At the back of the newsroom of the Rag, Austin’s storied and raucous underground newspaper, a volunteer sat by a phone, waiting for calls from women searching for help. In hushed tones, the volunteer would tell the callers what they needed to know to get safe abortions, even though providing such information meant volunteers risked getting in trouble themselves.
It was the fall of 1969, before the 1973 decision gave women in the United States the right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. The little corner office near the University of Texas campus was the Birth Control and Problem Pregnancy Information Center. Run by and for women students at UT, it was the outgrowth, in classic 1960s counterculture fashion, of consciousness-raising sessions. According to accounts and documents from Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History, the sessions led members to focus on reproductive rights, which led to the creation of the
