Liberating abortion, p.15
Liberating Abortion, page 15
Dr. Howard began providing abortions in the 1950s, receiving referrals from other doctors and the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, and he even served as the first abortion provider to connect with the Abortion Counseling Service, aka Jane. Heather Booth, a founder of Jane, was referred to him through the medical arm of the civil rights movement. Although she doesn’t remember much about her very first call to him, she told us she remembered him being “pretty wonderful” and willing to answer questions for her and patients in a warm, direct, and factual manner. Once she set up an appointment, women who needed an abortion would meet up with a man holding a red carnation; they put a scarf over their eyes and rode to his clinic, Friendship Medical Center on the South Side of Chicago. Eventually, as Jane started sending more patients to Dr. Howard, they worked out deals so that for every three patients who paid $500, he would do one abortion for free. Dr. Keemer, a militant socialist, criticized Dr. Howard’s fees in his memoir, writing that he thought charging as much as $700 made the procedure unattainable for those who needed it most. But Dr. Howard had claimed that he charged white women with money more than Black women and told Dr. Keemer that he couldn’t afford to take on free cases because he needed the extra cash to pay off local, county, and state officials. Dr. Keemer, who also made “contributions” to the police, didn’t buy that story, citing Dr. Howard’s expensive vices.
Whether the payoffs were necessary or not is arguable, because both doctors were arrested for providing abortions. Dr. Keemer’s clinic was raided by Detroit police in August 1956; everyone in his office was arrested, and police seized his patient records, using them to compel women to testify. Dr. Keemer sought to use his 1958 trial to challenge the abortion law, having doctors and patients testify to the necessity of therapeutic abortions—care provided at the approval and discretion of a panel of doctors—and the dangers of continuing an undesired pregnancy. He was also indirectly told that for $25,000, it could be arranged that none of his witnesses would show up. Dr. Keemer knew that his case could push the legalization movement forward, so he knew what was riding on it.
In his memoir, Dr. Keemer recounted the prosecution questioning one of his white patients and the way he repeatedly overemphasized for the jury that Dr. Keemer, a Black man, had touched the “private parts” of the white patient. “I looked at the pitiful young lady as she stepped down from this dehumanizing ordeal. I looked at the jurors. They were looking hard at me,” Dr. Keemer wrote. “I knew then that justice was not to be done.” The racist line of questioning raised age-old tropes about Black masculinity and sexual aggression, and Dr. Keemer was convicted, serving fourteen months in prison. He was arrested again in 1972 in yet another raid on his clinic; this time the police took in every person of color they saw on his clinic floor. He was later vindicated in court.
When Dr. Howard was arrested in July 1964, he was also fighting a tax evasion case; however, his abortion charges were dismissed in September, when the accuser failed to show up for court. He returned to provide abortions that same month and was arrested in a sting operation. After the assassination of Malcolm X, Dr. Howard gave a speech that the Red Squad (a unit in the police department tasked with monitoring and infiltrating social justice movements) determined dangerous, so a woman and a deputy wearing a wire posed as a couple in need of an abortion. When Dr. Howard quoted them $500 and took the woman back for the procedure, he was arrested. At his trial in 1968, he was found not guilty because, as his lawyer pointed out, the woman in the sting was not pregnant; therefore, there was no crime. Dr. Howard never stopped providing abortions and, according to his son, kept a large box of cash ready for bribes, paying at least $10,000 to police on two separate occasions.
Both Dr. Howard and Dr. Keemer continued their efforts to legalize abortion while providing care illegally. Dr. Howard trained providers in New York and other states as legalization caught on and supported efforts to challenge the ban in Illinois. He also used some of the profits from abortions to build Friendship Medical Center, a multifloor health center for Black people offering everything from ophthalmology to prenatal care—and, of course, abortions, once the procedure became legal in 1973. He envisioned “lunch hour abortions” early in the pregnancy with women able to get their abortions quickly and move on with their day. The clinic provided 60 to 100 abortions per day and upward of 20,000 in the first year, seeing half of Illinois’s abortion patients. In 1973, two months after abortion was legalized, Dr. Howard was on the cover of Jet magazine with a photo spread of his clinic on the first day of legal operations, serving a few of the four hundred patients who had abortions that day. For his part, Dr. Keemer estimates he provided 30,000 abortions before legalization and 20,000 afterward. He joined the advocacy effort, serving as the Midwest vice president of the newly formed National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) and speaking to Black nationalists to dispel rumors that abortion was genocide.
Looking Back on the Frustrating Road to Legalization
There were many discussions in the lead-up to Roe v. Wade about how to liberalize the abortion laws. Test cases sought to challenge the idea of what constituted a threat to a patient’s health, while others were calling for full decriminalization. Many white doctors still believed that they were the ultimate authority on when an abortion should be performed. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, a prominent white physician, supported the efforts to legalize abortion but felt the entire repeal of abortion laws would be too radical, instead supporting efforts requiring patients and their providers to plead their case to a panel of doctors who would approve the circumstances, which usually included physical or mental health, health of the fetus, rape, or incest. Of course, you can imagine how this would work out for Black and Brown patients, if they even made it that far. Eventually Dr. Guttmacher changed his mind, but it was harder to change policies that fast, especially given the American Medical Association’s long-standing position against abortion.
Then-governor of California Ronald Reagan legalized abortion under such a model in 1967, but it proved ineffective for the masses. Doctors referred patients to clinics in Mexico because few could meet the narrow restrictions, which allowed abortion in only certain medical instances. “La Casa de las Gringas” (“the White Girls’ House”) was a popular clinic in Mexico City that charged more than $1,000 for an abortion, according to Gutierrez-Romine. Those in Southern California, however, could take a quick day trip to Tijuana, receive their abortions for a few hundred dollars, and be home by evening. US emergency rooms saw the aftermath of the unsafe procedures and tried to save the lives of those who had had unsafe or incomplete procedures.
Dr. Leon Belous was an outspoken Russian-born gynecologist who kept his involvement in the efforts to send patients to illegal abortion providers a secret until his name surfaced during a 1966 investigation of a woman’s death. Investigators, acting on a tip, raided a Chula Vista, California, apartment office and discovered that doctors such as Dr. Belous were sending dozens of patients there, which was illegal. Advocates used the case to push for a liberalized abortion law, arguing that it was better for a doctor in the US to provide the care rather than send the abortion seeker to Mexico. The provider in question, Dr. Karl Lairtus, a friend of Dr. Belous’s, was a trained, competent abortion provider, but only licensed in Mexico, not the United States. Despite knowing Dr. Lairtus, Dr. Belous still spread the narrative of the “butchery” of the Tijuana clinics. His argument played on racist fears and ignored the fact that Dr. Lairtus was licensed in Mexico, where he and Dr. Belous met. It seems that his argument was more xenophobic and nationalist in nature, relying on assumptions about Mexican health care rather than focusing on ensuring women had competent providers on both sides of the border. The case reached the California Supreme Court, which sided with Dr. Belous, agreeing that women in the United States were in danger of receiving substandard care in Mexico.
What’s frustrating about this argument is how much it relies on xenophobia and US exceptionalism to prove its point. Dangerous abortions—as well as safe ones—were happening right here in the United States, yet the case needed to prey on racist assumptions about dirty clinics in Mexico in order to change the law. As Gutierrez-Romine points out, “While legislators in California grappled with their fears of Tijuana abortions, they failed to recognize that it was actually California’s law that made women unsafe.”
We can’t help but notice the parallels with today. When abortion was recriminalized across the country, some pro-choice advocates warned of the dangers of back-alley abortions and people going to Mexico for what they considered “unsafe” care. We talked to reporters who were concerned with abortion pills coming across the border from Mexico or from India, questioning whether they were safe for people in the United States to take, ignoring the fact that most medications are manufactured overseas. It’s the xenophobia, combined with abortion stigma and fueled by US exceptionalism, that creates the assumption that although the United States isn’t offering widely accessible legal abortion care, the care abroad must be inferior because it is provided by Brown people. Some people never stopped crossing the southern or northern borders for abortion care.
Using Ableism to Advocate for Abortion
The therapeutic abortion model was a workable one for a small population of women who needed abortions, particularly white women with financial means and those who could garner public sympathy. During the early twentieth century, the rubella (German measles) epidemic thrust abortion into the public conversation, changing the public’s perception of the need for abortion due to health indications. Pregnant people who contracted rubella were more likely to deliver babies with disabilities. As historian Leslie Reagan explains in Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disability, and Abortion in Modern America, rubella was a threat both medically to those who contracted it and also to the idea of a perfect post–World War II nuclear family with healthy, nondisabled children. At the same time, many people—including Sherri Finkbine, a US children’s television show host—were taking common medications containing thalidomide, which was found to cause fetal physical disabilities in pregnant people. Sherri’s story made national headlines in 1962 when she sought an abortion but was refused by her provider’s hospital and then traveled to Sweden for care. Finkbine and her family told their story in several magazines with family photos. Other national magazines highlighted white women’s stories to garner support for specific reasons for abortion. People of color rarely entered the mainstream conversation.
In the 1971 Bronze Thrills cover story titled “I Performed an Abortion on My Sister,” the Black publication details a woman named Marianne’s story of fearing for her younger sister, Karen, who contracted rubella. Marianne explained that she would never have forgiven herself if Karen gave birth to a child with disabilities, writing, “I don’t want to see you bring a handicapped child into the world.” When doctors refused an abortion for Karen, Marianne took it upon herself to borrow instruments from the hospital where she worked and perform the abortion herself. Karen later hemorrhaged and died. Although Marianne’s position on abortion shifted a bit, it was for ableist reasons. She did not believe abortion should be available for a young person or someone already parenting who “doesn’t want to be bothered with another,” but she did believe it was “a solution to an impossible situation where a child will be born with a handicap”; therefore, she argued, abortion should be legalized.
Marianne’s concerns mirrored others: Abortions were granted in specific instances because young, married white women were considered sympathetic patients who shouldn’t be “burdened” with children with disabilities. They were seen as “deserving” of a healthy baby. Although we support a person’s decision to have an abortion for whatever reason, what is complicated is that rather than address the underlying issue of lack of social support for people with disabilities, ableism became a justification for abortion. Abortion’s legitimacy became centered on the belief that healthy, nondisabled children were the preference. Sympathy for women who needed abortions relied on the legitimacy of their whiteness, marital status, class, and desire for a child to make a woman a worthy candidate for an abortion—a sympathy that low-income people and people of color could never obtain simply by who they are. Today, we still see this narrative used to justify abortions, especially later abortions, or to plead the need for exceptions within a restriction. In her paper “After Roe: Race, Reproduction, and Life at the Limit of Law,” American University race scholar Sara Clarke Kaplan argues that in the wake of the Dobbs decision, despite public conversation about the impact banning abortion would have on low-income people and communities of color, the stories elevated focused on the plight of white, well-off, married cisgender women seeking abortions due to a medical indication. She knows this from her own experience as a Black woman who had a later abortion. These stories, she writes, served as “empathetic representatives of universal womanhood in crisis.” Because these women’s identity aspects are not discussed they can be a stand-in that everyone can sympathize with because they are not marred by bigoted views on their reproduction. Their whiteness symbolizes innocence and justification for their deserved desire for an abortion, as well as a healthy child. Often, the medical condition of the pregnancy or disabilities detected are the focus of the narrative, allowing a public discussion on the value of disabled people’s lives and worthiness to spread unchecked. The focused conversation also erases the many barriers that impact a person’s ability to obtain an abortion, creating delays leading them to have an abortion later in pregnancy. Of course, people of color are more likely to experience these delays. Thus, their need for an abortion, when a health condition is not disclosed, is viewed as less worthy than those who have medical indications, often symbolized in white women’s stories. The racial divide in who is worthy of an abortion continues. The liberalization of abortion laws is critical, but it’s important to recognize that it was advocated for using ableist tactics and left people of color who disproportionately needed care out of the conversation or facing criminalization.
* * *
As newspaper headlines continued to cover the stories of patients dying or being permanently injured by unsafe procedures, legislators began to take up the cause of legalization, believing that abortion would be safer if it were widely available and regulated. In Unbought and Unbossed, the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm detailed her connection to abortion, including why she chose to become the chairwoman of NARAL. She explained that data had shown that women were having abortions, whether or not abortion was a crime. “Abortions will not be stopped,” she wrote, continuing, “the question becomes simply that of what kind of abortions society wants women to have—clean, competent ones performed by licensed physicians or septic, dangerous ones done by incompetent practitioners.” Chisholm made the legalization of abortion the cornerstone of her political platform as part of access to safe pregnancy care for people of color across the country.
The conversation began changing publicly as women’s liberation groups held speakouts where people who’d had abortions could share their stories in front of audiences, essentially admitting to committing crimes as they sought health care, bringing the private to the public. In Abortion Rap, Diane Schulder and Florynce Kennedy detail the March 1969 abortion speakout of the Redstockings, a New York City–based group that wanted to help people who’d had abortions let go of the guilt and shame associated with the procedure. The stories, or “abortion raps” as they called them, were central to forcing politicians to understand the unequal system the therapeutic model created for Black and Brown people who needed abortions. Their testimonies shifted the conversation in states such as New York, leading to legalization.
Legalization nationwide, however, came through a case out of Texas, involving Jane Roe, later identified as Norma McCorvey, a white woman who alleged she’d been raped and wanted an abortion but was unable to obtain one because it was illegal. She was connected with two young lawyers who took her case to the Supreme Court. Norma was unable to receive her abortion both because it was illegal and she was unsure of where to receive care, and because if she had received an abortion, she would no longer be pregnant, which would have rendered her case moot. She later contended this was frustrating to her. The irony is that one of her lawyers, a white woman named Sarah Weddington, had previously had an abortion in Mexico and knew how to have one. The case was huge, and “Roe” garnered sympathy because her pregnancy was a result of rape, an allegation that McCorvey later declared was not true. But the fact remains that the conversation about legal abortion hinged on the health, safety, security, and virtues of white women. They were meant to be protected, both from criminalization and dangerous providers.
The Roe v. Wade decision itself legalized abortion nationwide, creating the pregnancy trimester framework, but allowed states to restrict abortion once viability occurred, based on quickening. Roe didn’t decriminalize all abortions, however. It legalized abortions within a certain set of rules and regulations, putting the procedure squarely under the authority of physicians and the state, not the people who sought them. This meant that the vision of community health care dreamed up by Jane and other community providers would still be considered illegal.
