THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Lynne Randall
“I knew I had persevered, and perseverance is an important trait.”
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, June 2023
LR: My name is Lynne Randall, and I was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1952.
JW: Tell us a little about your early life, your childhood. What influences were there that you think were important?
LR: I was the youngest of three girls. My father died of a heart attack when I was less than a year old, so, suddenly my mother was – her life was changed. And consequently, our life was changed, in that she had waited until after the war to marry her sweetheart, and then he survived the war but not life afterwards. So, she suddenly was a widow with three little kids, and trying to figure out how to earn a living and care for her kids. At that time, this would have been 1953 and there weren’t very many single moms. A social net wasn’t there so much, so that really changed a lot of things.
We were lucky to have a good network. I had an uncle who was a doctor, so he took care of us. She had a family friend who was a dentist, so we got some dental care, and we belonged to a synagogue that allowed her to join for free. All those kinds of things. So, we were lucky in that sense, of being able to maintain a middle-class life, and use my father’s war benefits and insurance to pay for the house that we were living in. So, those things were important.
I’ll say that there are some things that helped me with my social awareness. In that one, it was a town that was mostly working-class Italian Catholics. There were few Jews in this town, and so we were like the odd ones out. There was a lot of, I’ll say, religious prejudice that I experienced through most of my life in Kenilworth, New Jersey. And then we went to a synagogue in another community, Westfield, which was much more affluent. And then we were the poor Jews from the wrong side of the tracks. So, I understood about economic discrimination. We weren’t rich enough and didn’t have nice enough clothes and all that. So, it was just an interesting experience of, where do you fit in?
I always had hoped that like my sisters, I would get to go to a different high school in a different town and meet some new kids. But by the time I got into high school, they had built a high school in our town, so I was stuck with the same kids. And it was a town where, really, if you could get through high school and as a girl not get pregnant, that was a big accomplishment. There was low expectation in terms of girls having any kind of aspirations past motherhood. And so, I was happy when my mother and stepfather decided to move to Florida, because then I got out of this little town, so I got to move to Florida at that point.
The other significant thing that happened as a child really, was that my mother married my stepfather, who unfortunately did not turn out so well for me, because he was a man that really needed to demean other people so he would be, in his own mind, smarter. My mother and I were told all the time that we were stupid, and of course he knew better than everybody. That type of personality. And he had a very intense obsession with female bodies. So, there was always the looking down the shirt, trying to catch me getting undressed, staring, groping, all of that kind of stuff.
He was very interested in feeling breasts. If he could pass you in the hall and manage to knock into you somehow, he would do that. And so there were a lot of horrible encounters. I didn’t really have the vocabulary back then to even know what was going on. This was the ‘60s, and people didn’t talk about this type of behavior. I didn’t understand what was wrong. It just was creepy and horrible.
And fortunately, by the time I was in high school, I was now in Florida, I met other kids who had creepy stepfathers. And we had our little stepfather support group where we shared things that happened at home, whether it was getting beat up, or this one girl had her stepfather rub onions in her eye. It was just stuff, but it helped all of us process it. That was part of our homeroom experiences. Debriefing over what had happened the night before about stepfathers.
JW: Oh, my gosh. You were not alone. You were not alone.
LR: Right. So that was a big theme. You’re not alone. And that really helped a lot to process it. But I did go to college thinking I was an overachieving mentally retarded person. That the college admission person had made a bet, “Could I make it through college?” Here’s a straight A student, and yet I felt like I was mentally retarded, and fat. And it helped me understand the power of an adult on a child. It’s one of those things that comes back to bite you in various moments in life. But it was a very profound experience to understand the power over children and how you can really mess with people’s minds to maintain power.
JW: You were a straight A student, and you got into college, obviously, but still you had these feelings of inadequacy. Your mother never stepped in, or she didn’t know what was going on?
LR: Well, I finally did tell my mother because I’d had this incident happen where he had stuck his hand down my shirt. I left the house and went over to a friends’ house to do my homework. I was just too upset to stay there. And when I got home, my mother was yelling at me because I had stayed out too late with the family car. I wasn’t going to be able to use the car all summer. I went to school the next day, and I talked to my friends in the stepfather group. Do I say anything? What’s going on. Why I stayed out. Do I not? Like, “Okay, I only have so much more time till I leave the house to go to college, I’ve already made it through this far.” I was an expert in delayed gratification. Just wait, wait, wait. You’re going to leave the house.
In any case, I came home the next day, and she started in on me again about how I was so irresponsible and I couldn’t be trusted, and I had abused the car privilege and all this stuff, and I just blurted out, this is why I had stayed out. And her response was one of those things that made me realize the gulf that was between my awareness and her awareness. And she said, “Well, I don’t know how I can control my husband when I can’t control your sister who’s living with her boyfriend.” And after that, I was like, “Well, what do you say?”
JW: Oh, my gosh.
LR: I’m 17 and I have such a different understanding of what consent is about, and what a voluntary relationship is, over this relationship with my stepfather but my mother is just mixing it all up, and so there was no real purpose to continue a conversation at that point. So, in terms of going forward, I always say that the day my mother and stepfather dropped me off at college was the happiest day of my life. Because I realized that I had made it that far, and now it was more up to me, what I would do going forward. Again, I really feel like I had that delayed gratification. I knew I had persevered, and perseverance is an important trait.
JW: Yes. As Elizabeth Warren said.
LR: Absolutely. I can relate completely to her. I wish I had gotten that T-shirt. That was a theme in my life; perseverance.
JW: That’s great. And so, did college live up to your expectations?
LR: Yes, actually, I went to college here in St. Petersburg at a small liberal arts college, which was called Florida Presbyterian College, and now is Eckard College. That was when I really got introduced to two things that have been themes in my life; the women’s movement and sailing. And those two things have been huge forces in my whole life. Now that I’m retired, sailing has taken prominence. When I was working, sailing took a backseat. But after all these years, now I can sail more.
JW: That’s great. Well, so what was your introduction to the women’s movement?
LR: When I was a freshman in college, that would have been 1970, I thought that I might be pregnant. I’d met a boy in college and we’d had sex, and my period was late. I don’t know how I knew that abortion was legal in New York. It wasn’t something that I ever remember discussing publicly with anyone, but yet I knew. I must have read it, or somehow absorbed that information through the air. I took up a collection in my dorm to raise money to go to New York, because I was on a $25 a month allowance from my grandmother and well, you do the math. $300 would take me a year with my allowance, so I had to take up a collection.
And then my period started and I returned the money, had a little party, and went on with my life. I found one doctor in St. Petersburg that would prescribe birth control pills to unmarried minors, and back then, a minor was under 21. So, those two experiences were pretty influential in realizing how much I was dependent on access to contraception, and reliance on abortion as a backup. And whether it was available, or not available, would have a profound influence in my life, and I just kept that in the back of my mind.
When I think I must have been a junior in college, we had to do a community service. So, I chose to volunteer at a little women’s center in St. Petersburg. One of the things that we did at that time, was abortion counseling. Abortion had just been legalized, and yet abortion services couldn’t advertise. So, people would call the women’s center and we were able to tell them where they could go. We also served as a rape crisis center and general resource center. We had consciousness raising groups, which I found incredibly helpful; back to the theme of, you’re not alone, actually sharing experiences about growing up as women in each of our lives.
These were women of many different backgrounds and ages. All found themselves in this little house in St. Petersburg. That was the Women’s Center of St. Petersburg in the early ’70s. And then when I graduated college, I moved a little bit after graduation, after these friends of mine who I thought were going to sail around the world and I was going to go sail around the world with them. The plans fell apart, and so then I moved to Atlanta to be with a former roommate and got a job working at a clinic in Atlanta, and I worked as an abortion counselor there.
JW: Okay, so by then we’re into the ’70s.
LR: This is like ’75. I started working as an abortion counselor, and I got involved with a community group that was supporting Dr. Kenneth Edelin and his defense.
JW: Explain that a little for the audience that’s listening.
LR: Dr. Edelin, he has since died, was an African American physician that was working at a public hospital in Boston and was providing abortions at the hospital. He was doing second trimester abortions. I’m not sure how he was doing it, but at some point, at one of the abortions that he performed, turned out that a nurse in the OR was pro-life, and she said that the fetus had been born alive and then he was prosecuted for that. People rose to his defense to speak up, that he was doing what was safe for her, and what she desired to end a pregnancy. And he was set up by this nurse. So that was one of my first encounters, besides the abortion counseling, of working with a woman individually to work on a more political abortion defense committee.
JW: I see. So, he was in Boston and you were Atlanta, but there was still a committee.
LR: Right. There were groups of women and men who supported him throughout the country and helped raise money for him, so I did that.
JW: What was the outcome for him?
LR: I believe he was acquitted, but it was a long process. There were other things that were going on in that year. So, this was 1975. The clinic I was working at was called Atlanta Center for Reproductive Health. It was started by a psychiatrist, Jerry Grossman, who was from New York, who had made quite a bit of money in New York when the requirement was that a woman had to get a note from a psychiatrist to prove that she would go crazy or kill herself before she had an abortion.
So, he had been involved in abortion services in that indirect way. And then when New York legalized abortion prior to the rest of the country, he set up a clinic. That clinic, and several other clinics that were in New York City, were extremely busy from charter flights and people coming from all over the country to New York. So then when abortion was legalized, he was in a position to set up clinics in other parts of the country. And that’s what he did.
I went to work there, and I’ll just say that I was a naive, enthusiastic, idealistic 23-year-old. I’m going to be working in abortion services and I had no idea about capitalism in medicine, and that there would be somebody trying to profit off of abortion services and not be equally idealistic and charitable. It was a good eye-opening experience for me. The woman that he hired to run the place was a former army nurse and she just viewed anytime staff talking together, we must be trying to organize a union or we must be trying to do something terrible in her mind. So, it was not the greatest boss.
JW: I’m going to interrupt you before you move past because I want to ask you what indicated the capitalism profit motive to you?
LR: Well, he wanted the staff, let’s say, to go to a community meeting, this defense committee work that I was going to go to in the evening. And he wanted me to go and represent the center, but he wouldn’t pay me to represent the center.
JW: I see.
LR: “Well, to represent the center, are you going to make a donation? What are you going to do for this work?” And there was no response.
JW: I see.
LR: They just wanted people to feel good that the center really cared about this, but in fact, it didn’t. I just saw how he would come in periodically to check up on things, and he always had a different young woman, blonde, on his arm. They were off for skiing trips, and they were off for this, and going here and there, and we’re barely making ends meet at our staff wages. We were kept part time as counselors with no benefits, and I was seeing his skiing trips to Switzerland and here, there, and elsewhere.
JW: So, you picked up what was going on. I mean, women still got services, obviously.
LR: Yes, the services were fine. It was just the awareness of what happens with the revenue. And it certainly wasn’t going into staff salaries and benefits. It’s going for his personal enjoyment. At that time, I worked there a year and a half. It was a very good experience in terms of helping me be determined that it would be great if there was a center in Atlanta where it was a nonprofit center that would provide abortion services that was run and controlled by women.
I got connected up with some women from Tallahassee, Florida, who were at the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Tallahassee. They came up to Atlanta to do some self-help presentations. And so, this is like a classic women’s health movement thing, where you have a slideshow and somebody demonstrates vaginal self-examination. Well, I thought that was the greatest thing. Helped me understand a lot about what was going on with the abortion procedure. And from that connection, I was involved with a small group of women that thought we could set up something like the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta.
So, while I was working at Abortion Clinic Atlanta Center for Reproductive Health, I started training down in Tallahassee on the weekends and working at their abortion services at the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Tallahassee. I quit my job, and I moved in with a friend, Lynn Thogersen. She and I became the co-founders of the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta.
She had worked in Tallahassee part time, and then she and her boyfriend had moved to Atlanta, and she had some of those skills of working in the clinic. She was working at the time as a legal secretary so she helped have some income, while I worked at trying to find a place and a doctor and supplies. Here we were, both 24 years old, and we’re trying to start a new business and it’s an abortion clinic. We had no experience, no money, no anything, but we found somebody that was willing to rent the building as long as we paid the first and last month’s rent. There we were, off and running.
JW: That’s amazing.
LR: Yes.
JW: And it got going.
LR: It got going. And the most amazing thing to me is that it is still going.
JW: Is it? I really obviously wondered that. Wow, that’s amazing.
LR: It’s still going. It’s still called the Feminist Women’s Health Center and it is still run as a nonprofit organization. When you ask what was one of my accomplishments, I would say that is my biggest accomplishment. Being involved in starting that. I was there for 17 years before I left, and to see it still going, and going strong. It now is a real leader in the reproductive justice movement. They have a majority people-of-color board. They have their first African American woman as the executive director, who’s really wonderful and very progressive, and it’s going strong. Now, I say that, at the same time that I don’t really know how they’re going to continue to manage financially with the severe restrictions on abortion services, which is a source of income.
They have other services. They have GYN services, they do trans services, they have HIV services, they do donor insemination. Yet, it’s hard to sustain yourself without the steady revenue from abortion services when that has helped pay for staff and the mortgage. I went there the end of last summer, because they were having a fundraiser to pay off the mortgage. They had moved to a better location than when I was there. We always hated that building, but that was the building we had. The only one that we could get at the time, and we did outgrow it, but it was nearly impossible to find somebody that was willing to sell or lease a building to an abortion provider.
JW: Well, it’s still hard in many places.
LR: Yes, it is. So, they had bought a building and they decided they were going to do a fundraiser to pay off the mortgage, which they succeeded in doing. And that really has helped reduce their overhead as they face these restrictions. Georgia has, like many states, the six-week ban. So, this just means there’s so few women that are actually able to get an abortion from a clinic because you have to know you’re pregnant. You have to figure out what to do, what you want to do, where to go, have money, have transportation, get an appointment, wait a waiting period, show back up, and still be under the six-week cut off. That’s more than most women can do.
JW: Yes. If you even realize you’re pregnant at that point. Many women, of course, don’t. It’s overwhelming.
LR: Exactly. It’s really painful to see how things have turned around. In the ’70s, one of the things that I really appreciate was that it was the energy of making social change and moving forward. Doing things that we thought we were going to overthrow the patriarchy. And 50 years later to see these restrictions, that just breaks my heart.
JW: Yes. Ditto. I mean, I tell young people, “Don’t agonize, organize.” And we will get there again, but it’ll take a lot of work and time to get there.
LR: There was a saying from Byllye Avery, who was a leader in the Black Women’s Organization and had been at the Gainesville Health Center in Gainesville, Florida, and she says, “Well, there’s an alphabet of things we’re working on, and we’re stuck in the A’s.” We’re stuck in abortion and AIDS. We’re just so stuck we can’t even have the conversation of all the things that we really want for improvement in people’s lives. It makes me so angry that we’re just stuck. We should be working on so many other things without having to put that much energy still in abortion.
JW: Well, I mean, it’s true, but of course, I think about Kansas, where there was a referendum and they didn’t get to put the restrictions on they wanted. The people spoke.
LR: There’s an effort here in Florida to pass a ballot initiative, and I hope it’s successful. We have a ridiculous conservative governor and legislature, total Republican controlled, and I hope the people will speak.
JW: So, you say you left the clinic after 17 years?
LR: Yes, I did.
JW: And did you continue that work or move into something else?
LR: Well, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I left. I had one of these mountaintop experiences. I had gone on a vacation to hike in Glacier National Park, and I had always been able to go on vacation, just relax. And this time, I realized I was just carrying this stress and I couldn’t let it go, and this is not healthy. I came back and I resigned with no real plan. I just knew I couldn’t do this anymore.
JW: Time to move on.
LR: Well, 17 years. It’s like birthing a child and going through elementary school and high school, and now it’s my time to go to college. I had put off going to graduate school when I got involved in the Feminist Women’s Health Center. So, I decided, “Well, when in doubt, not sure what to do, just go back to school. See what might happen.” So, I went and got my master’s in public health at Emory, which is in Atlanta. I was doing that, and I was working as a legal assistant, and it was my turn to be the board president for the National Abortion Federation.
I had been involved with the National Abortion Federation as a board member because of my job at the Feminist Women’s Health Center. So, in any event, I was doing that. And in the course of my time there, I realized I was beating myself up because I didn’t understand what was going to happen with health reform, and what the future of the Feminist Women’s Health Center and a small clinic was going to be with health reform. And then I went to graduate school, and I realized nobody understands health reform really. Everybody is wondering what’s the future of health care, and who’s going to survive, and how we’re going to have mergers and acquisitions and billing and all this stuff. And so, I was in good company.
I thought working in a hospital would be really boring to me. I could do it, but I just wouldn’t be that engaged. So, lo and behold, I found myself getting a job in abortion services through the national office of Planned Parenthood, through Planned Parenthood Federation of America. I got a job in their security department as the assistant director of security. The office is in New York, but it was a job that involved traveling to see clinic locations all around the country to help people enhance their security.
By this point in ’95, there had already been several murders. We had had a murder of two receptionists in Boston and the murder of Dr. Slepian, and so my job was to help people harden their facilities. And I also knew from the school of hard knocks, that there’s other kinds of security concerns, what could be employee theft, it could be stealing prescriptions. What do you do when staff bring a gun to work or somebody’s partner wants to bring a gun into the facility because they always are carrying? So, I brought that practical experience, and I did that for a few years.
It was wonderful because I got to see so many different places around the country and see what issues they were dealing with, and the similarities and the differences, and that was great. It also was good for me because as somebody who started as a leader at the Feminist Women’s Health Center when I was 24, trying to figure things out without a lot of experience, I always felt like I wish I could have revisited some of these things and had the benefit of more wisdom and really learned the challenges of organizational structure, and the way it works for you and against you. So, then I got to see a lot of different organizational function and dysfunction.
JW: Wow, you must have learned a lot. It doesn’t sound like it is a non-stressful job, though.
LR: No. The thing that was less stressful, though, is when you’re a consultant, it is easier to detach. The problem is not waking you up in the middle of the night as when it’s your own staff, and your own finances, and you’re worried about the snowstorm, we’re shut down for a week, can we make payroll? The Doctor called in sick and we have to reschedule, and three people are out sick, and what are we going to do? There’s just no end to personnel and financial worries. That was my experience as the director.
JW: I see. Yes.
LR: Now, I could be looking at other people’s situations. They had a demonstration, or they had protesters and they’re stressed out, and I could just be the one who could look at it more objectively and offer some advice. And if they took my advice, great. And if they didn’t, well, I didn’t have any authority over them. I was there to help them process. Same thing about recommendations. I could say, “Well, it would really help you if you change this, that, and the other, to make your facility more secure,” but it was up to them. So, that was a lot less stressful. I was engaged, and yet a step removed at the same time.
And I think it was extremely helpful that I had so many experiences. I wasn’t coming in as academic, or somebody who just was new to the trials and tribulations of running abortion services and all the things that bite you in the butt. The unexpected moments. Political or financial, or there’s new clinic regulations that you’re trying to figure out, and there’s a doctor shortage, and there’s insurance crises, and the list goes on and on about the challenges of actually providing the service. So, my engagement was always about what does it take to provide this service and to provide the service well, in a very stressful, inhospitable environment.
I went from that job to, I applied and was hired as the director of another program at Planned Parenthood called, CAPS, a consortium of abortion providers. So, my job went from focusing on security, to helping Planned Parenthood on a national level, think about ways to increase access to abortion. How could Planned Parenthood have more locations that were providing the service? So, then my job was to work with boards of Planned Parenthoods to figure out, “How do we get to yes?” How do we get to say, “Yes, this is a service we want to do for the first time, or yes, this is a service we want to expand,” or add different locations.
I was there right at the moment when the abortion pill was approved by the FDA, and I’d say my other biggest accomplishment was being there and realizing that if we didn’t figure out a way to make doctors want to provide this, or at least be open to providing the abortion pill, and clinics figure out how to change their systems to accommodate a very different procedure, the abortion pill was just going to sit there and languish and it could go away. So, I realized at that moment that this pill has to get out there. And we didn’t know what was it going to be like. Are women going to like it? Not like it? Want it? Demand it?
But the idea was, we have to make it available and let the women decide if this is the method for them. Because there had been no choice in abortion method before. It was just a surgical procedure. And so, people had to learn to offer an option. And while abortion providers in many ways are out front in dealing with all the stresses, they’re human too, and resistant to change. So, you do what’s comfortable and what you’re familiar with.
JW: Right. And also, of course, it brought in less money, right?
LR: Not necessarily.
JW: Oh, okay.
LR: One of the ideas early on, was that it costs more to provide because of the sticker shock of the price of the drug.
JW: I see.
LR: The medication was extremely expensive and so people were thinking, you have your staff cost plus this huge price tag of the drug. It’s now generic. And initially, the FDA wanted the regimen to be three pills. We had to prove through a lot of study, that women didn’t need 600 milligrams of mifepristone. That 200 milligrams of mifepristone were effective. So, if you were going to take three pills, that was really expensive, when one pill would do. There was a lot of things to work through, and lo and behold, women actually chose it.
My coworker, Mary Fiercett and I, were really committed to using data to help us because we would hear people say, “Well, a lot of women.” Or, “Only a few.” And we were like, “Well, what’s a lot? Tell me your denominator.” So, we had to start learning how many women wanted it? What’s the percentage that are choosing this over that? And we also had some very deep early misperceptions and assumptions that, “Only women in a hippie place would like it. Maybe they want it in Eugene, Oregon, but they certainly aren’t going to want it in Waco, Texas.”
So, we had to work through all of this, and it’s a very personalized choice. It has much more to do with people’s connection to their body and to pain. There are some people when it comes to pain, “Just give me anything you’ve got.” Particularly, a comparison would be childbirth. And other women are going to want natural childbirth because that experience is more important. And there’s a lot more going on in the decision of, which type of abortion is a woman going to prefer? And so, we also wanted to keep the price out of it in terms of making the decision that these two methods cost the same. Which is the other thing that happened.
If you can imagine, let’s say from the doctor’s perspective, if they were making $100 a procedure, and women choose the abortion pill and they only get paid $20. They were saying, “I’m going to be paid the same. I’m taking on the liability and the responsibility to end a pregnancy, and I have the same type of insurance cost and liability and responsibility,” and it’s true. So, I don’t know how it’s ended up now, especially because people are really trying to access the drug through online sources and it’s become generic. The other thing that changed is that the FDA did accept a change in protocol from 600 to 200 milligrams. So, things could have changed from when I left Planned Parenthood in 2011.
JW: Well, yes. Of course, the FDA also said it could go through the mail, which it couldn’t at first, and now we have this pending lawsuit. So that’s another whole story.
LR: I did feel that one of the things that Americans have done well over time, is access illegal drugs and substance. Whether it was alcohol, certainly marijuana, cocaine, heroin, Oxycontin. It’s not great, and it doesn’t make it safer, it doesn’t make it less expensive. But we have a country where we’ve had access to illegal drugs. So, I would rather that people have access to figure out ways to have access to mifepristone, should it be illegal, then go back to a coat hanger. I don’t think we have to go back there and shouldn’t scare people with that image. I think that whether it be mifepristone combined with misoprostol or misoprostol alone, the drugs are so much safer as an option for an abortion.
So that’s a good thing. And I feel really glad that I was involved in making sure that mifepristone was a drug that doctors and women got introduced to, and we could study the safety of it, and make it as safe as possible and as widely available as possible. So now, people will say, “Don’t take it away from me.”
JW: Right. And as we know, more than half the women who had abortions, I think it was in 2018, use the drugs.
LR: Right. And in the beginning, in 2000, we didn’t know if anybody, if anyone would choose that. So, I was involved in that huge culture shift, and a medical practice shift, and it was a lot of very small and big things that we did to raise awareness and track the safety of it and figure out practice changes to make it safer and more available.
JW: Obviously, it always helps to have resources and knowledge, but women have done what they had to do forever.
LR: Right, that’s true. And at the same time, there are going to be many women who can’t do that. They just don’t have the resources. They’re in fear. There’s just so much unknown, and the default is resignation. Have the baby that you’re not planning or wanting at that moment. That is what happens. That some women succeed and have the determination and it all happens successfully. But for so many, no. What else do you have to ask?
JW: Well, we’re coming towards the end. I know you’re sailing now, but you’re obviously still following what’s going on and being involved in some way. In what way would that be?
LR: Mostly it’s following what’s going on and being a supporter of both the Feminist Women’s Health Center and Planned Parenthood. Going to events, reading what I can about it, and just being aware.
JW: And sharing with others. Well, it sounds like this sort of, I’ll say, inadvertent experience when you were a freshman in college, shaped your whole life. Would you say that?
LR: Yes, it did. And I think about it. I’ve actually made a sign for a demonstration I went to, No Going Back, in 1970. I was ready to hitchhike a thousand miles to New York City, and that should not be what happens in Florida in 2023. It’s just so upsetting to even think about that, but it is the case now. We have a six-week ban, so a woman would have to go to the state that’s closest, that she could actually obtain an abortion. And we all know that most of the women who need abortions don’t have that resource to do that.
JW: That’s sort of the way it goes.
LR: I had more determination and grit. I felt like I had put my life on hold to get to college, and I was not going to lose my chance and my scholarship to go about my life. So that determination carried me through.
JW: Right. And you didn’t have other kids at the time, which of course some women now do.
LR: Right, I didn’t have other kids at the time. So, now I’m enjoying my retirement. I feel like the poster child for retirement. I stay healthy and I love to go sailing. I became a sailing instructor and I’m teaching women how to sail.
JW: That’s fabulous. More power to the women. That’s what I say. Well, let’s just say is there anything else you’d like to add in closing?
LR: I appreciate your time in interviewing, and this whole effort to capture some of this history.
JW: It’s great. I loved it. Thank you.