Geraldine "Gerri" Santoro (néeTwerdy; August 16, 1935 – June 8, 1964) was an American woman who died after receiving an unsafe abortion in 1964. A police photograph of her dead body, published by Ms. in 1973, became a symbol for the abortion-rights movement in the United States.
Santoro was raised, along with 14 siblings, on the farm of a Ukrainian-American family in Coventry, Connecticut.[2][3] She was described by those who knew her as "fun-loving" and "free-spirited".[2] At age 18, she married Sam Santoro; the couple had two daughters together.[3][4]
In 1963, her husband's domestic abuse prompted Santoro to leave, and she and her daughters returned to her childhood home. She took a job at Mansfield State Training School, where she met another employee, Clyde Dixon. The two began an extramarital affair and Santoro became pregnant.[2] When Santoro's husband announced he was coming from California to visit his daughters, she feared for her life.[3] On June 8, 1964, twenty-eight weeks into her pregnancy, she and Dixon checked into the Norwich Motel in Norwich, Connecticut, under aliases.[3] They intended to perform a self-inducedabortion, using surgical instruments and information from a textbook which Dixon had obtained from Milton Ray Morgan, a teacher at the Mansfield school. Dixon fled the motel after Santoro began to bleed. She died, and her body was found the following morning by a maid.[2] Dixon and Morgan were arrested three days later. Dixon was charged with manslaughter, and Morgan was charged with conspiring to commit an illegal abortion.[5] Dixon was sentenced to a year and day in prison.[2][6]
The photograph of Santoro's body taken by the police
Police took a photograph of Santoro's body as she was found naked, kneeling, and collapsed upon the floor, with a bloody towel between her legs. The picture was used in placards and famously published in Ms. in April 1973, all without identifying Santoro.[3][7] The photo has since become an abortion-rights symbol, used to illustrate that access to legal and professionally performed abortion reduces deaths from unsafe abortion.[3]
Leona Gordon, Santoro's sister, saw the photo in Ms. and recognized the subject.[4][6] Santoro's daughters had been told their mother died in a car accident, which they believed until the photo became widely distributed.[3] Of the photo's publication, Santoro's daughter, Joannie Santoro-Griffin, was quoted in 1995 as saying: "How dare they flaunt this? How dare they take my beautiful mom and put this in front of the public eye?"[3] Later, Joannie became an abortion-rights activist, attending the March for Women's Lives in 2004 with her teenage daughter Tara and Gerri Santoro's sister Leona,[8] and blogging in memory of her mother.[9]
In 1995, Jane Gillooly, an independent filmmaker from Boston, Massachusetts, interviewed Gordon, Santoro's daughters, and others for a documentary about Santoro's life, Leona's Sister Gerri.[2][10] The film was initially broadcast on the PBS series P.O.V. on June 1, 1995. It was later screened at film festivals, opening in the United States on November 2, 1995.[2] In the documentary, Leona expressed that she was initially shocked by the photograph's publication but that "as years went by... [she] thought it was good that it was printed."[4][11]
