- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Rooks talks about her abortion rights activities (7:05)
- Creator:
- Rooks, Judith
- Contributor to Resource:
- Paulk, Janet, 1932-
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 2004-04-27
- Subject:
- Feminism
Social movements
Women's studies - Location:
- United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
- Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Judith Rooks was born in Spokane, Washington in 1941. Her father was a surgeon in the army reserves during WWII, and her mother was a nurse. She attended the University of Washington where she received a B.S. in nursing in 1963. Rooks married after graduation and then moved to Washington, D.C. where, in 1964, she began working as a nurse at the Clinical Center (part of the National Institute of Health). While in D.C. her husband was sent to Vietnam and during his absence Rooks pursued her graduate degree in nursing at the Catholic University of America. During the late 1960s, after moving back to the west coast, Rooks worked on the weekends at San Francisco's Haight Ashbury Free Medical Center. The couple moved to Atlanta when Rook's husband took a job at Emory University Hospital. Once in Atlanta, Rooks became head of a Georgia Citizens for Hospital abortions, an organization which fought to get the Georgia abortion laws changed. In addition to her activism, Rooks also worked for the CDC (Center for Disease Control) as an epidemiologist in the Family Planning Evaluation Division where she uncovered revealing statistics regarding the disparity between black and white women who were allowed to have "legal abortions" prior to the change in the state laws. This research was used in the Doe v Bolton case which challenged Georgia's abortion laws. She has continued to work as an epidemiologist for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as the Principal Investigator for the National Birth Center Study at Columbia University. Rooks authored numerous publications about family planning, and women's health, as well as being an expert in the field of midwifery. She has also been the recipient of numerous honorary awards including the Martha May Eliot Award for exceptional service to mothers and children, in 1993; the Hattie Hemschemeyer Award for continuous contributions to nurse-midwifery and maternal and child healthcare, in 1998; and the National Perinatal Associations' National Award for Outstanding Contribution to Maternal and Child Health in 1999.
ooks describes her childhood during WWII. The daughter of a doctor and a nurse, she believed that aside from teaching, nursing was the only occupation a woman could pursue. Graduating from the University of Washington in 1963, Rooks married in 1964, and went on to earn a graduate degree in nursing at Catholic University of America. She describes her early professional experiences, and says that her interest in reproductive rights began when, teaching at San Jose State University, she assigned students to research the effects of illegal abortions on Mexican agricultural workers. Rooks says that she became politically involved with reproductive rights through the Georgia Citizens for Hospital Abortion. She discusses the abortion laws and their realities in Georgia, especially for poor women, who made up the majority of those seeking illegal abortions, and goes on to describe her experiences in getting support for legislation that would change the existing laws. She describes her committee's failed attempts to get the new legislation passed, after which, she says, she held a press conference on the steps of the Capitol and declared, “because the Georgia legislature has turned its back on the health needs of Georgia women, my committee will establish a counseling center to provide information and arrange legal abortions in Washington, D.C. or New York for Georgia women who could not access necessary health services in Georgia.†Rooks goes on to describe the committee's efforts to assist women in getting safe abortions. She believes that it was her pro-choice activism that resulted in her being turned down for a job in the school of nursing at Georgia State University, and she recounts her aborted contract signing to illustrate this. Rooks went on to work at the CDC where, in her research into the epidemiology of family planning, she began gathering statistics on legal and illegal abortions. She talks about the Georgia Citizens for Hospital Abortion committee's decision to bring a suit to challenge the abortion law on the books as unconstitutional, and describes in detail the work that went in to the Doe v Bolton case, and the people involved, including Margie Pitts Hames who argued the case in the Supreme Court. Rooks talks about her book, Midwifery and Childbirth in America, and goes on to discuss the history of midwifery in the United States. She talks about her move to the Pacific Northwest with her second husband, and about the work she has undertaken since then, both nationally and internationally. She finishes by describing what she considers the most important accomplishments of the Women's Movement: "My life would be totally different without it. The freedom of contraception, the freedom of abortion, the ability to have informed education and consent for your health care. The whole world is changing because of the strengths of women."
Transcript of this excerpt: JR: And so, I had a press conference on the steps of the legislature and at that time, you know, New York had abortion available because of this very liberal law that had been passed by the Women's Rights Movement in New York. And in New York City, there were clinics doing abortions and people could fly there from all over the country. And in Washington, D.C., because of a federal district court decision, it was also a place. So there were these two places where abortions were available, and people from other states could fly into those states and get abortions. So, in my press conference, I said that because the Georgia legislature had turned its back on the health needs of Georgia women that my committee would establish a counseling service to provide information and arrange legal abortions in Washington, D.C. or New York for Georgia women who could not access necessary health services here in Georgia. And there were television cameras and radio things and the newspaper and it was, you know, on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution the next day. And it was on radio and TV. And I gave my home address because we hadn't established these services yet and I guess one of the reporters said, "Well, where are people supposed to call?" So I said, "Well, we've got to set it up but for now I'll give you my home number." And my husband wasn't home and by the time I got home, we were beginning to get phone calls. So by the time I got home -- and it was carried by the UP and the Associated Press, all over the South. And, you know, it was on TV and so it was just all over the South. I was getting phone calls -- hundreds and hundreds of phone calls -- and I had to quickly establish -- And Imin Herndon (sp?), the Rev. Imin Herndon who was a Presbyterian minister at, a campus minister at Emory, and a number of social workers and counselors and other ministers. There was an ecumenical ministry group that supported abortion law change and some social workers and counselors. And we quickly got people from our committee who were available to be counselors to be available to talk to women. And I flew, with one of the doctors who was a member, an obstetrician who was a member of our committee, flew up to New York and examined some of the clinics to make sure we weren't going to be sending women to an unsafe place, and went to Washington, D.C. and examined those clinics, and made a list of abortion services in those two places that we thought were safe. At first, we had very high standards for counseling, and we insisted, you know, on doing real counseling to make sure that people were sure of their decision. But the demand was so great that we really couldn't do that. We just didn't have enough personnel and enough time with the hundreds of people who were calling us from all over the South. JP: And you moved from your home phone to an established -- JR: We quickly set up a service, and so when people called me at home, it was just people working out of whatever phone number they had. And we had these numbers. And of course, phone communications was not good like it is now; so it was just a list of people that could be, you know -- JP: To be referred. JR: -- to be referred. And we made paper lists and Xeroxed them and gave them -- made it available, published it in The Great Speckled Bird and published it through, made it available at -- Oh, and we made a brochure. We had already made a brochure to inform women of their rights under the old law, and we had put these brochures out in obstetricians' offices around the state and health clinics around the state to say, "Abortion is legal in Georgia -- IS!" This reason, that reason, that reason, and what you do and how important it is to, you know, do it quickly and how to go about it. So we'd done that, and we set up this abortion counseling service. But it was an amazing time. And now that abortion isn't -- is under attack, and we have -- women who are of reproductive age now don't know what it was like when abortion wasn't available. What we found -- I just remember getting phone calls from people calling from Mississippi or Alabama or, you know, poor people in Atlanta, and they would call and they couldn't say the word because "abortion" was like using the most awful cuss word, the most unacceptable word. And they just couldn't say it. In fact, I would tell people in my committee, "Use the word "abortion,"" you know. "While you're standing in line at the grocery counter, ask the woman behind you or the woman in front of you, "Well, what do you think of legal abortion?" And they would go, [gasps], you know, but to undo the taboo about even talking about abortion -- So people would call and you would hear this deep Southern accent saying, "Is this [hesitating sounds], is this [hesitating sounds], are you -- I want to talk to someone." And I would have to say it for them, you know. "Are you calling about information on a legal abortion?" [gasps] "Yes," you know. And, then, they would have to tell me how -- what the situation was, and they were really a good person. You know, "My 13-year old son has made a 13-year old girl pregnant and he's really a good boy and she's a good girl. But you know this is gonna ruin their lives. And we're good people, we're against abortion, but this is just the necessary thing." And, you know, they had to convince me that it was OK, and so I would give them the information and they'd be so relieved. And, later, when I went to work at the Centers for Disease Control, people would come to my office -- the janitors, the secretaries and the doctors -- and kind of sidle into my office when nobody was looking to say, "You know, I need information on where to go to get a legal abortion." - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2073
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2073/manifest.json
- Language:
- eng
- Additional Rights Information:
- Copyright to this item is owned by Georgia State University Library. Georgia State University Library has made this item available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
- Extent:
- 79 pages (three audio cassettes)
- Original Collection:
- Georgia Women's Movement Project Collection
Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives - Holding Institution:
- Georgia State University. Special Collections
- Rights:
-
