaghan's regime, means The hidden.
doesn't have the relationship with my mother as I do, so if she got pregnant she wouldn't have known what to do or where to go. It could easily have become a late abortion.
My mother spent the morning of wedding day helping her friend have an abortion. I remember her telling me she had to empty away LICC bucketfuls of woman was haemorrhaging so badly that my mother rang her friend's doctor, a woman. She just didn't want to know.
My mother told the doctor that if that black people whose permit has expired and who then apply to the Home Office for an extension will be immediately visited and removed by the police.
Technical hitch A SIGN 'of the times. Harry, recently-qualified teacher and reader of Socialist Challenge, was among three applicants from an original 76 who were selected for interview for a post as lecturer grade one in. the general studies department Tottenham technical college, North London.
The three became irritated as they were kept waiting for hour after hour last Wednesday morning. A secretary apologised for the delay and said it was because a departmental meeting was taking place.
This indeed was the case. Shortly after lunch the short-listed applicants were informed that principal had just been told to make an immediate expenditure cut of £20,000. The three could collect their travel expenses, but there was no Dr Milton Helpern, a medical examiner in New York, was published in a leaflet issued by the National Abortion Righes Action League - the pro-abortion campaign in the United States.
NARAL printed this picture because it was fed up propaganda of enlarged foetuses and wanted to counter it with pictures showing the alternative.
abortion as a lesser evil compared to back-street abortion.
early, is straightforward and not shocking al all.
abortions. It does show the hypocrisy of the 'sanctity of life' arguments of SPLC and Life.
reason. The photograph illustrates a reality we may have forgotten in the 12 years since the Abortion same her house shouting best friend". The doctor came.
I was only two months and if it had been now and if I Lived in the right Tower Hamlets, I could go along as catchment an outpatient suction method it would take just six The minutes and I'd go home the same day feeling none the worse. That's if I knew about such things.
of illegal abortion methods recently and there was a description of the more job.
Our reader. dismayed. He considered that he stood a good chance for a similar vacancy at Edmonton college further education. But that afternoon he learned that the college was not troubling to short list applicants. The full-time post, maximum of 20 teaching hours a week, had been part-time one, with 16 teaching hours, and significantly less pay and other job benefits.
The case of the forgetful magistrate JOHN Turner is the chairperson at Tottenham North London. On 5 May last year he remanded two for reports. college named Breen Dohan, feeding a child.
that she could not spend three weeks in Holloway without her child. The prosecuting barrister, ThIS woman died from an air embolism during an illegal abortion. The photograph, from the files of He considered very carefully various arguments that might be presented against our publishing it.
The danger is that this concedes the ground to the anti-abortionists by implying we support legal In fact, we say that quite simply it is a woman's right to choose. Legal abortion, especially if it is But this photograph shows the reality of what so many women fear — the butchery of back-street The horror of back-street abortion is not the reuson we support legal abortion, but it is part of the Il still exists for some women, and we don't want it back again. We believe this reality should not she didn't come she'd stand outside «You killed my such as killed me. clinic and with the I was reading about various types That's National paign.
was wholly of The unit which involved converted to have magistrates court cropped controversy black women in weeks pending One of them, a Mauritian WAS breast- and She informed the court Inspector realising that with the anti-abortionist shock-horror method l'd had The book said that if there is the slightest slip, and if liquid had into my bloodstream - if I'd had erosion in my womb or vagina, or the tube had cut me — it would hay "Immediately fatal" words in the book. The woman in thi picture could so easily have been me.
I would do anything to avoid am other woman going through wher That's rony Im in rent to Abortion Caman injustice had been done, west & the duty solicitor at the court asked him to go back to Turae ask him to reconsider.
duty solicitor, Christe Carstairs, did as requested. He Turner that there was no room Holloway prison's 'mother and to remand her in would mean separating her fro child who was being breastfed.
The magistrate summone court inspector, who continged Carstairs had said. Turner rep по doubl that arrangements will be made.' Ca was shocked. He appealed to s in chambers who said: 'I agre Dohan is unlikely to reoffeed accordingly - grant bail.
The reason why this matter up again is because has broken out l Herald. Turner wrote a letter de Tottenham that he was informed that the child would be Carstairs virtually calls bim a lis debate goes on...
Meanwbile, for more infon on magistrates and how they turn to page 10.
Socialist Challenge 12 July 1979 Pag
Who does Joe Gormley
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nowhare Gestapo time