Grim history shaped Conn.’s abortion laws
While we await the final Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, let us remember two Connecticut women, Sarah Grosvenor, of Pomfret, and Gerri Twerdy Santoro, who grew up in Coventry.
One was a 20-year old in colonial Connecticut, the other a workingclass mother of two who had left her husband in the 1960s.
Both died after botched attempts at abortion.
And these are just two women whose names we know. Though the state provided the setting for Griswold v. Connecticut — a foundational court case for Roe v. Wade — Connecticut has as tattered a history as anywhere else when it comes to reproductive rights. The state’s landscape is littered with the bodies of women who died after trying to end pregnancies they could not carry to full term.
In 1742, while the Connecticut colony was still a theocracy, Sarah Grosvenor, of Pomfret, died after an attempted surgical abortion. Ms. Grosvenor, who was unmarried when she became pregnant, first tried ingesting an herbal mixture meant to end her pregnancy, procured by her sexual partner, Amasa Sessions. When the herbs didn’t work, she sought the services of a doctor, who, fearing she would not survive childbirth, operated, and two days later, Ms. Grosvenor miscarried. That next month, she became ill and died — perhaps from unsanitary surgical tools.
The physician, Dr. John Hallowell, was eventually tried and convicted of a misdemeanor, as he’d tried to end her pregnancy after “quickening,” when a woman feels the movement of a fetus. Prior to quickening, no one in the colonies thought twice about the use of abortifacients.
In 1821, the Nutmeg State became the first state in the union to restrict abortions after a sex scandal that involved a minister and his young congregant. The law was amended in 1860, about the same time the American Medical Association — another institution that has made a turn-around in its stance on reproductive rights — began to lobby against abortion.
By 1900, Connecticut joined with other states in declaring abortions a felony.
But anti-abortion laws don’t stop abortions. They simply stop safe and legal ones. In 1964, Gerri Twerdy Santoro bled to death in a Norwich motel room after an attempted (illegal) abortion performed by her romantic partner. Ms. Santoro was married — but not to the man who impregnated her. She’d left her abusive husband out west, but heard he was due to come to Connecticut, and Ms. Santoro feared his reaction when he saw her swollen with a pregnancy.
Things went horribly wrong and Ms. Santoro’s partner panicked and left her to die. The black-andwhite crime scene photo of the woman lying folded up on the floor was published in Ms. Magazine in April 1973 and became a symbol for abortion rights activists with the heading “Never Again.” At the time of publication, the magazine editors didn’t know the identity of the bloody woman in the disturbing photo. Ms. Santoro was identified by her sister, a Ms. subscriber. The man who’d impregnated her and tried to aid in aborting the fetus served a year in jail.
The year after Ms. Santoro’s death, Griswold v. Connecticut injected into the conversation about reproductive rights the idea of privacy, including a (married) couple’s ability to decide whether to use birth control.
By the time the Roe decision was handed down, Connecticut’s relatively strict anti-abortion laws carried penalties of up to five years in prison, and a $1,000 fine for anyone who performed an abortion, and two years in prison and a $500 fine for women who got abortions, unless the procedure was performed to save her life.
Today, Connecticut now has some of the country’s least restrictive abortion rules, so now is a good time to encourage the 13 states with abortion ban trigger laws — abortion laws that kick in if Roe is overturned — to do one thing:
Be more like Connecticut. Admit that women know what’s best for them and stop this senseless and deadly march into a theocracy.
At the end of this most recent legislative session, Gov. Ned Lamont signed a bill the protects medical providers if they provide abortions for residents in more restrictive states who come to Connecticut for the procedure. That’s because everything is outsized in Texas, including that state’s legislators’ view of just how far their powers extend beyond their own state boundaries, where private citizens are essentially deputized to enforce the state’s draconian abortion laws. As Sen. Martin Looney, D-New Haven, said, the legislation was passed “in defense of our own values and our own legal system.”
We stand on the bones of the Sarahs and the Gerris every time we have to remind legislators and church officials about the importance of a woman’s agency over her own body. We do not tread lightly on those bones. Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.