Here’s another part of the series I wrote on abortion for my employer, the Roseburg, Oregon News-Review, in the spring and summer of 1990 as context for that November’s election, which included two anti-abortion measures on the ballot: a total ban and a requirement of parental notification for pregnant minors to obtain one.
The series did not appear in print until the following February 1991 -- months after the election for which I intended it, and many weeks after I’d left the newspaper’s employment. I’ll explain why after I’ve posted all the series. This part, with the snore-inducing headline “Law Books Reveal County’s Abortion History,” was published Feb. 4, 1991, and buried on page 8.
The initial section in italics is a prehistory I had included as background. The editor(s) cut all of it and went straight to the section on illegal abortions in Douglas County, which was justifiable, I suppose. One or two other things were not. I’ll tell you about that later. (This history portion will appear in two parts for length).
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Abortion is as old as the family. Women in ancient as well as contemporary primitive cultures found it as necessary to rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies as the modern career woman sometimes does.
Methods ranged from gentle Asian massage to damage the fetus and rupture the sac, to the Yąnomamö Indian women, who would simply have a friend jump on their bellies.
The older women of the village often instructed young mothers in the use of poisonous herbs that could rid them of a fetus, although they often screwed up their insides and even endangered their lives.
Abortion was not outlawed in this country until after the Civil War. In the colonial and pre-Revolutionary United States, the doctrine of “quickening,” which held that the fetus was not alive until its movement could be felt, meant that courts readily acquitted doctors who aborted babies during the first three to five months of pregnancy.
According to James Mohr’s Abortion in America, reformers estimated one abortion for every 25 to 30 live births between 1800 and 1830. By the 1850s, the proportion had increased to as many as one in every five or six.
A report issued by the Michigan Board of Health in 1878 guessed that one-third of all pregnancies in that state ended in abortion, and that 70 to 80 percent were sought by “prosperous and otherwise respectable married women.”
So it should be no surprise that there was a significant demand for the service in Douglas County, and physicians that were willing to meet it. It is not the sort of thing for which records exist, but it was fairly common knowledge.
Abortion had been made illegal in the Oregon territory under a manslaughter statute in 1845.
One Richard S. Price was indicted by the Douglas County Circuit Court in 1873 on two rape charges and “procuring abortion.” A young woman signed a statement declaring that she became pregnant “by means of forced connection” with Rice, who gave her “certain drugs and medicines … for the purpose of procuring an abortion” four months later.
The court file says nothing of a verdict or sentence, let alone the victim’s age. The other rape charge, though, involving “a female child under the age of fourteen years,” resulted in a 10-year prison sentence for Rice.
To judge by the handful of cases that were appealed to the Oregon Supreme Court, most manslaughter by abortion prosecutions in the state involved the death of the mother rather than simply the killing of a fetus, perhaps because the former was less easy to hide from authorities.
During time within memory, local residents can testify to a continual demand for abortions, legal or otherwise. “There are people I know of that performed them as early as 1920,” said Dr. Donald Jeppeson, who was in family practice in Roseburg some 35 years.
“I think chiropractors and naturopaths performed the majority of abortions back when they were illegal. They had a looser arrangement.
“One of “the Roseburg physicians) was not particularly known as an abortion doctor, but there were a couple that were wide open. Most of these birds were still alive when I came to town but they were old and retired.”
“One of “the Roseburg physicians) was not particularly known as an abortion doctor, but there were a couple that were wide open. Most of these birds were still alive when I came to town but they were old and retired.”
Jeppeson said estate sales from various physicians’ offices turned up such instruments as suction curettes. “Now you tell me they used that to scrape their toenails. They didn’t.”
These physicians were employed at the Catholic-run Mercy Hospital -- the only such facility in town before 1951 -- but performed the abortions in their offices, according to Jeppeson. Most were in the Medical Arts Building, now the Professional Center at Oak Avenue and Main Street. “It wasn’t some back-street office,” he said.
Jeppeson does not believe any of the doctors were ever prosecuted. “They were famous (well-known) but (the authorities) needed someone to file a complaint,” he said.
Women apparently found other ways to rid themselves of an unwanted pregnancy. Eunice Wight, a 72-year-old resident of Azalea, recalled using a drug to expel a fetus when she was newly married. This was in 1938 or 1939, she said.
She later raised a daughter by that husband. But at the time, he was 20 years her senior and already had two kids from his first marriage. Also, families were “hard pressed” in the post-Depression era.
The husband was familiar with a pharmaceutical called Chi-ches-ters because his first wife had used them to abort herself, according to the woman. “They didn’t actually advertise them as abortion pills. They were a laxative or something.
“It was a cheap abortion. I never regretted it. I hate to think what would have happened if I’d had that child. He didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a job. A lot of people say, ‘Well, you probably weren’t pregnant at all,’ but I know I was.”
According to Wight, the late Fred Chapman, a longtime Roseburg pharmacist, remembered Chi-ches-ters. “When we went in and asked about them, he laughed and said we used to sell a lot of those,” she said. “Mr. Chapman also told me they were taken off the market when abortion became legal.”
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NEXT: Part two of a history of illegal abortion in Douglas County, including other herbs, extracts, and preparations women used to rid themselves of a fetus; and the prosecution of an Oakland, Oregon osteopath who pleaded guilty to manslaughter by abortion in 1968. . .
Read the introduction to my series, Abortion, past and future
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