Abortion Information in Municipal Library Vertical Files
By Pauline Toole, Commissioner, NYC Department of Records and Information Services
Recently, the Supreme Court's draft decision in Dobbs v Mississippi was leaked to the public. The decision, as currently written, overturns the 1973 decision in Roe v Wade which determined there is a Constitutional protection of the right to obtain an abortion.
The vertical file drawers of news clippings and agency reports in the Municipal Library contain four folders about abortion in New York City, including a very thick file from the 1970s.
New York State decriminalized abortion in 1970 by passing a simple law that made abortions provided by a licensed doctor legal within 24 weeks of gestation. Women and their doctors made the decision. State residency was not required.
Many people, including leading proponents of legalization and medical professionals predicted that there would be chaos on July 1, when the law took effect. They predicted large numbers of patients would overwhelm the hospital and clinic system. Complicating matters, the City's Board of Health rules had just been published on July 1 and did not take effect until October 19, 1970, creating confusion. Ultimately, the rules established provider qualifications and permitted abortions to be accessible in doctors' offices and clinics until the 12th week of pregnancy. Thereafter, the procedure was to occur only in hospitals. The regulations also required birth control information be available for patients.
An article from July 1971 in the Health Department's publication Family Planning Perspectives reported that the doomsayers were wrong. "None of these dire predictions has come to pass. In the first year since the law was enacted, about 164,300 legal abortions have been performed in New York City in 15 municipal, 52 voluntary, and 37 proprietary hospitals, and in some 18 free-standing clinics." Four out of 10 of these have been performed on New York City residents, largely in municipal and voluntary hospitals, and about 55 percent of resident abortions have been performed on poor women free or at minimal cost.
Charts produced by the Health Department showed that upwards of 76% of abortions occurred in the first trimester. Births to unmarried women dropped for the first time since record-keeping began in 1954. Access to legal abortion impacted the number of "incomplete" abortions--those cases that were self-induced or initiated in unlicensed facilities from 415 a month in 1970 to 220 per month in 1972.
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