INTRODUCTION

Until recently, the era of illegal abortion has been a "sealed chapter" in women's history. In WHEN ABORTION WAS ILLEGAL: Untold Stories, compelling first-person stories illuminate the danger of back-alley abortions, revealing the physical, emotional and legal consequences of when abortion was a crime in the United States. Women who jeopardized their lives, doctors who risked losing their licenses, and others who tried to help women find safe abortions, speak frankly about their experiences.

RELATIONSHIPS and ROLES

Betty had been in a "serious relationship" when she became pregnant. The pregnancy ended the relationship. 

• Discuss ways in which an unplanned pregnancy might affect a relationship. From a woman's point of view? From a man's?
• What might some of the physical and emotional issues be when the man does not want to be involved in decisions about an unplanned pregnancy? If he does want to be involved?

• Contrast the attitudes today about an unmarried woman's decision to continue a pregnancy with those before abortion was legal.
• Can you imagine yourself in Rosalie's situation? What do you think you would do?

• How do you think you would feel about marriage as an alternative to having an abortion?
• How might you feel about raising a child as a single parent?
• How would you feel about giving a child up for adoption?   Other options?

• Discuss the place of contraceptives information in "the abortion debate."
• Discuss the complexity of feelings about birth control, and why that can also be a volatile issue for some people. 

Dr. Armstrong reports on hospital admissions of women with "botched abortions" in the 1950's and 1960's. The cause of these deaths was often disguised on hospital records as "spontaneous hemorrhage" or "infection." 

• Discuss the challenge of getting accurate statistical information on illegal abortions.

• If you were a doctor at that time, facing loss of your license and/or imprisonment, how might you have acted?
• What do you think some of the motivations of the few doctors who did provide abortions might have been? What were some of the costs to them personally? Their rewards? 
• Did the film change the way you view health practitioners who perform abortions today?

• Discuss the implications of a therapeutic loophole prior to Roe v. Wade. What happens to access for women of different economic classes when abortion is neither fully legal, nor fully illegal?
• Do you think there are circumstances under which access to abortion should be limited? Which?
• Do you think it is possible to "legislate" all the possible scenarios that surround unplanned and unwanted pregnancies? Why or why not?

Betty reflects on obtaining an illegal abortion and admits she felt "like a criminal" until she was able to speak about it, some forty years later. Prior to Roe v. Wade, many women went to unskilled abortionists they had never met, performed self-abortions, or continued their pregnancies without talking to anyone about their feelings.

• Why do you think Betty's "societal guilt" remained for 40 years? 
• Discuss the ways in which counseling, or being able to confide in someone, might affect a woman's emotional reaction to an illegal abortion, or to a legal abortion experience. 
• Discuss the mixed feelings ANY choice can bring, either immediately or years after the decision.

• Why might a woman who had an abortion then choose to "risk her life to have a child?" 
• Why might a woman who loves and wants children choose to have an abortion, especially a dangerous illegal one? Discuss the concept of "the right time."

• What is the value of young people hearing about the back-alleys?