Marcy Bloom does U.S. advocacy and capacity building for a Mexico-City based organization GIRE – El Grupo de Informacion en Reproduccion Elegida/The Information Group on Reproductive Choice. She was formerly executive director of Aradia Women’s Health Center.

Often your life can be transformed by people you have never met.

In 1962, when I was eleven years old, a Phoenix, Arizona woman named Sherri Finkbine was denied the ability to have an abortion in her hometown even after discovering that her pregnancy was likely to be seriously deformed. Mrs. Finkbine (there was no Ms. yet) had taken the medication thalidomide to alleviate her nausea before learning that the drug had been linked to serious fetal deformities in Europe. After being denied an abortion in Arizona, she flew to Sweden. I clearly remember the headlines: "Tearful Sherri off to Sweden." She and her family received death threats, the press hounded her, and when she returned home, the headlines blared: "Abortion mother returns home."

I wasn't sure what an abortion mother was. But I did understand that the pregnancy she was carrying was very sick, that she was very sad and upset, and that this operation called an abortion could only be obtained far away.

I didn't understand why her own doctors at home couldn't help her. I was eleven years old and I was also very upset.

Fast forward to 1977. I was 25 years-old, had been working for seven years at one of New York City's first women's clinics that provided abortions, and it was truly an exhilarating time. The women's movement was hot. NY had legalized abortion in1970 and three years later Roe vs. Wade had legalized abortion throughout the country.

Before Roe, however, women from all over the US – and beyond – were coming to NY for safe abortions. One of my jobs was to go the airport and find the women flying in to bring them to the clinic. I was the woman with the brown curly hair in the red smock and the women usually spotted me before I found them. Driving through the streets of Queens into Manhattan, we all talked in the car and it was truly a consciousness-raising session. "Why are you here? Where are you from? Do you have any kids? Who knows you are here? How did it happen? Did he leave you? Are you scared?" I saw first-hand the tremendous and empowering good of legal abortion. I felt honored that these women allowed me a glimpse into their complex lives.

When I heard about the death of Rosie Jimenez on October 3^rd, 1977, I was stunned and upset. I was also outraged. I didn't get it. Rosie Jimenez was a 27-year-old Chicana college student living in McAllen, Texas, the young mother of a five-year-old daughter, and the first known victim of the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment, which is still in effect, killed Rosie when it denied her state Medicaid funding for a safe abortion. She gambled with her life, sought out a much cheaper, but unsafe, abortion, and died in agony from a massive infection that shut her body down.

I was naively shocked and upset. Why was this woman dead? What happened to fairness and equality? She was poor, so why didn't Medicaid pay for her abortion, which, after all, was a legal and safe medical procedure? Legal abortion was supposed to end the days of desperate back-alley abortions and images of coat hangers and lye douches. Women were going to be able to exercise their reproductive rights and choose the course of their lives. They weren't supposed to die any more, or be hurt and maimed. What happened to Roe vs. Wade's bright and exciting promise for women's lives?

Today, more than thirty-three years later, much has happened and we're still asking this cogent question. We have seen the rise of religious fundamentalism domestically and internationally, the conservative political backlash against feminism and women's rights, and Roe vs. Wade has been ravaged. Abortion remains legal but very difficult to obtain especially for women who are young, poor, and marginalized – those who always get the shaft in society. More than 3700 women have abortions in the U.S. alone everyday – approximately 1.2 million women a year. The need for the preservation of women's health care services and our right to choose remains as compelling as ever.

Although my professional career in reproductive rights has now spanned more than 36 years, I was again shocked when I heard of the death of Yasmina Bojorge on November 3rd, 2006. Although I no longer view myself as naïve or easily shocked, I couldn't quite comprehend why this woman was allowed to die. Yasmina was the first victim of Nicaragua's recent abortion ban that removed even risk to the life of the woman as a reason for an abortion. Despite in-utero fetal demise of the pregnancy she was carrying, Yasmina was denied a life-saving therapeutic abortion, died in agony, and her two-year-old son is now without a mother. Once every 10 minutes a woman dies somewhere in the world because she was prohibited by discriminatory laws from obtaining a safe abortion. Yasmina, like Rosie, died because of oppressive laws and sexist attitudes that contribute to the devaluing of women and the stigma of abortion. These tragedies are heart-breaking in any circumstance, but all the more so because they are so preventable.

Sherri, Rosie, Yasmina – you don't know me, but I know you, at least a little. I am sad and shocked that you suffered so much. I promise you won't be forgotten.

I am the woman in the red smock. I'm sorry I couldn't come for you at the airport.