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How an Abortion in 1910 Changed the World
Stories like that of Vera Connolly show how abortions change lives for the better
We are now living in the nightmare. Legislation virtually outlawing abortion has passed in several states, setting up a reconsideration of Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court. In response, thousands of women have traded their privacy for advocacy under the banner of #YouKnowMe, an online campaign started by talk show host Busy Phillipps, by telling the world what their abortions allowed them to accomplish in life. These women follow in the footsteps of Billy Jean King, Nora Ephron, Judy Collins and 50 other celebrities who in 1972 placed the now famous “We have had abortions” ad in Ms. magazine.
What we are seeing is a historic continuum of women speaking back to any discourse on abortion that leaves out their own experience. Unfortunately, long-standing taboos on the subject leave us few testimonies from women from generations before Roe about how their abortions changed their lives — and ours — for the better.
Digging again into the archives, I offer here the story of Vera Connolly, born in 1888, whose abortion enabled her to become one of the most effective progressive journalists of the 20th century, and to save the lives of countless women and children. Connolly’s correspondence and manuscripts tell the story of her professional life which included articles in women’s magazines that circulated to millions of readers and even entered the congressional record. But because she had a habit of burning her letters to maintain her privacy, the details of her personal life can only be pieced together through clues left by hundreds of letters from her compatriots, dispersed across several archives of California writers.
A soldier’s daughter, Connolly grew up in military barracks on Indian reservations and on Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay. She witnessed firsthand the government’s horrible treatment of Native children and immigrants — an experience that would stick with her for life, rendering her a staunch feminist and social justice advocate. Dropping out of University of California, Berkeley after her father died, she moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea to take care of her infirm mother.
