Sharing a reflection…
By Ed McManus, NTD Executive Board Member
In 1965, when I lived in Denver, my girlfriend Caryl got pregnant. She wanted desperately to get an abortion, but that was completely against the law in Colorado and every other state. We couldn’t even find anyone willing to perform an illegal abortion.
Finally, a lawyer friend gave me the address of a clinic in a town in south Texas that he said would do it, but he said you couldn’t call there. You just had to show up.
So Caryl and I drove all the way down there, and she went in, only to be told, “Sorry. We don’t do that.” Imagine: We had driven 900 miles for nothing, and now we had to drive 900 miles back! (Caryl later got it done at a place in Nebraska.)
That horrible experience woke me up to the reality of what women faced throughout the country, and I decided to try to do something about it. So I invited some people over to my house, and we proceeded to form an organization to begin working to repeal Colorado’s ban on abortion, or at least to reform it. We called it the Colorado Assn. for the Study of Abortion (CASA).
(It later became the Colorado chapter of the Natl. Assn. for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, NARAL. It now has rebranded as Cobalt, cobaltadvocates.org, https://cobaltadvocates.org/, (Colorado Politics, Jan. 23, 2020) and has nearly 68,000 members!)
My company transferred me to another state a few months later, but 2 friends of mine in CASA got another friend who was a law school student to draft a bill, and they persuaded yet another friend, Dick Lamm, who had just been elected to the legislature, to introduce it.
The bill allowed an abortion if the woman's physical or mental health was threatened, if the unborn child might have birth defects, or in cases of rape or incest.
The bill, very surprisingly, attracted bi-partisan support, and Colorado became the first state in the country to liberalize its abortion law! (And my buddy Dick went on to be elected governor a few years later!)
Six years after passage of the Colorado law, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade declared abortion legal. But now, of course, the court has stricken down that historic decision. What an enormous mistake that is, and what a tragedy for the women of the nation, to be told that the government again has taken control of their bodies!
I’m not really in a position anymore to invite a bunch of people over to my house and organize a campaign to stop this madness, like I did 57 years ago. I have kept this story in my heart for all this time, but I have been inspired by all the brave women today who are recounting their experiences, and I decided to speak out myself for the first time. (A version of this story was included in May in a newsletter I publish on Facebook/LinkedIn.)
The House passed legislation last September to make abortion legal throughout the country. If a majority of senators OK making an exception to the filibuster rule, they can get that bill through the Senate (although, of course, it will still face a legal challenge).
So I am asking my friends across the country to urge their senators to step up. And I’m hoping you will do likewise. Please share this story widely, and please support Cobalt or another pro-choice group!
