Renee Chelian remembers keeping her head bowed and counting the pairs of shoes of the women sitting around her.

Chelian was 15 and too frightened to take in her surroundings or look at the faces of the many women who sat with her, waiting for an abortion at the Detroit warehouse where the floor was covered in grease stains, and folding chairs and card tables served as the only furniture.

She’s not even sure she was in Detroit because she and her father were blindfolded when they got into the car near their Highland Park home and driven to the spot where Chelian’s fate was sealed.

Renee Chelian shares memory of abortion clinic in New York Renee Chelian shares memory of helping thousands of women who traveled across the Midwest for abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press

The year was 1966 and abortion was illegal in Michigan and most other states in the nation. Much has changed since that botched, illegal abortion, but activists fear a return to the days when terminating a pregnancy was illegal, dangerous, expensive and sometimes fatal.

There are many states already moving in that direction: 29 have banned abortion at some stage of pregnancy, including Alabama, which passed an outright ban in May. In Michigan, abortion opponents are gathering signatures for citizen-led initiatives to ban an abortion procedure typically used in the second trimester and ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected at about six weeks.

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While few of the most restrictive bans have taken effect because of court challenges, the actions are part of a concerted effort by abortion opponents to get an abortion case before a now more conservative U.S. Supreme Court and ultimately get the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which affirmed a constitutional right to abortion in 1973, overturned.

"We're starting to talk explicitly about what the future of abortion access will look like," said Alexis McGill Johnson, interim national president of Planned Parenthood, which provides health care and abortion services for women. "If something happened to Roe and it was overturned, it will kick it back to the states. And we're kind of already operating in a model where there are states that will have access and other states that won't."

Founder Renee Chelian at the Northland Family Planning Centers in Westland, Friday, July 5, 2019. Junfu Han, Detroit Free Press

The narrowing of abortion rights in Michigan

Abortion in Michigan is still legal up to about 24 weeks of pregnancy, but the procedure has gotten harder to obtain since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutional right to privacy in 1973, allowing women to choose an abortion.

Right to Life of Michigan, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, has been successful at petition drives to:

Ban taxpayer-paid abortions;

Require parental consent for minors to get the procedure;

Require women to purchase an additional rider to their health insurance policy if they want coverage for an abortion;

And ban a procedure used to end late-term pregnancies.

Michigan is not alone in those restrictions: Oklahoma has banned medication-induced abortions and 17 states have banned the use of telemedicine to prescribe abortion medication; 36 other states require parental consent for minors to get an abortion; 26 states require women to get an ultrasound before an abortion; 22 states, including Michigan, require physicians to offer the woman a chance to view an image of their ultrasound and hear the fetal heartbeat; 34 states prohibit state funding for abortions; 22 states prohibit insurance coverage for abortions for public employees; and 10 other states prohibit private insurance from offering abortion coverage.

Right to Life also has pushed through the Legislature bills that require abortion clinics to adhere to the stricter regulatory standards that govern outpatient surgical centers, including larger exam rooms, wider corridors and having to be within 30 miles of a hospital, causing some clinics to close, move or renovate; women to wait 24 hours between making an abortion appointment and getting the procedure done, and doctors to offer to show the woman a picture of the ultrasound of the fetus and listen to the fetal heartbeat.

As a result of the legislation, the number of abortion clinics in Michigan has declined from 83 to about 20 and the number of abortions in Michigan has gone from a high of 49,098 in 1987 to 26,594 in 2017, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services

“I think deep inside a lot of people feel that our public policy of abortion on demand, without restrictions, is not a policy that they're comfortable with,” said Barbara Listing, who has been president of Right to Life since 1981 and whose organization now boasts a membership of 450,000 households in Michigan. “The end game, of course, is to restore protection to that unborn child.”

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Right to Life Michigan President Barbara Listing, 78, works out of her home in Shepherd, Michigan, on Thursday, July 25, 2019. Kimberly P. Mitchell, Detroit Free Press

Because Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has promised to veto any bills that would further restrict access to abortion, Right to Life and another anti-abortion group — the Heartbeat Coalition — also have begun collecting signatures for citizen-led legislative initiatives that would ban dilation and evacuation abortions, a procedure commonly used during the second trimester of pregnancy, and ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is typically at about six weeks of pregnancy, when many women don't even know that they're pregnant.

"This is something that certainly people feel much more strongly about," Listing said of the proposal to ban D&E abortions, which Right to Life calls dismemberment abortions. "I think we'll end up with more than 10,000 people circulating petitions. After two weeks, we've already sent out 118,000 petitions."

If the groups gather enough valid signatures from registered voters — about 350,000 are needed — the Legislature has 40 days to approve the measure and it automatically becomes law without the need for a signature from Whitmer. Or it could do nothing and it would be on the November 2020 ballot.

Abortion rights supporters, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have challenged similar laws in other states and would do the same in Michigan if the legislature passes the laws, said Ann Mullen, spokeswoman for ACLU of Michigan. Such a challenge would effectively delay implementation until the lawsuits could be heard by federal courts. Several similar laws passed in other states are being challenged in the courts now and would probably land before the U.S. Supreme Court before Michigan’s proposed laws.

Barbara Listing talks about the impact of abortion Right to Life Michigan president Barbara Listing talks about the impact of abortion. Kathleen Gray, Detroit Free Press Lansing Bureau

What Michigan was like before Roe v. Wade decision

In 1966, there were few options for women with unwanted pregnancies. They weren’t allowed to go back to school, so many teenagers would disappear for a year until their babies were born. No state had decriminalized abortion and the drugs that could induce a miscarriage hadn’t been invented yet.

Some women tried taking a toxic combination of drugs, including quinine, a chemical compound most commonly used to treat malaria. Others sought out the underground network of abortion providers or had the means to travel to other countries where abortion was legal.

As a result, maternal deaths from abortion were high. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that 1,407 women died in 1940 from illegal abortions in the United States. Once antibiotics became a staple of modern medicine in 1962 to fight infections, abortion-related deaths fell to about 125 a year. And once the procedure became legal, that annual number had dropped to 57 by 1973, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Michigan doesn't have historical statistics for maternal deaths from abortion, but since 2006, there have been two in the state.

The father of Chelian’s boyfriend, a politically well-connected businessman, found options for her pregnancy. The boy was sent to summer camp and Chelian went to the warehouse, where, for $2,000, abortions were provided for women in the first trimester of pregnancy. But Chelian was further along, maybe 14-16 weeks, so instead of using the suction procedure typically used at that time, the abortion providers packed her uterus with gauze with the intent of inducing her into labor and sent her home to wait to deliver her fetus.

After a week and no delivery, a kind of panic set in.

“They called every day to check on how I was doing, but we had a party telephone line, so everything had to be said in code,” she said. “They had me take massive doses of quinine before I had to go back to the warehouse. I don’t know what they did to me a week later, but I went into labor and delivered at home the next morning.”

It was a hot August day in her house. Her father had taken her siblings away so they wouldn’t know what was going on and her mother, who was six months pregnant at the time, closed all the windows in the un-air conditioned home so their neighbors wouldn’t hear Chelian’s labor screams.

After that day, Chelian went back to school in September like nothing had happened. But she vowed to never let another girl, teen or woman go through what she had gone through. She went to work for the doctor who had helped with the aftermath of her abortion and helped arrange for women seeking abortions to travel to London for the procedure.

And in 1970, when New York repealed its ban on abortion, she began accompanying the doctor on a small plane to Buffalo, New York, every weekend for two years, to help provide abortions to thousands of women who traveled from across the Midwest seeking an abortion during the first three months of their pregnancy.

“We were usually there by 6 or 6:30 every Friday morning,” Chelian said. “The clinic didn’t open till 8 a.m., but when we got to the office, there were always patients waiting for us, always.”

A Detroit Free Press article from 1971 following two women's trips to Niagara Falls, New York to have abortions with Mitchell Referral Service. Detroit Free Press

The Buffalo clinic, a small, second-floor office with two or three procedure rooms and a small utility room where Chelian sterilized instruments in an autoclave, charged $300 for an abortion. It was one of many similar clinics during the two-year span between New York legalizing abortion and Roe being overturned.

In 1971, the Detroit Free Press reported on the Mitchell Referral Service that provided a several-times-a-week charter air flight from Detroit to a clinic outside Niagara Falls, New York, an abortion and a meal after the procedure, all for $400.

From mid-1970 to mid-1972, more than 400,000 women, two-thirds of them from out of state, including Michigan, received legal abortions in New York, according to New York health officials.

But abortion rights’ supporters in Michigan didn’t believe that women should have to travel to other states. Legislators introduced several bills to repeal Michigan’s ban on abortion. But they always fell a few votes shy, even after the only woman in the Senate, Sen. Lorraine Beebe, a Dearborn Republican, gave a passionate speech in support of the bill and revealed her own abortion 20 years before.

“You men, can you say, ‘I am pregnant, I am happy’ or ‘I am desperate?’ No, you can’t begin to imagine the feeling that a woman has,” Beebe told her stunned and silent colleagues during a speech on the Senate floor in 1969. “You are trying to impose your will on a woman’s decision. You cannot do this. What we are talking about is the difference of life and death to women who resent being pawns and third-class citizens.”

The speech brought her national attention, letters of both encouragement and threats, attempts to firebomb her home and a reelection loss in her next campaign.

The legislative efforts led to the formation of the groups that would evolve into Right to Life, which was led by Catholic and other religious leaders, according to a history of the anti-abortion movement written by Kalamazoo resident Robert Karrer.

Detroit Rabbi Joshua Sperka was one of the first anti-abortion activists to speak in the graphic terminology that has marked the movement during testimony on the abortion bills.

Sen. Lorraine Beebe's speech garnered national attention, death threats, attempts to fire bomb her home and a reelection loss in her next campaign. Detroit Free Press

"We have experienced the impact of a society which, step by step, has betrayed humanity's essential reverence for the sacredness of human existence," he said during a Senate Judiciary committee meeting in 1967. "These words disguised the mass murder of a people. We are dealing with human life and the consequences of this proposal no man can foresee."

Abortion rights supporters were undeterred by the legislative loss. They got enough signatures to put a repeal of Michigan’s abortion ban on the 1972 ballot and, according to early polling, were well on their way to a ballot victory.

It was an odd alliance of medical professionals, some faith leaders, social justice activists, labor unions and even the Michigan Republican Party that became some of the biggest supporters of the ballot measure.

A resolution passed unanimously by the executive committee of the Michigan GOP read, “The Michigan Republican Party believes in the dignity of the individual and the rights of each person to freedom of choice … and recognizes that the decision to have an abortion is a personal moral decision, which, in each case, must be made by the woman in consultation with her own clergyman, family and physician of her choice.”

In the end, an alliance of other religious leaders, primarily in the Catholic Church, formed The Voice of the Unborn to defeat the ballot proposal and put together a winning campaign of the now familiar blown-up photos of aborted fetuses and a "Love and Let Live" message. The final tally: 2 million voters opposed legalizing abortion in Michigan while 1.2 million supported it. The proposal lost in all but Oakland and Washtenaw counties.

It was the first real test of the anti-abortion movement in Michigan. According to Karrer's history, "The two anti-abortion victories were a continuation of the national trend ... the anti-abortion movement had flexed its political muscles. It had lobbied in statehouses, had courted sympathetic legislators and had worked to elect politicians opposed to reform."

The movement has only survived and thrived since then, said Listing, whose decision to join the movement came after Roe was overturned.

"Once you decide legally you can kill a member of your human race, then that's going to open up the door to other things," she said. "We've seen infanticide. We've seen assisted suicide, we've seen doctor prescribed suicide. And really, I think there is a lessening of the value of human life."

Much hinges on conservative U.S. Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court has three abortion-related cases pending before it, but hasn’t indicated yet whether it will take them up when the justices return in the fall:

A Louisiana law that requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of their offices;

An Alabama law similar to the bills being considered in Michigan that bans the abortion procedure known as dilation and evacuation;

An Indiana law that bans abortions for reasons of gender, race or medical anomaly, such as Down syndrome, and requires that fetal remains be either buried or cremated.

Many other cases — about 250 bills have been introduced in 41 states that would restrict access to abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a Washington D.C.-based group that tracks abortion policy and advocates for abortion rights — are making their way through the federal court system now.

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One case that could result in Roe being overturned is an Alabama law passed in May that bans all abortions except to save the life of the woman and penalizes the doctors who perform the procedure.

“It typically takes two to three years for the case to move through the legal system before it gets to the Supreme Court,” said Elizabeth Nash, state policy analyst for the Guttmacher Institute. “One reason why we’re seeing all this is that there is a real sense that the court has shifted to the right and there are the votes to undermine, if not overturn, Roe.”

Since taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump has been able to appoint two new justices to the Supreme Court — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — and cement a 5-4 conservative majority on the bench.

What happens in Michigan if Roe is overturned

If a relevant case rises to the U.S. Supreme Court that could lead to the justices voting to overturn Roe v. Wade, Michigan would revert to the last abortion law on the books — a 1931 law that made performing an abortion a felony, unless it was to save the life of the woman.

Public Act 328 of 1931 reads: “Administering drugs, with intent to procure miscarriage — Any person who shall willfully administer to any pregnant woman any medicine, drug, substance or thing whatever, or shall employ any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of any such woman, unless the same shall have been necessary to preserve the life of such woman, shall be guilty of a felony, and in case the death of such pregnant woman be thereby produced, the offense shall be deemed manslaughter.”

Martin Mitchell stands before a billboard advertising his abortion service in 1970. John Collier, Detroit Free Press

The transition to the 1931 law, however, would be a little more complicated. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has said that she would not prosecute a woman seeking an abortion or a doctor performing one. That decision would fall to county prosecutors.

But Nessel also would have to reconcile the 1931 law with other laws that have been passed since the ban on abortion was overturned in 1973.

“You might not have something that would go into effect immediately,” Nash said. “There would need to be a legal assessment of the laws passed since Roe was overturned, but it could be a matter of the Legislature coming in and wiping the books clean and starting over."

Under the current makeup of the Legislature, where Republicans have majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate, it is unlikely that bills introduced by Democrats earlier this year that would repeal the 1931 abortion ban would be brought up for a hearing or a vote. All the Republicans in the Legislature have supported bills that restrict access to abortion.

“The key to all of it is the political will in the state, and right now the Legislature is not really in favor of abortion rights,” Nash said. “This becomes very much a political question.”

A patchwork of laws nationwide

Even if Roe is overturned, it is unlikely that abortion would be illegal in all 50 states. While 19 states, including Michigan, have laws that would restrict or ban abortion if Roe is overturned, 13 states have passed laws that uphold the rights to an abortion.

Michigan, however, could return to the days when traveling to one of the 13 states for an abortion becomes an option. In addition, the advent of telemedicine could make it easier for Michigan women to consult with a doctor in a state where abortion is legal. But it's unclear whether the drugs that can induce an abortion would be available or could be ordered online for Michiganders because of the wording of Michigan's pre-Roe abortion law.

"In a way, the landscape on abortion we will continue to see is the South, the Midwest, and the Plains will all look to further restrict access to abortion," the Guttmacher Institute's Walsh said. "Illinois becomes very important because the legislature there has just adopted a number of abortion protections."

There are other drugs, such as the so-called "Morning After" pill, an over-the-counter drug that stops a pregnancy within 72 hours of unprotected sex. But that doesn't work for women who are further along in their pregnancy.

Listing said there are many other options for women who are faced with an unwanted pregnancy.

"We are concerned about that woman who feels for some reason that she has no other choice," she said. "What we've done, unfortunately, as a society is that abortion has been offered as a first choice. And there should be other choices to help her carry that baby to term and whether she needs help to keep the baby and have that baby as part of her life or place a baby for adoption."

But Chelian, who started her first abortion clinic in 1975 in Southfield and has opened two more in Westland and Sterling Heights, considers herself the "grandmother of abortion" in Michigan and vows to continue the fight for access.

Renee Chelian at her Northland Family Planning Clinic in Detroit in 1992. Patricia Beck, Detroit Free Press

"I've lived this my whole life. I wanted to start a clinic that would be a place that if I had to take a daughter for an abortion, I would want to take her to a place that would be spotless and where people would be treated with respect and dignity. And patients would just never feel like I felt," she said. "We should be terrified because if they overturn Roe, they will pass laws to criminalize women and we will be living the Handmaid’s Tale."

Contact Kathleen Gray: kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal.

Timeline: Abortion laws in Michigan Illustration by Brian McNamara, Detroit Free Press

1969: The state Legislature tries, but fails to adopt a bill that would have repealed Michigan’s abortion ban.

July 1970-June 30, 1972: 402,059 women, many from Michigan, received legal abortions in New York City after that state repealed its ban on abortion.

1972: By 1.96 million to 1.27 million, state voters reject a ballot proposal to allow abortion on demand in Michigan in the first three months of pregnancy.

Jan. 22, 1973: The U.S. Supreme Court affirms a constitutional right of privacy, allowing a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

1978: Gov. William Milliken issues the first of what will be 11 vetoes of legislative attempts to halt Medicaid payments for abortion.

1983: Gov. James Blanchard vetoes two attempts to ban Medicaid-funded abortions.

1987: Michigan Right to Life launches a successful campaign to have voters approve a ban on public funds being used to pay for abortions for welfare recipients.

1990: Right to Life embarks on another successful ballot petition drive, this time, requiring parental consent before a minor can get an abortion.

1993: State passes law requiring women must receive state-mandated counseling and wait 24 hour hours before making an appointment and getting an abortion.

2004: The third successful Right to Life petition bans abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy.

2013: The Legislature approves a fourth Right to Life petition that requires women to purchase an additional rider on their health insurance if they want to have coverage for an abortion.

2013: Legislature passes a bill that requires abortion clinics to conform to the same strict regulatory standards as outpatient surgical centers.

2018: Gov. Rick Snyder vetoes a bill that would have continued a ban on doctors using video conferencing to prescribe abortion-inducing drugs to pregnant women.

2019: The Legislature passes a ban on Dilation and Evacuation abortions, a commonly used second trimester abortion procedure. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has said she will veto the legislation, so Right to Life has started a petition drive to get about 350,000 signatures, which would allow the Legislature to vote on the measure and, if passed, would automatically become law without Whitmer’s signature. The Michigan Heartbeat Coalition starts a separate petition drive in an attempt to ban abortions when a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is generally at about six to eight weeks of pregnancy.