This is the second half of a feature about the history of illegal abortions in Douglas County, southern Oregon, which originally appeared in the Roseburg, Oregon News-Review on Feb. 4, 1991. . . .
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A box of Chi-ches-ters turned up in the dusty basement of Chapman’s Pharmacy during a recent inventory. Undated directions to the pharmacist say the product is “no longer an emmanogue” -- emmenagogues are agents that stimulate menstrual flow -- but should be used only “for relief of functional menstrual pain.”
This could mean that an active ingredient was removed at some point, or simply that the company was trying to protect itself from false claims about its product.
Don Wells, owner of Gordon’s Drug in Canyonville, remembered throwing out a number of boxes of Chi-ches-ters when he bought the business 26 years ago. “I question whether they changed the formula one bit,” he said. “They just couldn’t make the claim, so they stopped making the claim.”
Wells cited the example of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, which became Carter’s Little Pills after the federal government cracked down and said the product had no effect on the liver.
Virginia Proctor of Canyonville graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1937 and recalls her sorority sisters using Chi-ches-ters.
“The girls used them to bring on their periods or induce abortion if they could,” Proctor said. “Not only that, but they used them when they knew they were going to a prom and they wanted to get their period over with early. Girls are like that, you know. They’re no different today than they were 50 years ago,” she said with a laugh.
Many other herbs and extracts have been used throughout history as abortifacients, among them parsley seed, jalapa root, calomel, aloes, savine (an extract of juniper), castor oil, quinine, oil of pennyroyal, ergot preparations, and slippery elm bark. All of these ploys were risky, undependable, and sometimes fatal.
Nathan Fullerton, a druggist with the firm of Fullerton and Richardson, was indicted by a Douglas County grand jury in 1907 for “selling oil of tansy without due inquiry.” He admitted he had sold two small vials to a Wilbur resident who subsequently died.
Oil of tansy is extremely toxic. Ten drops may be fatal, according to the CRC Handbook of Medicinal Herbs. The court file does not say whether the woman was trying to abort or commit suicide, or had something else in mind. Fullerton, however, was found not guilty.
Castor oil was “frequently used by gals who were sick and tired (of being pregnant), and let’s get this thing over with,” Roseburg pharmacist Tom Hornsby said. “Generally it gets them in more trouble than it’s worth.”
Ergot preparations are “vaso-constrictive,” which means they cut off blood supply, in this case to the fetus. Ergot alkaloids are used legitimately for migraine headaches and to inhibit bleeding after childbirth.
“Ergot comes from a sort of fungus that grows on rye in wet weather,” according to Wells. “Hundreds of years ago they noticed that women who ate rye bread from bad flour were losing fingers and toes … and fetuses.”
Slippery elm bark was a gummy substance that apparently aborted fetuses by physical irritation. Women bought a 6- to 8-inch sliver and inserted it vaginally. “That’s an old, old one,” said Dr. George Constantine, associate dean of the college of pharmacy at Oregon State University. “People used to buy them and say they wanted to make tea.”
Constantine, who had pharmacies in San Jose, Calif., Salt Lake City, Utah, and Corvallis, said he would offer the elm bark in powdered form. “They said, no, they’d rather grind it themselves so it would be ‘fresh.’ We didn’t sell it to them (in that case). We always happened to be out of it that day. You have some ethical standards to abide by if you suspected what they were planning to use it for.”
In 1968, James R.D. Little, a 48-year-old osteopath whose office was at 214 S.E. Locust St. in Oakland, pleaded guilty to a grand jury indictment charging manslaughter by abortion.
According to a memorandum by then district attorney Doyle Schiffman, investigation turned up evidence of at least nine abortions performed in Little’s office. One woman had obtained two in one year. Clients came from Roseburg, Sutherlin, and Eugene.
One 25-year-old Roseburg resident told authorities her 58-year-old husband “does not believe that any of their previous children are theirs and has threatened to kill her if she ever got pregnant again,” according to the police report. “They have a blood Rh factor problem and in addition use a contraceptive, thus the husband will not accept that he may be the father.”
Schiffman’s memo noted that “the small office used by Dr. Little … was unkept and … filthy.” Police said the smell was “almost unbearable.” The seized tools were rusty, no anesthesia was used, and “the majority of the operations were performed on a wooden kitchen table.”
The defendant received a 10-year sentence. His physician’s license was automatically revoked. After 2-1/2 years in prison, he was paroled.
Local physicians do not recall seeing women with complications that might have resulted from illegal or self-abortions. “Personally, I think that’s grossly exaggerated, the number of women who used a coat hanger,” said Dr. Warren Kadas of Sutherlin.
Jeppeson said he did have patients who had gotten abortions years before, when they were 15 and 16, and discovered much later to their sorrow that they could not conceive.
“I saw them after they had gotten married and wanted to have a baby,” he said. “It’s relatively common information that about a good 10 percent of illegal abortions end up with infections, and the majority of those are sterile forever.”
A 1969 Oregon law reaffirmed the illegality of abortion but loosened the exceptions to include health risk to the mother, serious physical or mental defect in the infant, or pregnancy resulting from “felonious intercourse.” Although that law was not removed from the books until 1983, it was effectively overturned in 1973 by the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade.
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In a sidebar to the main story above, I added the account of a grisly murder case that originated in an incident outside Glendale, a small town of fewer than 900 inhabitants at the southern edge of Douglas County, 56 miles northwest of Medford and 116 miles south of Eugene . . . and ended up going all the way to the Oregon Supreme Court.
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An apparent abortion attempt figured in one of Douglas County’s most spectacular murder cases.
Roy A. Farnam, 23, lived on a farm 12 miles east of Glendale with his parents and siblings, and had dated 14-year-old Edna Morgan through most of 1914, according to court records. Morgan lived with her father and sister on a farm five miles west of the Farnam place, where she was a frequent visitor and sometimes stayed overnight.
At 1:30 a.m. Dec. 9, H.H. Beamer, whose farm was just west of the Morgan place, discovered his barn on fire. In the morning he found a body in the ashes. Hairpins, a corset stay, and three pieces of flat lead that were thought to be melted bullets were found with the remains.
Also, a fetus in the fifth month of development was discovered near the corpse. Physicians later testified that the fetus had been expelled through an operation by hand or instrument, and that Morgan’s death probably occurred after the birth.
Farnam’s first trial, for rape, twice resulted in hung juries. With the turn of the year and his third trial, a new prosecutor had to be appointed because Douglas County District Attorney George Brown had been elected state attorney general and left for Salem.
In the third trial, Farnam was convicted of rape and given a sentence of three to 20 years. Five months later, his trial for second-degree murder resulted in a manslaughter conviction. He received a 1-to-15-year sentence, to run after completion of his rape sentence.
Appealed to the Oregon Supreme Court, the case takes up 87 pages of “Reports of Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of the State of Oregon,” volume 82, when most cases require only five to 20 pages.
The majority agreed “it is conclusively proved that the defendant lured this poor … child into a barn remote from human habitation, and that he either murdered her outright, or, in an attempt to produce an abortion to protect himself from the consequences of his own lust, so dealt with her as to bring about her death.”
Forty-five pages of the Supreme Court decision consist of Justice Burnett’s vigorous dissent from the majority side. He argued that the evidence against Farnam, though considerable, was still completely circumstantial. He added that certain hearsay evidence should not have been admitted, and the jury received some improper instructions.
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