Outside Mildred Hanson's clinic, Jenny Anderson grabs a quick smoke and stares up into the gray sky. The doctor in Mankato who told Anderson (not her real name) she was pregnant doesn't do abortions and suggested she go to Planned Parenthood in Minneapolis or Sioux Falls to have the procedure. Her boyfriend drove her to Minneapolis, but she was too far along in her pregnancy for the one-day abortion procedure. Planned Parenthood had to refer her to Hanson, who is experienced in the more complicated second-trimester abortion.
"When I found out they couldn't do it I just sat down and cried," Jenny says. "I had to go all the way back home and then figure out how to get to the Cities again another time."
Juliette Borda
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Anderson and her 16-year-old sister came here on the bus from Mankato last night and had planned on making it home today before it got too late. Tonight they will have to spend another night in a motel while the seaweed sticks nurses at Hanson's office gave Anderson this morning work to expand her cervix.
Having an abortion wasn't an easy decision for Anderson who, until recently, considered herself to be against the procedure. When the protestors outside asked her and her sister where they were going, the two women did as Hanson's staff had suggested and said they were getting eye exams. The Phillips Eye Institute is right next door, so the lie is a plausible one.
"They have no idea what I'm going through," she says. "You think you're against it and then it happens to you."
Mildred Hanson didn't believe in abortion either when she was Anderson's age. Growing up on a farm in Clayton, Wisconsin, in the 1930s, Hanson and her six siblings were taught by their religious parents that abortion was wrong, end of discussion. Hanson changed her mind, though, while doing her medical residency in the 1950s at what is now HCMC. "Women were coming into the emergency room bleeding with 107-degree fevers from botched abortions," she remembers. "We were allowed to help them since their lives were in danger, but we had to interrogate them first. 'Who did this? Who did this?' We would have to say.
"Here's a woman who is fighting for her life and we were putting her through that? It was horrible and it made me realize women had to have a right to this procedure."
Hanson figures that word got back to illegal abortionists that she was sympathetic, because more and more injured women began showing up in the emergency room asking for her. It was a frightening time for Hanson. She was a single mother with four young children and she couldn't afford to lose her license. Doctor and patients walked a thin line.
"We could only do abortions if the woman was bleeding from 'spontaneous' causes, like in the case of a miscarriage," Hanson explains. "Women put sticks and things in themselves, anything to start the bleeding so a doctor could intervene." She referred women she could not help to an underground network of doctors whom she trusted to perform safe abortions.
"Young doctors don't know what it was like to see a woman come into the emergency room dying from an illegal abortion," says Hanson. "We'd try to clean out their uteruses as best we could and give them penicillin around the clock. Thank God I never lost one. But those who escaped with their lives endured a lifetime of pelvic inflammatory disease and other complications."
Jenny Anderson's case is typical of the kinds of patients she sees, says Hanson. Young girls with few resources who know they can't offer a baby much of a life. Anderson and her sister had to make two exhausting trips to the Cities, says the doctor, but the important thing is that the girl had a choice.
"As far as I'm concerned, there's never been a greater threat to abortion rights than there is right now, and it just doesn't seem like people realize that," she adds. "Before long it's going to be too late."
