- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Rooks talks about Doe v Bolton (5:47)
- Creator:
- Rooks, Judith
- Contributor to Resource:
- Paulk, Janet, 1932-
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 2004-04-26
- 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.
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.
Transcript of this excerpt: JR: Margie [Pitts Hames] was putting together the legal arguments. And one of the arguments was that it is safer to have a legal abortion than to have an illegal abortion or to have a pregnancy. And in fact, that's true; that a pregnancy, the risk of maternal death or maternal morbidity from a full-term pregnancy is greater, and was certainly greater at that point in time, from, you know, maternal hemorrhage, seizures, toxemia, different problems that can affect a pregnant woman's health and cause maternal death than -- or infection -- than having a legal abortion of a -- of an early abortion. So she also made that argument in the brief, that in fact, it is safer for a woman and since it is safer, that supports the right of a woman to make a decision to do something if she doesn't want the baby -- to do something that is safer for her. So we had all of this public health information that was fed into the Georgia case and that wasn't fed into the Doe case. Ultimately, we won our case at the district court level but we didn't lose -- we didn't win every single issue. We won the issue that the state could not limit the reasons a woman had abortions to -- could legally have an abortion, to just three reasons. But we didn't win on, it had to be in a hospital accredited by the Joint Commission for Hospital Accreditation. It had to be just a legal resident of Georgia, and the silly reason about three doctors approving and a committee because if it could be any reason, then why would you need the three doctors? But we didn't win on the three doctors or the committee or the hospital or the residents. But we did win on limiting the reasons, that it was a decision that the woman could make herself, with her family, and with her physician. And if three physicians agreed and this committee agreed, it didn't have to be rape or incest, maternal health reasons. It just could be the woman's own reasons. So that was a basic issue that we had won on but we appealed on all of the other reasons. JP: OK. But the person you were using or who was (inaudible) -- JR: Mary Doe. JP: -- had gone on to have her baby? JR: She went on to have her baby, and the baby was adopted out. JP: OK. But you were still able to use that as -- JR: Yes. JP: -- a case. JR: Because we said to the court that because pregnancies move so fast and legal cases move so slow, that any woman who would be a bona fide person with standing in the court, by the time it would actually get to the court and go through that whole process, would have had her baby or an abortion and would no longer be president -- be, have standing. So -- JP: And, in fact, did she have the baby before you all went to -- JR: No! JP: -- federal court? JR: No! JP: How fast was (inaudible) court? JR: It was between 16 weeks and 40 weeks. I don't know exactly where, but she was very pregnant. And she had to be present at the court. And so, we knew -- I mean, we called her "Mary Doe" because she needed anonymity and so we invited, and specifically went out and looked for all the pregnant women we could find, and had them come to the court hearing. So the room -- 'Cause we knew there would be a lot of press there who would want to come up and interview Mary Doe. So we packed the room with pregnant women so that Mary Doe would not be identifiable. JP: And later did her name become identifiable? Or is it something you can tell us? JR: I would just as soon not. It has been identified. Later, we actually -- Margie Pitts Hames helped her with her divorce -- she wanted to be divorced -- did the divorce for free and helped -- She wanted to adopt the baby out -- and helped her with the adoption process, and helped to get her a job. And she got a job in a donut place. And so we really tried to do everything we could for Mary Doe. But Mary Doe then became a born-again Christian and was found by the Right-to-Life group who convinced her that she had done a terrible sin, and she recanted her -- and said that she wished she had never done it. So she, you know, did a public disavowal and basically said, oh, she'd been forced into it, but of course that was not true. - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2077
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2077/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:
-
