When Barbara Schwartz looks back on her younger days working as a stagehand on Broadway, she remembers all the excitement: the nervous ballerinas donning costumes backstage, the stagehands holding flashlights between their teeth.
She was able to launch herself into this high-pressure career because of a choice she made in 1976, she says. She had an abortion at a clinic she found in the Yellow Pages. It was three years after the court ruling Roe v. Wade established the constitutional right to abortion; to Schwartz, the world seemed full of new career opportunities for women. She got a credit card in her name, became one of the first women to join the local union, and joined the crowd of technical workers at shows like “Cats” and “Miss Saigon.”
Now 69, Schwartz is retired. She spends these years escorting women to the doors of an abortion clinic on the Virginia-Tennessee border. She was drawn to this volunteer work, she said, because for her the promise of her 20s has diminished — the result of laws that have reduced access to abortion, with a bill that leaked from the Supreme Court last week revealing that Roe is likely to be overturned.
“This is my way of giving back,” Schwartz said.
That’s also how Ginny Jelatis, 67, thinks about it. She was a senior in high school the year Roe v. Wade was decided; and she began serving as a clinical companion after retiring from her job as a history teacher in 2016.
“I feel my life is perfectly framed by this issue,” Jelatis said. “I became an adult at 18 and here I am, at 60, still struggling.”
For women like Jelatis, who entered adulthood in the early 1970s, the world of work and opportunity was rapidly changing. Women’s participation in the workforce rose from about 43% in 1970 to 57.4% in 2019. Many factors drove women into the workforce in greater numbers in those years, but scholars argue that access to abortion was important. .
“There is no doubt that legal abortion enables women of all classes and races to have some control over their economic lives and the ability to work outside the home,” said Rosalind Petchesky, a retired professor of political science at Hunter College, whose research was cited in the 1992 Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, who confirmed Roe.
Women who entered the workforce shortly after Roe are now reaching retirement age. Some, like Carolyn McLarty, a retired veterinarian, are more committed than ever to anti-abortion activism. Others, like Schwartz, look back and feel their careers are indebted to the 1973 Supreme Court decision and the reproductive options it allowed women. So they’re spending their retirement years working as escorts at abortion clinics.
The experience of older clinic companions, shared in interviews over the past few months, shows what Roe meant to a specific group: women who struggled for access to abortion when they were on the cusp of adulthood and whose professional lives were shaped by opportunities. that Roe provided them, in their opinion.
“My God, it all came back,” said Debra Knox Deiermann, 67, a clinic companion in the St. Louis (Missouri). “I just can’t believe young women won’t have access to what we had.”
Other women who were starting their families or careers when the Roe decision came have fought hard against legal abortion, their adult lives marred by a decision they thought was terrible at the time and are happy to see it about to be overturned. According to the Gallup poll, in 1975, 18% of women ages 18 to 29 believed that abortion should be illegal under all circumstances; last year, in this same group of women, now aged 63 to 75, the percentage was 23%.
A 2021 Pew Research poll found that 59% of Americans said they believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 39% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. Recent Pew data indicate that women are slightly more likely than men to say that abortion should be legal in all cases, and younger people, ages 18 to 29, are much more likely than older adults. to say that abortion must be legal in some or all cases.
Bound4Life, an anti-abortion civil society group, estimates that a fifth of its volunteers are retired. The Eagle Forum, an anti-abortion group that serves people of all age groups, estimates that most of its volunteers are 55 or older.
“They are almost the only age group that responds to our emails and responds when we send out alerts to call their elected officials,” Tabitha Walter, political director at the Eagle Forum, said in an email to The New York Times.
Some are motivated by the huge cultural and legal changes around abortion they have witnessed and, in some cases, driven over the course of their careers.
“I’ve seen the pendulum swing from being very conservative to being out of control, rejecting God,” said McLarty, 71, who volunteers as Eagle Forum board secretary and has been involved in the Oklahoma Republican Party. “The younger generation is seeing how they’ve been cheated on a lot of things.”
McLarty said she knew that changes to the abortion law during her lifetime coincided with an increase in women’s participation in the workforce. But for her part, she would have liked to spend less time on her career and more on taking care of her children.
“Looking back, I probably would have spent more time at home,” said McLarty, who worked part-time when his children were young. “There are different times in life for different chapters.”
The last half century has brought a series of cultural changes that have facilitated the entry of women into the labor market. New technologies created new office roles, many of which went to women; high school completion rates have increased; the stigma associated with married women in the workplace has decreased.
But sociologists and economists argue that legal abortion is a uniquely important factor, giving many women the option to delay starting families and save money in early adulthood.
Recent research has attempted to understand the role that access to abortion plays in women’s employment. Most notable is the Turnaway Study, conducted at the University of California at San Francisco.
The researchers followed two groups of women — one group who wanted and had abortions and the other who wanted abortions and were unable to obtain them — for five years and found that those who were unable to have an abortion had worse economic outcomes. Nearly two-thirds of those who did not have the abortion they wanted were living in poverty six months later, compared with 45% of those who did.
Roe’s overthrow would mean that women across the US would face varying state laws on access to abortion, with 13 states poised to ban abortion either immediately or very quickly after the court’s decision. There is very likely a correlation between regions of the country where it is more difficult to have an abortion and those with fewer options for day care and parental leave, according to an analysis of survey results by financial website WalletHub.
For older women who believe they have achieved financial stability because of their decision to have an abortion, there is resonance in sharing their stories with the younger women they meet in clinics today.
“Older people I work with might remember that dread of ‘Oh my God, what if this happens to me?'” said Deiermann, who has spent most of his professional life working on reproductive health advocacy.
Many clinic volunteers, like Deiermann, remember when their colleagues and friends had illegal abortions. Telling these stories feels more urgent than ever.
Karen Kelley, 67, a retired nurse and midwife in Idaho who volunteers at an abortion clinic, spent her childhood aligned with the anti-abortion views of her Catholic family. Then she found herself pregnant in her mid-20s, with no income to support a baby. Realizing that motherhood could “damn all her hopes”, she chose to terminate the pregnancy, about six years after Roe.
This is a memory Kelley passes on to the women she escorts up the clinic steps. “If they ask me, I always say that I understand how they are feeling because I had an abortion and they have every right to make that decision,” she said.
And some older women said the position they are in today — retired, with savings and stability — is something they attribute to Roe.
“It gave us a chance to decide to get married and have a family later on,” said Eileen Ehlers, 74, a retired English teacher and mother.
What Roe gave her is something she can now give back in volunteering: “We have time,” she said.
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