Revisiting the History of Abortion in the Wake of the Dobbs Decision.

Abstract

Revisiting the History of Abortion in the Wake of the Dobbs Decision Kelly O’Donnell (bio) and Naomi Rogers (bio) In September 1977, Rosaura Jimenez, a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican American single mother in McAllen, Texas, went to the home of Maria Pineda for a surgical abortion. Pineda, a midwife, was licensed to deliver babies but not to perform abortions. After the procedure Jimenez developed sepsis; several days later she died of organ failure in the McAllen General Hospital. Her death would have been common and unremarkable a decade earlier, but since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, abortion had become legal and widely available in hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices across the United States. Jimenez had initially wanted a legal abortion and returned to a physician who had given her one eight months earlier, paid for by Medicaid. But in August the Hyde Amendment had gone into effect after the Supreme Court had judged it constitutional. Passed by Congress in the previous session, the amendment banned the use of federal funds for abortions and led states to restrict their funding of Medicaid as well. In McAllen Jimenez had been rebuffed by the physician, who said he would not be reimbursed, although she could find and pay for an abortion herself. Jimenez had a financial aid check in her purse to pay for her college classes (she was studying to become a special education teacher), but she chose access to education over access to legal reproductive care. After first traveling to Mexico where she received a cheaper but ineffective “hormone injection” from a pharmacy there, she sought Pineda’s aid.1 [End Page 1] Jimenez was quickly described as the first victim of the Hyde Amendment, a symbol that inspired rallies and candlelight vigils outside the state legislature in Texas and across the country. Eager to make this tragedy a potent lesson about the danger of antiabortion politics that could threaten the lives of every woman, feminist and Village Voice journalist Ellen Frankfort along with Frances Kissling, the director of the National Abortion Federation, came to McAllen in 1978. They believed that this death could become an issue that would unite feminists across class and race.2 Frankfort and Kissling, along with two of Jimenez’s friends, organized a sting operation to try to bring Pineda to justice. Setting up one woman with a wire and having Diana Rivera, another friend, pretend to need an abortion, the two white abortion activists waited in a station wagon with reporters from a Dallas television station. Pineda warned Rivera—as she had probably said to Jimenez—that if there were complications, she should say that her abortion was performed across the border in Mexico.3 The feminist visitors were then shocked to find that their race and status did not protect them from the arm of the law. Local police officers arrested not only Pineda but also Frankfurt, Kissling, and Rivera as potential “co-conspirators” in an illegal abortion.4 Texas’s weak medical practice law meant that although Pineda was found guilty of practicing medicine without a license, her misdemeanor offense resulted in three days in jail and a hundred-dollar fine. In 1979 Frankfort and Kissling published Rosie: The Investigation of a Wrongful Death and announced that 5 percent of the book’s royalties would be contributed to the new Rosie Jimenez Fund to provide financial assistance to poor women seeking abortions in Texas.5 [End Page 2] Jimenez remained a symbolic figure for American feminists seeking to protect access to abortion in the face of increasingly successful anti-abortion strategies that grew more creative and restrictive in the wake of the Hyde Amendment. As a poor Latina, Jimenez offered a way for white middle-class feminists to demonstrate cross-class, cross-racial support of reproductive health care in the face of the splintering of feminist organizations such as the Black Women’s Health Project and the National Latina Health Organization in the 1980s. A more holistic reframing of reproductive rights and reproductive justice was necessary to bring together disparate groups of feminists, especially around forced sterilization.6 Access to safe and legal abortion continued as a...