Planned Parenthood Action at Tufts held an event on Nov. 20 featuring the “Bad Old Days Posse” — a group of women telling their stories about life before “Roe v. Wade” — who shared their experiences of the state of abortion rights in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“There was a time in the early ‘60s when women’s lives were governed by ‘couldn’t,’” Bad Old Days Posse member Pat Yingling began.
She described the limited legal rights of women in the ‘60s, including difficulty accessing birth control, and explained the significant risks women took to seek illegal abortions. In 1973, “Roe v. Wade” was passed, establishing a constitutional right to abortion. Almost 50 years later on June 24, 2022, it was overturned.
“We thought we won [but it] looks like we didn’t,” Yingling said. “This is all about controlling women in one way or another — controlling where you go, if you can go to college, what kind of jobs you get, what kind of money you have and what happens with your bodies.”
“I’m filled with rage and sorrow now that we are back again fighting for reproductive equity and justice,” another panelist, Vicki Solomon, said.
Solomon shared her experience receiving an abortion in 1965 as a sophomore at Wheaton College, which was then an all-women’s school.
“I knew that I needed to have an abortion. I knew that I was too young to have a child,” Solomon said. “I was 19 years old, I was in college, I was just starting to be a dancer. It just was not going to work.”
Solomon explained the covert process of receiving an abortion in the ‘60s. She was picked up by a car at a corner and taken to an apartment, where she got her abortion.
“I went back to college and never said one word to anybody who I had spoken to about this. Nobody asked me, it was just like a code of silence,” Solomon said.
Solomon became a dancer, eventually got married and had two children. She also worked to help her community through various jobs in education.
Members of The Bad Old Days posse speak at an event hosted by Planned Parenthood Action at Tufts on Nov. 20.
Louise, the next speaker on the panel, is a retired public health nurse who worked in abortion counseling, HIV and AIDS and LGBTQ+ health for many years.
Growing up in a conservative family in Connecticut, Louise never received sex education and was in shock when she first discovered she was pregnant during her freshman year of college.
After months of denial, Louise was finally able to accept that she needed to get an abortion. However, the procedure ended up taking twice as long as it was supposed to.
“I think about all of the women in Texas, Alabama and Florida who have to confront an unwanted pregnancy right now,” Louise said. “They have to wait and make a plan and rustle up the money and figure it out and every week that goes by while they’re doing that puts their bodies at more risk and puts themselves in more and more jeopardy.”
The next speaker Marjorie Short was a freshman at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1967 when she became involved in a sexually abusive relationship that resulted in an unwanted pregnancy.
After experiencing rejection and humiliation from her doctor, a campus mental health therapist, her church and her best friend, Short spoke to her mother who belittled and berated her at first, but ultimately helped her get an abortion.
“I had been shamed, blamed and silenced, and no one was there for me,” Short said.
Then, Martha Nencioli, a retired women’s health practitioner, spoke about her experience accompanying her friend in getting an abortion when she was a senior at Boston University in 1966.
Nencioli shared the story of her friend nearly getting arrested just moments after she had gotten an abortion. At the police station, she recalls the police publicly announcing, “I think this woman just had an abortion.”
Although they were fortunately released from the station, she wondered what would have happened under different circumstances: “What would have happened if we had not been with her, if she had been alone, and how different would it have been if she’d been a woman of color? And I think it would have been a very, very different experience,” Nencioli said.
After this experience, Nencioli moved to Italy and dedicated her career to women’s health and reproductive rights.
In response to President Elect Donald Trump’s re-election, Yingling advised the audience to order birth control pills in advance, donate to abortion funds, be aware of what abortion laws are in each state, protect digital privacy by monitoring location services and become familiar with Project 2025.
Sally Benbasset closed the panel encouraging the audience to continue talking about the importance of abortion rights and sharing stories like theirs.
