by
Ruth Bicknell Lindeman
mother I had. Despite the era in which she was born, my mother was a physician. She was Dr..
Harriet Orvis Bicknell. She grew up, and was educated, in Yankton, South Dakota public schools.
She advanced through under-graduate education and medical school at the University of
Nebraska, and on to an internship at the Mary Thompson’s Hospital for Women and Children in
Chicago.
At that institution they had to reserve multiple beds, just for women who came for help with late,
self or quack-induced, abortions. Because abortion was then criminalized, those women sought
help only after their lives were in danger. I can still remember the sad look on my mother’s face
when she put it this way: “Most of the time we lost not only the pregnancies; we also lost the
mothers”.
I wonder, in how many homes did mothers die, and how many young children were left un-
mothered?
I support public funded programs to facilitate adoptions, praise abstinence, and teach
comprehensive, age-appropriate human sexuality education. What I want most is for women's
abortions to be freely chosen, preferably early, and to be performed by physicians in clean
surroundings and with instruments that have been sterilized.
Ms. Lindeman is an 80 year old flutist and former librarian. Married for sixty years, she is the mother of five
and grandmother of nine. From 1978 to 1998, before abortion providers advertised in the Yellow Pages, Ms.
Lindeman ran a private abortion information/referral service out of her rural South Dakota home, taking over
2000 calls. In the 1970s, while serving as state coordinator for South Dakota NARAL, Ms. Lindeman was
appointed to the South Dakota Commission on the Status of Women. She has made two unsuccessful bids for
the South Dakota Legislature. For the last thirteen years she has been a volunteer activist producing
Alternatives to Violence Workshops at the state prison in Springfield, South Dakota.
