Remembering an Abortion Rights Activist Who Spurned the Spotlight
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
Guests include Lili Loofborow, who profiled Maginnis for Slate; Professor Leslie J. Regan, who wrote the book When Abortion Was a Crime; and the artist Andrea Bowers whose video piece, Letters to An Army of Three recreated the messages people would send Maginnis when they were desperate to access abortion services.
Special thanks to the Schlesinger Library, where the 1975 oral history of Pat Maginnis is housed.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There was a time in most places in this country where if you got an abortion, you could face interrogation by police. |
| 0:08.0 | Which meant decades ago, the vast majority of people seeking abortions in the US had to go underground for a doctor, |
| 0:15.5 | or secretly perform the procedure on themselves, or simply leave the country. |
| 0:24.0 | If you can only give me the name of a Mexican doctor, please use the enclosed envelope as soon as possible. |
| 0:29.0 | Since upon thousands of people wrote desperate letters back in the 1960s to a woman named Pat McGinnis. |
| 0:35.0 | She was an abortion rights activist who had compiled a very special list. |
| 0:41.0 | Please send me a list of doctors into one of the take care. |
| 0:44.0 | It was a catalog of sorts of dozens of abortion providers outside the US, because for many people, this was the only choice. |
| 0:52.0 | I've seen several doctors and all have refused to even try to help me writing this. |
| 0:56.0 | I feel ashamed and desperate. |
| 0:58.0 | I am married, but my husband has just been called for jungle training in Korea for 18 months, so a child would cause too many problems at this time. |
| 1:07.0 | I'm 18 years old, single and three months pregnant by a married man. You are my last resort. |
| 1:15.0 | She had stacks and stacks, almost like towers of like the plastic shopping bags with letters in them. |
| 1:24.0 | Andrea Bowers was the artist who recorded these actors reading out loud these letters, addressed to Pat McGinnis, and two women who worked closely with her. |
| 1:33.0 | Bowers compiled these accounts into a video project called Letters to an Army of Three. |
| 1:39.0 | And then Bowers found out that two days before New Lawn, Texas spanning almost all abortions went into effect, Pat McGinnis died at 93 years old. |
| 1:50.0 | I miss her. And this worked change my life, you know. |
| 1:56.0 | To see McGinnis' life end, just as a new restrictive abortion law in Texas was set to begin, has prompted new reflection on where Pat McGinnis fit into the abortion rights movement, |
| 2:08.0 | a movement that often didn't know what to do with a radical activist who demanded immediate direct action. |
| 2:15.0 | She felt like the people running the movements were a little fearful of her tactics and politics. |
| 2:26.0 | And perhaps their tactics and politics at that time were too radical for the direction the movements were going. |
| 2:35.0 | And so I always thought that she was kind of hidden because of the radicality. |
... |
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