Abortionist, p.1
Abortionist, page 1
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CONTENTS
Preface to the 1994 Edition
Preface to the 2019 Edition
1. Danger
2. The Life of Crime
3. A Man’s World
4. A Woman’s Hell
5. Reno
6. Portland
7. Prime-Time Crime
8. Women on Trial
9. Persistence
10. After Ruth
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Bibliographic Note
Bibliography
Bibliography to the 2019 Edition
For Lee and Amy
* * *
PREFACE
For the past one hundred and fifty years in the United States, when abortion has been discussed in public, the context has almost always been legal: we need laws to stamp out abortion. We need to liberalize the laws. We need to give women a legal right to choice. We need to restrict or recriminalize the practice. While these discussions have proceeded across the decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—when abortion was a crime, and when it was not—girls and women have found abortion practitioners to terminate pregnancies they were unable to manage. Our history shows us that neither criminal statutes nor censorious public attitudes were ever sufficient to stop women determined to decide for themselves whether and when to become a mother.
Nobody knows for sure how many illegal abortions were performed each year in the decades before Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. Law enforcement officials and public health experts often estimated the annual number of abortions at one million, with only ten thousand of those conducted in hospitals as medically santioned therapeutic abortions. In 1953, when abortion was most emphatically a crime, Alfred Kinsey’s pathbreaking study,Sexual Behavior and the Human Female, reported that more than one out of every five women in the United States who had sexual relations—whether inside or outside of marriage—had had an abortion. The experts generally agreed that most illegal abortions were performed on married women, not surprisingly, since more married than single women engaged in sexual relations. But an enormous number of girls and women in both groups found abortionists to take care of them in the illegal era.
We have no reliable numbers to attach to illegal abortions, nor do we have a thorough profile of abortion practitioners. Many were able to conduct their business without exposure. Like many people who operate outside of the law, a number left no evidence of their illegal activities. We do know that in a great many cities and towns, medical doctors in the illegal era did sneak in an abortion case every now and then, often as a favor to a long-time patient who made her desperation and her determination frighteningly plain. In many regions of the country, there was at least one full-time physician-abortionist, such as the well-known Dr. Robert Spencer in Ashland, Pennsylvania. A steady stream of unwillingly pregnant girls and women from New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and farther away than that heard about Dr. Spencer and made their way to his office between 1923 and 1967.
Some practitioners were not physicians, but were nevertheless highly skilled and experienced. Some were midwives, others nurses, chiropractors, naturopaths. The vast majority of illegal abortions were performed by individuals—doctors and others—who knew what they were doing because they provided their services day in and day out, year after year, for decades at a time with the tacit consent of law enforcement.
Others who performed abortions in the illegal era were not trained or skilled. These were the notorious back-alley butchers, the car mechanics, the hairdressers, the proprietors of hardware stores, the housewives who saw that the law, together with women’s need to control their fertility, created lucrative opportunities for a person with the stomach to try his or her luck at scraping wombs. These types performed a relatively small share of the abortions carried out in the illegal era. Their careers generally did not last long. They made mistakes, and they were arrested at once. The terrible consequences of their work, and the highly public fate of these abortionists—their arrests and trials and incarcerations—guaranteed them an enduring place in our historical memory of the illegal era, despite their brief and limited practices.
People who saw the results of anti-abortion laws firsthand in the illegal era—the physicians and public health officials who kept tabs on emergency room traffic—were well aware that it was not the physician-abortionist, nor the midwife or chiropractor or even the car mechanic, who caused abortion-seeking girls and women the most physical damage before Roe v. Wade. By far, the lion’s share of the damage was at the hands of the unwillingly pregnant woman herself, so desperate and resourceless, so shamed and determined, that she’d take up a hideous array of herbs and implements, despite the spectre of damage and death from self-styled abortions that haunted every woman in those days. Dr. Kinsey and his colleagues in the 1950s estimated that seventy-five to eighty-five percent of septic abortions were self-induced. An obstetrician in Washington, D.C., observed in 1958 that attempts to suppress abortion simply raised the self-induced abortion rate and consequently the death rate.
This book addresses even broader sources of danger to women in the United States during the illegal era: the law itself and the cultural and political context in which the law was sometimes enforced, sometimes not. To address these sources of danger, I have reconstructed the career of one abortionist, Ruth Barnett, who practiced in Portland, Oregon, from 1918 until 1968. This woman’s life and work make a very strong case that it was not the practitioner who created the danger for women before Roe v. Wade, it was the law—which was never effective in stamping out abortion, but nevertheless always pressed dangerously on the lives of women in this country. Whether the anti-abortion statutes were rarely enforced, as in the 1930s, or often enforced, as in the 1950s, the fact that these laws were on the books created opportunities for individuals—sleazy entrepreneurs and ambitious politicians—who did not perform abortions, but positioned themselves to benefit from women’s desperation, at women’s expense. The story of the illegal era provides a glaring example of how, when an activity is simultaneously illegal, culturally taboo, and perceived as one of life’s necessities by women, the opportunities abound for exploiting women while enhancing the power of men.
The life and times of Ruth Barnett provide those who believe new anti-abortion laws will eliminate abortions with a fresh perspective on what these laws have accomplished in the past. For those who believe that women’s right to choose must be protected and extended, The Abortionist provides a new understanding of just how pervasive the danger was before Roe v. Wade, and why. It is my hope that bringing Ruth Barnett’s life and work out of the shadows after all these years will not only do honor to her courage and commitment to women, but will inspire readers to honor and support abortion providers across this country who are once again targeted and reviled as they do the difficult and crucial work that so few others are willing and able to do.
Rickie Solinger
Boulder, Colorado
January, 1994
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PREFACE TO THE 2019 EDITION
When The Abortionist was first published in 1994, abortion providers and abortion clinics were under murderous attack: shootings and bombings; electronic hit lists circulating on the web; physicians, staff, and clients under constant threats of violence. The attackers, anti-abortion extremists, placed religious beliefs over secular law to justify “killing for life.” Advocates of violence were desperate in the 1990s. Anti-abortion Republicans had held the office of president for twelve years (eight years for Ronald Reagan, four for George H. W. Bush; both had been tolerant of abortion rights before they became president and both had made Supreme Court appointments). But the court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade, was still largely intact. Now Bill Clinton, a Democrat and the first “pro-choice” president, was in office.
I wrote The Abortionist as a way to show what abortion provision looked like before Roe v. Wade, when the procedure was a crime. I was interested in showing how criminalization diminished women’s status as full members of society. I also wanted to figure out what was at issue in the courtroom when illegal practitioners and their clients were hauled before a jury and forced to account for their actions. Were these people accused of killing babies or accused of something else? What was the impact on women’s lives of pursuing a criminal solution to a very common dilemma? I used the well-documented career of one highly skilled, rather flamboyant abortion provider, Ruth Barnett, who worked mostly in Portland, Oregon, from 1918 until her death in 1968, to pursue answers to these questions. I also gathered a score of abortion trial transcripts, to get the flavor of these proceedings that took place all over the country in the two decades after World War II.
One conclusion this material fixed in my mind is that neither criminal statutes prohibiting abortion nor the stigma attached to illegal abortion stopped women who were determined to decide for themselves whether and when to become mothers. After all, the authorities estimated that approximately one million illegal abortions o ccurred every year in the middle of the twentieth century.
My other conclusion: the state laws criminalizing abortion before Roe v. Wade were a grave source of danger to all women then. After all, the law said that girls and women could not manage their own bodies (the cornerstone condition of enslavement, encoded in the laws of the slavery regime) and enforced the dictum that female biology controlled female destiny. It was that simple. But the dictum had consequences that were not simple. Most females who had heterosexual intercourse could become pregnant at any time. Educators, employers, cultural authorities, and many other social arbiters constructed their ideas about girls and women on this reality. Unexpected pregnancy and motherhood justified excluding females from many fields of study and many jobs, justified paying them lower wages than men, and otherwise stunted the claims of women to full membership in society. Plus, as long as females were subjected to laws that denied them sexual and reproductive autonomy, all women were affected, whether or not any one of them climbed up on the abortionist’s table.
This insight about the danger to all women has frightening relevance today. Roe v. Wade hangs by a thread. Opponents of Roe continue to raise religious beliefs above secular law, in violation of the Constitution but with breathtaking conviction and persistence—and success. They proceed with their efforts to recriminalize abortion as if it were possible to cancel this one reproductive right without changing everything about the status of fertile, potentially pregnant persons in the United States. Living under a regime of coerced pregnancy, coerced childbearing, and coerced parenthood changes everything. The Abortionist offers a picture of what that regime looked like in the past. It’s a picture with sharp, renewed relevance in the twenty-first century.
The life and times of Ruth Barnett show us that the law was a surprisingly weak barrier to abortion and also that the law nevertheless had vast power to harm the status of targeted groups. The Abortionist offers a look at just how pervasive the danger was before Roe v. Wade and why I have written a new concluding chapter for this revised edition to bring the politics of abortion up to date, from Ruth’s time to our own. The revised edition lays down a warning for those who aim to repeat the past.
Chapter One
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DANGER
It is 1965. She is twenty-three, new in San Francisco. After nineteen applications and one interview, she has her first job after college. She is a junior high school home ec teacher. A few weeks after school starts, her college boyfriend flies down from Portland to San Francisco, more for old time’s sake than for love. The two of them go to the movies, go to the ocean, go back to her place and have sex. He flies back to Portland. She misses her period.
All grown up and scared to death, she sees a doctor on November 30th who confirms, yes, she is pregnant. Suzanne Tyler—we will call her—talks to her sister and to her sister’s fiance. She talks on the phone to Bill Holbrook, the young man in Portland. Bill says he has contacts. He knows a guy who knows a person. … Suzanne goes to school and teaches fourteen seventh grade girls how to make macaroni and cheese. As the fourteen girls slide fourteen half-quart casseroles into the oven, Suzanne decides to have an abortion.
Suzanne makes this decision, but she isn’t prepared for it. Gazing at her seventh grade pupils, she realizes she isn’t prepared for any of this. That night she talks to Bill on the phone again. Later she says about this conversation, “The only decision that we came to was that something had to be done. We weren’t going to get married, and he wanted to see what I could do down in San Francisco and he was going to see what he could do up in Oregon.”
By now Suzanne Tyler is seven weeks pregnant. She doesn’t know any abortionists in San Francisco, or anywhere else. She knows the other teachers in her junior high school. And she knows her roommate, also a home ec teacher, a Catholic girl from Milwaukee. All unsuitable confidantes. Suzanne calls up Bill and tells him she will fly to Portland next week on Tuesday, December 7, 1965. Bill agrees to set everything up.
Suzanne tells the junior high school principal something about a family emergency, and that Tuesday evening, she flies to Portland. Her plane arrives long after dark. The young home economics teacher and Bill, a half-time instructor, half-time student at Oregon State University, check into a motel in downtown Portland as Mr. and Mrs. William Holbrook. Later, when the mayor of Portland has reason to reflect on this event, he points out that when the girl, on her way to an abortion, and her boyfriend registered in unit No. 35 of the Jamaica Motor Court as a married couple, even though they were not, it was “very probably a violation of the hotel ordinance in the City.”
Bill’s route to a solution for Suzanne’s problem was attenuated. As it turned out, he knew a guy who knew another guy who knew how to find an abortionist. Wednesday morning the parts of the scheme began clicking into place. The couple left the Jamaica Motor Court, Bill driving and Suzanne huddled up against the passenger’s window, grim-faced. They drove in Bill’s El Camino truck to the edge of Portland’s Southwest Hills, and pulled into the parking lot of Henry Thiele’s Diner at 10:00. Bill remembered the details. “Well, I parked in the parking lot for awhile,” he said, “and didn’t see anybody, and then pretty soon a blue ’62 Chevy drove up and this man got out and went in the door of the diner. I figured this was Don Rogers.”
Bill watched as Don walked through the door of the diner and back out. Then Bill caught the other fellow’s eye. “He said, ‘Bill?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ ” Bill motioned to his truck, where Suzanne hadn’t moved and looked to be asleep, and then, he remembered, “I just took a walk down the street.”
Don strolled over to the El Camino. He tapped on the window and Suzanne opened her eyes. She rolled down the window. For the next few minutes, as Suzanne tells it, “I was inside the car and he stood by the open window and talked with me. We were waiting for this person to come.”
During this conversation Suzanne found out for the first time that they were waiting for a woman abortionist. She was sure that Bill had told her it would be a man. Suzanne, very scared already, did not take this well. Don tried to assure her that it was good—possibly much better—that the abortionist was a woman. “He said that sometimes men take advantage of girls that they—that they give these abortions to, and that I wouldn’t have to worry about anything like that because it was going to be a woman.”
While they talked—it was mostly Don who did the talking—both of them darted looks across the parking lot. Don started a short, nervous pacing from the window to the front of the truck and back, to the front of the truck and back again. But there was still no sign of his contact. He told Suzanne he was going into the restaurant to make a call and that she should watch out for a maroon Lincoln Continental while he was gone.
Instead of watching, Suzanne closed her eyes again. She imagined her vagina, her tissue, her blood. She imagined her hands and her thighs covered with blood. She started, and opened her eyes. Don had come back. He was standing by the truck window saying that the wires had crossed, there had been a little mix-up, but everything was straightened out now. The person would be there in a minute or two.
And then almost at once the maroon Lincoln pulled into the parking lot. Don signaled to the woman driving the car as he opened the door of the truck for Suzanne. The girl, feeling helpless and already bloody, left the El Camino and got into the abortionist’s car. “I got inside the car and I was just—I was extremely nervous, and she drove me to her home. I was extremely nervous. I asked her exactly what the procedure was, exactly what she was going to do. She said it was going to be a simple curette and that I would be in and out of her house in no time.
“We drove up into the Southwest Hills, to Champlain Drive. It was a brown house, brick, and it didn’t have much of a front yard. She drove into the driveway. I got out of her car and went inside of her house. Into her living room, and I laid my coat down on a chair.”
