Art review: Denver exhibit puts faces to women who died from botched abortions prior to Roe vs. Wade

Quirky and perky, with a face full of determination, it’s hard not to get a quick crush on Vivian Grant the way that Daisy Patton paints her, circa 1960, in a series of women’s portraits on display at Denver’s Art Gym Gallery. With her emerald green dress, dangling earrings and precision-plucked eyebrows, Grant radiates the kind of organic optimism that could carry her far in her burgeoning career in New York’s publishing world. But the accompanying text tells a story with a different ending. At 23, she found herself showing signs of pregnancy and sought to terminate it. Abortion was illegal in those days, and dangerous, the stuff, as we say, of back alleys and shady practitioners and Grant, like many others, was one of its victims, dying from complications of the procedure. An autopsy later showed it was a false pregnancy. Tragedy on top of tragedy. That’s the narrative arch of Patton’s “Would You Be Lonely Without Me?,” which captures in oil paint on paper the images of 15 women who died as a result of botched abortions in the era before the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision made abortion legal, and raised the medical standards around… Read full this story

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