- "The notion of quickening was a venerable, woman-centered concept, long embedded in the common law. It allowed that a pregnancy could not be confirmed until the woman felt the fetus move within her body. In the days before drugstore pregnancy kits, sonograms and rabbit tests, and all the other modern methods of verifying pregnancy, the woman herself was the definitive expert. Doctors and midwives agreed that menstrual irregularity - in fact, all the symptoms of pregnancy - could be associated with conditions other than pregnancy. So traditionally, it was not until the woman reported the sensation of fetal movement that she could be declared pregnant. Consequently, an abortion in the early months of pregnancy - often treated as an operation to restore the woman's menstrual flow by removing a "blockage" - was not considered a crime. During all of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, the quickening doctrine governed abortion law in the North American English colonies, and then in the United States." pages 11-12
- "Sometimes the issue of quickening made for enormously complicated abortion persecutions. In the early decades of the twentieth century, for example, the state of Wisconsin had one anti-abortion statute with two distinct sections. One section made it an "offense against Chastity, Morality, and Decency" to produce a miscarriage by destroying embryonic life. An individual who caused such a miscarriage was not considered to have committed an offense against a person, since an embryo - before quickening - did not have the legal status of personhood. The law indicated that the individual who caused an early miscarriage committed merely a considerably lesser offense against morality.
The second section of the statute dealt with abortion as an "Offense Against Lives and Persons." Legislators intended for this section to be used to prosecute abortionists who caused a miscarriage in a woman carrying a "quick child." This crime was unequivocally an act of homicide, specifically, manslaughter in the second degree." page 12
- "Already by the mid-1940s, hundreds of thousands of women- married and unmarried - were exhibiting two striking forms of behavior that could be called protofeminist: a willingness to break the law to protect themselves, and a determination to control their own fertility, even in an era when women's role as baby maker was more glorified than ever." page 154
- "But nobody lifted a finger against a competent practitioner like Ruth Barnett. There were no deaths, there were no prosecutions.
Today, when the opposition to abortion is so bitter, so political, and in some quarters, so religiously zealous, it is well to look back only fifty years to a time when abortion was illegal but prevalent. It was a time when most ordinary citizens were not particularly bothered by the fact. Even religious leaders who decried public debauchery in the form of gambling had not a word to say in public against abortionists." page 155
- "Indeed, studies conducted in the postwar decades, before the legalization of abortion, claimed that vast numbers of women secretly obtained what they required. Studies showed that as many as two out of every nine pregnancies ended in illegal abortion, and nine out of ten illegal abortions were said to be performed in those days on married women. If these estimates of clandestine behavior bear any relation to the truth, it is possible that nearly every adult in Portland had had an abortion, of knew someone who had, or at least knew someone who had a friend or relation or co-worker who had had one. In this way, abortion indeed became a "daily occurrence." " page 155-156
- "Many decades later, Rolla Crick wondered how the cops and the press would have behaved if Dr. Ed Stewart had still been the proprietor on the eighth floor of the Broadway Building when abortion became a crime in Portland. It was a good question because, along with their admiration for Ruth Barnett, reporters transmitted other messages about the woman abortionist, and those messages were about her sex. As the stories appeared day after day in the aftermath of the raids, Ruth's elegance slid into a vain sensuality, her medical prowess was recast as a perverse willingness to prey on women's bodies. Her lucrative practice became a vehicle for transforming the wages of women's sex into a cash crop. In the transition, Ruth's power became the venal power of the Seductress, the bloody power of the Lady Vampire, the lewd power of the Madam. In this way, the female abortionist lent levels of new meaning to the crime, exactly what was called for to keep the story hot.
It also helped that, to a surprising degree, the "victims" themselves - the unwillingly pregnant girls and women - could be ambiguously rendered for public consumption. In deference to ideas about the sexual shame attached to abortion, and about the victimized status of women who went into the back alley, some of the reports sidestepped evoking the clients in any vivid, flesh-and-blood way. In Dr. Buck's office, for example, the patients on tables remained hidden to cops and reporters who knew they were there but accepted the fact that Dr. Buck stood between their desire to see them and the women's need to be protected. In fact, almost all the male abortionists managed to shield the women in treatment in their offices. Even the "pretty blond wife" on a table in Dr. Elliott's office was a device; none of the observers on the scene actually laid eyes on her. It was as if the simple fact that these abortionists were male was sufficient to give both their business and their clients a veneer of legitimacy.
At the Stewart Clinic, of course, it was another story. Nobody was a "wife." Nobody had a husband or boyfriend along for protection or support. The females at the Stewart Clinic on July 6th were on their own. They were "unclad," "shrieking," "waiting in cubicles," like prostitutes, then resisting, escaping, sexual. There was no hint anywhere that these naked, eroticized women were potential mothers. Instead, the coverage hints that although Ruth Barnett's power (even in absentia) was in part predatory, these females were not real victims. Rather, they were offering themselves up as snacks." pages 178-179
- "Amidst all the bizarre sensationalism of the raids, no reporter dared to name the most obvious and shocking news of all. No one mentioned that the events of July 6th made the abortion business in Portland visible, with all its multiple offices, its multiple practitioners (almost all of whom were doing abortions on a random morning), and its multiple patients from all walks of life.
Now that everyone knew, indubitably, that abortion was occurring all over town, it would be hard to deny the corollary, that ordinary women all over town had secrets, that anybody's wife or daughter might harbor the dangerous secret that she had been unwillingly pregnant and had resisted. The big secret now revealed, though still unstated, was that these women had taken their reproductive lives into their own hands, the law be damned. As one commentator who'd seen those screaming headlines put it at the time, "Criminal abortion has swept over the entire country! It happens all around you, down your street, across from your place of business, and it may even be happening right in the building where you live or work." In other words, it might be happening to your wife. That message, too, leaked through the headlines in Portland, and gave a ludicrous cast to the whole business because it multiplied the layers of hypocrisy Portlanders had to penetrate in order to reach the moral indignation that the headlines demanded." page 181
- "Thus the men who shaped the news and packaged it continued to underscore the difficulty of defining the crime, the criminals, and even the victims with certainty." page 182
- "If abortion had been secret but accessible before, in 1951 the signs were increasingly clear that the authorities were stepping in to manage what had for so long been women's personal business. " page 185
- "By the late 1940s, new, oppressively supervisory structures in the fields of medicine, law, and criminal justice had emerged to govern the meaning and the course of the pregnancies of millions of women. The existence of those structures often made the decision to end a pregnancy much more dangerous than it had ever been before. The cultural, medical, and legal commitment to the proposition that pregnant women must stay pregnant, no matter what. This meant ensuring that the abortion decision would be taken out of the hands of women and placed in the hands of experts.
In medicine, a great many doctors began to take an aggressive position against abortion after several generations of doing fairly large numbers of abortions themselves, looking the other way, or even facilitating, through referrals, countless illegal abortions. It was a fact that before the war, many women found cooperative doctors because the list of approved medical indications for abortion, which kept expanding through the thirties, justified thousands of "therapeutic abortions." And even women who didn't have a medical problem had little trouble finding one of the thousands of illegal practitioners across the country who practiced undisturbed, in the shadow of the law. One way or another, women who wanted to end their pregnancies found a way. But after the war things changed. Many doctors said abortion wasn't necessary any more." page 186
- "In these postwar years, pregnancy became fundamentally a moral issue." page 187
- "Nor, of course, could legal demands be squared with the determination of many women to get abortions, the law and their doctors' proscriptions notwithstanding.
There is not question that doctors were feeling the squeeze from all sides and from within their own ranks, as well, since any two doctors would be likely to disagree about which woman should be given permission for an abortion under which conditions." pages 187-188
"Studies conducted at the time showed that sterilization had indeed become a fairly common practice in the early fifties. Over fifty-three percent of teaching hospitals made simultaneous sterilization a condition of approval for abortion, and in all U.S. hospitals, the rate was 40 percent. One doctor, unhappy about the fact that unwillingly pregnant women were being forced to accept sterilization, observed that the practice had the effect of driving women to illegal abortionists to escape the likelihood that dealing with law-abiding physicians would entail the permenant loss of their fertility." page 190
- "But what does stand out, alongside the elevated, if still modest, rate of arrests and the sensationalism in which anti-abortion activity was couched, was the special vulnerability of lay female practitioners, no matter that the violations committed by other abortionists, including male doctors, were exactly the same.
Carlson Wade, a chronicler of abortion activities in the postwar era, cited a situation in Iowa to make the same point. . . . Wade remarked, "From the above it is clear that in many prosecutions, the court is primarily interested in who performed the operation, rather than why it was done." page 198
- "The story that the prosecutor typically told about a female practitioner's greed and lack of skill and perversity was so unambiguous that the woman abortionist rarely fought her way out from under them. Ruth never did." page 199
- "To begin with, the abortion cases became first-rate occasions for men - doctors, lawyers, judges, police, jury members - to gather together in a public place and affirm their right to govern women's bodies, to define women's rights, and to enforce women's vulnerability. Second, Ruth's trials (and the trials of more than fifty other women abortionists whose ordeals were matched against hers ) were dramas that titillatingly pitted one woman against another - the alleged abortionist against her putative client - and milked the encounter. Finally, and not surprisingly given the first two governing elements, the whole event was drenched in sex. Wherever it occurred, the trial emerged day by day and in sum as a species of pornography, a cryptoporno show in which, in the name of the law and public morality, men invoked women's naked bodies, their sex, and their vulnerability in a style that was both contemptuous and erotic." pages 199-200
- "The available transcripts allow us to walk in and out of courtrooms in the 1950s and observe women abortionists on trial. What was common to all these courtrooms was an atmosphere dense with sex and smut, and with notions about women that could have stimulated misogyny in even the most generous-minded observer." page 202
Return to Booknotes Menu
Thanks for visiting Sunshine for Women at http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/main.html
e-mail 
sunshine@pinn.net
Sunshine for Women encourages you to support our feminist sisters by purchasing their books, reading them, disseminating the ideas they contain, but most especially, by making their book available to our sisters, our daughters, and the community at large by requesting your school library, your public library, and area bookstores to carry their books. Remember it is not enough to write literature, history, and theology, we must pass these works on to future generations. Help us to preserve these works for a new generation by putting them on library bookshelves.
last updated
