Grim Tales Fill Brief Backing Abortion Law

A coalition of pro-choice groups, in a legal brief featuring chilling letters from women who told of their illegal abortions, today urged the Supreme Court to reaffirm its 1973 decision legalizing abortion.

Including such letters is an extraordinary and perhaps unprecedented move, but the National Abortion Rights Action League and other groups said the brief will help “place the realities of abortion in women’s lives before this court.”

The “friend-of-the-court” brief was filed as an answer to one filed by the Reagan Administration in July urging a reversal of the 1973 ruling.

The briefs were submitted in abortion-regulation cases from Pennsylvania and Illinois that the high court will study after beginning its 1985-86 term in October. Although those cases do not directly challenge the 1973 ruling, the Administration’s “friend-of-the-court” brief said the court should seize the opportunity to declare that giving women a constitutional right to abortions “has proved inherently unworkable.”

In the brief filed today, the pro-choice groups said a reversal of abortion policy would return the country to a condition “in which hundreds of women will die each year from illegal abortions and thousands will have to risk their lives or be forced to endure unwanted pregnancies.”

‘I Remember Tijuana’

Much of the 31-page brief was devoted to excerpts from letters describing what confronted women seeking pre-1973 abortions.

“I remember Tijuana,” said one. “I remember bugs crawling on walls . . . a stinking cesspool of urine, sweat, filthy sheets and bugs. . . . Where else could I have gone in 1963?”

Another letter-writer described her abortionist as an alcoholic who “was drinking throughout the procedure, a whiskey glass in one hand, a sharp instrument in the other.” She said that after the operation he offered her a $20 refund of his $1,000 fee if she would perform oral sex.

The brief said the letters “do not constitute sworn testimony or record evidence (but) they do provide an invaluable source of information about the lives of women who choose to have an abortion.”

Justice Department lawyers have asked the court to “return the law to the condition which it was” before Jan. 22, 1973, when the decision in Roe vs. Wade was announced. That would leave states free to impose whatever limits they deemed appropriate--including banning all abortions except those necessary to save a woman’s life.