The Image Embodied the Abandonment.

The Cycle of Cruelty: Abortion, Power, and the Return to the Motel Room

In the grainy black-and-white police photograph, Gerri Santoro is frozen in time, her body collapsed on a bloody towel, knees curled under her, face pressed to the motel carpet. She had come to that room desperate—not for escape, but for a future where she was not shackled to an abusive man, where she could make her own choices, where she could be free. But she was found there instead, dead at twenty-eight, another woman caught between the law and survival, another body sacrificed to a system that feigned moral clarity while reveling in suffering.

Her death in 1964 should have been a warning, a grim testament to what happens when policy disregards autonomy, when the state claims dominion over a woman’s body. Instead, it became an echo, a cycle, a moment that history would return to like a needle stuck in the groove of a broken record. By the time Ms. magazine published her image in 1973, the United States had legalized abortion, Roe v. Wade had been decided, and septic abortion wards were closing across the country. The cycle, it seemed, had been broken. But history does not simply move forward—it loops, it resets, it rebrands cruelty as righteousness, and given enough time, it returns to the motel room.

The year I was born, 1970, was the same year New York became the first state to legalize abortion for non-residents. Women flooded into the state seeking care, and in just a few years, the impact was clear—septic abortion cases dropped by 75 percent. The solution had always been simple: give women access to care, and they will not die. When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, the moral justification for abortion bans collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy. The ruling did not create abortion; it simply ended the punishment that came with it.

Even in that moment of supposed victory, the undoing had already begun. The ink on Roe was barely dry before lawmakers and religious conservatives began crafting a strategy to erode it—not by direct attack, but by withholding access, by making abortion a privilege instead of a right. The first major blow came in 1976 with the Hyde Amendment, which blocked Medicaid funding for abortion, ensuring that while it remained legal, it would be out of reach for poor women.

The cost of this strategy was immediate and measurable. Rosie Jimenez, a 27-year-old college student and single mother, became the first known casualty of Hyde. She could not afford a legal abortion, so she sought a cheap one in Texas. She died from a septic infection in 1977, a woman sacrificed not to the law, but to the economic barriers built around it. The message was clear: if you cannot afford an abortion, you do not deserve one. If you suffer, that is your punishment for being poor.

Rather than banning abortion outright, conservatives made the process so grueling, so humiliating, so financially draining that fewer women would seek it.

Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 introduced the “undue burden” standard, allowing states to impose restrictions as long as they did not completely block access. What followed was a flood of state-level restrictions designed to make abortion functionally inaccessible.

Mandatory waiting periods forced women to make multiple trips to clinics, making time, travel, and childcare insurmountable barriers. Parental consent laws meant teenagers in abusive households had to beg a judge for permission to control their own bodies. Ultrasound mandates forced women to listen to fetal heartbeats, turning shame into policy. Targeted regulations, also known as TRAP laws, shuttered clinics by requiring hallways to be widened, equipment to be upgraded, and admitting privileges to be granted—all medically unnecessary, all designed to bankrupt providers. Each law was framed as reasonable, as protective, as neutral, but at their core, they all carried the same message: if you seek an abortion, you deserve to suffer for it.

This strategy was not accidental—it was the calculated product of the Reagan era, the Religious Right, and a conservative movement that perfected the art of making cruelty sound like responsibility. Just as Reagan reframed poverty as personal failure, he helped conservatives rebrand abortion as a moral crime. The same man who popularized the "welfare queen" myth—a racist caricature designed to justify gutting social programs—paved the way for anti-abortion rhetoric that framed women as selfish, irresponsible, and undeserving of autonomy.

With the moral justification in place, those who might have otherwise remained passive became emboldened. They saw themselves not as extremists, but as righteous warriors. Clinic bombings, assassinations, and daily harassment became the violent extension of legislative cruelty. Dr. David Gunn was stalked and murdered in 1993. Dr. Barnett Slepian was shot in his own home in 1998. Hundreds of clinics were attacked, thousands of patients were harassed. Conservatives in suits made abortion functionally inaccessible. Conservatives with guns ensured those who provided it lived in fear. Legislation and terrorism worked hand in hand.

At its core, conservatism is not about morality, nor about small government, nor about fiscal responsibility—it is about punishment. If you are poor, you deserve a life of hardship. If your parents failed you, you deserve to struggle alone. If you are sick, you deserve to suffer without healthcare. And if you are pregnant and do not wish to be, you deserve whatever pain the state can inflict upon you.

It is a cycle, a narcissistic reset, a system that does not solve problems but merely repackages them under new rhetoric. In the 1970s, welfare mothers were blamed for poverty. In the 1980s, AIDS patients were blamed for their disease. In the 1990s, single mothers were blamed for crime. In the 2000s, the working poor were blamed for their own low wages. And in the 2020s, pregnant women were blamed for needing an abortion in a country that had stripped them of every alternative.

The cycle does not end—it rebrands itself, repackages oppression, and returns to the same fundamental cruelty. And in 2022, the cycle reset completely.

When Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health overturned Roe v. Wade, it was not a new era—it was a return to an old one. It was the re-creation of the world that killed Gerri Santoro. And now, the septic abortion wards are already coming back. Women are being denied life-saving miscarriage care. Doctors are hesitating to intervene, fearing prosecution. Women are being forced to carry non-viable pregnancies, to suffer, to die.

The space between totalitarianism and democracy is a motel room in 1964, a woman on her knees, dying alone on a bloody towel.

And yet, if history has a habit of repeating itself, then so does resistance.

The people who shut down those septic wards before—who fought for bodily autonomy, who refused to accept a world where women bled out in back alleys—are still here. They are watching, remembering, learning from the past, and taking note of exactly how the cycle works. They know how to break it.

So maybe history does not simply loop back forever. Maybe, at some point, someone grabs the damn record and smashes it.