Abortion, past and future . . . part 1

Underneath the tweets and insults, this president (or at least the longer-term reactionary forces who are using him as a handy cover) will be laboring to change the scope and direction of this nation’s policies and laws.

As I’ve noted, each new vacancy on the Supreme Court provides another opportunity for the religious right to overturn Roe v. Wade. Don’t think they won’t do their utmost to make it happen.

Oregon has the dubious honor of being only one of three states that will vote on an anti-abortion measure (the other two are Alabama and West Virginia) this November: Measure 106, to ban public funding for abortions, so our state will end up with more babies born into poverty, and thereby more future welfare, government control, and crime. Initiative signature gatherers got 106 approved a month ago.

Effectively, it’s already happened across much of the nation, years and years ago. It’s difficult but vital for those of us who live on the coasts, and in the big “blue” metro regions, to keep in mind that abortion is not even available to women who live in 87 percent of all the counties across the U.S., legal though it might be.

Back in the late 1980s, when I was a reporter in southern Oregon for the Roseburg News-Review, my work on the police and medical beat made me aware that even then, a woman who wanted an abortion could not obtain a legal one anywhere in Douglas County -- the fifth largest in Oregon in terms of square mileage, ninth (out of 36) in population.

For a time after abortion had been legalized everywhere in the U.S., a veteran pediatrician in Roseburg had performed them, but by the summer of 1990 he had retired, and as far as I could tell, nobody else would do them: no private practitioners, not the county health division, and none of the hospitals.

On top of the financial and emotional costs, pregnant teenagers as well as single adult women and overburdened moms had to find someone to drive them to Eugene, Ashland, or Portland (more than an hour at the nearest) to get it done. Such appears to be the case across much of the nation today, especially in the Midwest and the South.

Back in 1990, two anti-abortion measures were scheduled for the November ballot in Oregon: Measure 8 sought to prohibit abortions altogether with the usual trio of exceptions (rape, incest, and to prevent the death of the mother); and Measure 10 would compel doctors give parents or a custodial adult two days advance notice before a minor could obtain an abortion.

I figured this was an excellent time to inform local readers what abortion had been like before it had become legal (since not a few voters appeared to believe it would be a great move to return to that condition) . . .  and what motivations (and obstacles) faced local women since it had supposedly become their right.

How and what I managed to get published about abortion in Douglas County (and not) is a story in itself. The short version is that the managing editor initially tried to wrest the idea away from me and give it to someone else . . . then assigned additional reporters to the project who hadn’t been motivated to tackle it before I proposed to do it . . . and the ultimate result was that publication got delayed so long that the series not only didn’t appear before the election, but got held up an additional three months until after I was no longer employed at the paper! (Plus, one piece and several details turned up missing, and I was never consulted about any of it.)

Although the effort was a disappointment in toto, I felt proud of specific work I’d done: researching what I could find on abortions in the region before they became legal, interviewing the pediatrician who did them after, and several women with varying personal experiences and points of view.

But let’s start with a small but essential piece that never saw the light of day. I did a sidebar to explain that, although women could not get an abortion on demand in Douglas County, this did not mean the procedure never occurred (which I suspected a lot of citizens believed). Here’s the draft report I turned in about that, which somehow never got into the paper. . . . 

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Each year, an average of 250 Douglas County women seek abortions elsewhere in the state. So why doesn’t anyone offer the service locally any more?

“That’s a very tough question,” Dr. J.M. Vargas-Bozo said. “I don’t think anyone feels comfortable doing them. Also, there’s pressure from some groups.”

“Yes, it wasn’t easy,” said retired Dr. Jim Harris, who was picketed during the time he performed legal abortions. “I certainly didn’t appreciate it when the pickets came around. Fortunately, they didn’t know where my office was.”

This is not to say abortions are never performed in Douglas County. Both Roseburg hospitals perform “therapeutic abortions” for incomplete miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and other medical reasons.

According to Sandy Hendy, nurse manager of the Women’s Center at Douglas Community Hospital, medical authorities estimate that one in six to one in eight of all fertilized eggs pass out of the woman’s system unnoticed with her menstrual bleeding within 12 to 14 weeks from conception.

For first-time conceptions, the rate of “natural” abortion may be as high as 25 percent.

“That changes the focus from the abortion issue,” Hendy said. “Mother Nature has said, ‘this isn’t gonna go,’ and already taken care of it.”

Local hospitals will perform dilation and curettage to clean the inner lining of the uterus if a woman has not passed all the products of conception and continues to bleed. DCH performed 22 D&Cs on that basis in 1989 and 16 this year to date, according to Hendy.

“They’re technically an abortion, but as far as the Department of Vital Statistics is concerned, they’re not,” Hendy said.

An ectopic pregnancy occurs when the egg implants in one of the fallopian tubes. This poses a grave health risk to the mother because she is apt to experience severe abdominal pain and the tube may rupture. Hendy estimates DCH performs roughly a dozen abdominal surgeries for ectopic pregnancies per year.

But if a woman seeks an abortion for anything other than medical reasons, no hospital or clinic will do it in Douglas County.

“It’s a real emotional issue, and physicians have chosen not to do them,” Hendy said.

“Nobody wants the harassment and it’s certainly not a moneymaking proposition,” Harris said. “It isn’t worth the hassle you’d have to go through to do them.”

NEXT: a history of illegal abortions in Douglas County, Oregon, circa 1873-1968