Wellesley For Reproductive Justice hosted a panel titled “Life Before Roe” on Thursday, Nov. 6, featuring four women from the Bad Old Days Posse who shared personal stories of obtaining abortions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, prior to Roe v. Wade.

At the time, abortion was illegal across most of the United States. That changed in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade case, when the Supreme Court recognized abortion as a constitutional right under the right to privacy, legalizing the procedure nationwide. Nearly fifty years later, however, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) overturned that ruling, declaring that abortion was not protected by the Constitution and returning the power to regulate it to individual states. Since then, many states have enacted bans or severe restrictions, reshaping access to reproductive care.

The Bad Old Days Posse (BODP) is a group of women, some of whom had illegal abortions, who educate college students about what life was like before Roe v. Wade to break the stigma surrounding abortion. As Carol Deanow, founder of BODP, reflected at the panel, “the pendulum swings back and forth, often to extremes, and in some way, the restrictions now are worse than I think they were pre-Roe.”

Among the Nov. 6 speakers was Martha Nencioli, who recounted accompanying a friend to an illegal abortion in the early 1970s. The audience drew audible gasps when she mentioned that “the police arrived at the hotel” to arrest her friend, while the man who performed the abortion simply walked away. 

“I always felt after that, that there was something incredibly wrong about how that situation unfolded,” she said. Noting the hypocrisy of the moment, she added, “I have a friend whose father was a New York City cop, and they all knew where to take someone to have an abortion. Their bosses’ girlfriends had abortions. It wasn’t legal, but everybody knew where to go.”

Before Roe, abortions took place in secrecy, arranged through underground networks built “through layers and layers of connections,” where women—often misled or uninformed—entered the process without knowing who would perform the abortion or what would happen to them. 

“You never knew what you were going to get,” Deanow said. “Some were skilled practitioners, and some were quacks and butchers.”

Louise Rice, a retired public health nurse working with abortion counseling, recounted her journey through a shadow network of whispered referrals. With little information and no legal options, one day she was left waiting on a Manhattan street corner to receive an abortion from two men she had never met before.

The procedure took place on a dining room table and lasted over an hour. 

“I had no anesthesia. I had nothing to calm me. I was terrified the whole time.” 

Later, Rice realized why there were two men in the room, as opposed to just one practitioner: “the other guy was there to hold me down.”

Naomi Ito ’28, who attended the talk, was among several audience members unsettled by the dangerous conditions under which abortions once took place.

“When she [Rice] said that she was in excruciating pain for thirty minutes longer than expected and still considered it a good doctor experience, [I thought]: that was the good doctor experience?”

When the procedure ended, Rice was sent to a nearby hotel to recover—alone. 

“I went back to college and never told another person about it,” she said. “It was my secret … I was the only person in the world who had had an abortion.”

Silence was a common thread across every story on the panel. Each woman described keeping her abortion secret for years, sometimes decades.

“I never told another person about it,” Rice recalled. 

For decades, BODP member Sally Benbasset carried her story in silence. “

We had family, and I never told anybody,” she said, recalling the abortion she had in 1969.

That silence, the women explained, was rooted in something they had been taught. 

“You get taught to feel shame,” Deanow said. “Shame is not exactly an automatic reflex, like anger or something like that. You’re taught to be shameful about certain things. And we were certainly taught that what we did was shameful. And I think the undoing that is crucial.” 

When they finally began to tell their stories, the experience was transformative. Rice recalled sharing her abortion story for the first time in a consciousness-raising group. 

“It was amazing. It was like, ‘Oh, wow. This is not uncommon. Women are having abortions, and I had an abortion,’” she said. “I haven’t shut up since talking about it.”

Speaking publicly, the women explained, helps dismantle the shame that still surrounds abortion. 

“We’ve got to challenge the shame by saying there’s nothing shameful about health care,” Deanow said. 

Benbasset added that talking about abortion can reshape how others understand it: “Sometimes someone will hear you, and it’ll be the first time it’s been normalized for them.”

When asked for advice she would give to young people fighting for reproductive rights today, Deanow spoke with the weary clarity of experience. 

“Having been through experiences of progress and backlash and progress, backlash… that process often goes in cycles,” she said. “We can and we must do it again. It makes us very angry that we have to do it again, but we must do it again.”

Their answer to what should come next was simple: “All of them.” Legislative work, voting, organizing—each matters. “Even if you’re in Massachusetts, where our legislators are generally pro-women and pro-health, they want to know that this is an issue that’s important to you,” Benbasset said. 

​​Benbasset further urged students to take action on their own campus. 

“What are you satisfied with? What’s available at Wellesley?” she asked. “Are you able to get medical abortion — the pills — through your health service, or do you have to go outside of the college?”

Near the end of the event, Nencioli shared one piece of advice that had stayed with her: never give up. She recalled a moment with historian Howard Zinn.

 “He said two things that have stayed with me all this time,” she told the audience. “First, you have to have humor. And the second thing was, change happens because many people do something. It doesn’t have to be a big thing, but if everyone does something, then we can affect change.”

As the crowd dispersed, Ito reflected on the stories she heard, carrying both empathy and optimism. 

“I think it was heartening to meet people who have been through this before,” she said. “It sucks that [Roe] has been overturned … [but] progress comes with backlash, and we will get through this.”

Contact the editors responsible for this story: Lyanne Wang