Abortion, part 2: An Inquiry into the Illegal Past, Douglas County, Oregon

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.”

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

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

A Harlan Ellison Memory - Cambridge, MA, January 1981

Harlan was at least an hour late, of course. He had enjoyed a lengthy dinner with friends before striding in dressed in a jacket over a black T-shirt that depicted a penguin armed with a submachine gun with the caption “Penguins Have No Mercy!”

I apologize, he said to the room; I’ve got only about 11 pages written of a 16-page story I had intended to read tonight. But with your indulgence, I’ll finish it right here and then read it. It was a Friday and I could walk the 10 blocks home, so I wasn’t worried about staying out late. I don’t recall that anyone else objected (or walked out) either.

The Sheraton Commander is a grand old hotel at the north end of Cambridge Common, the “village green” that stands northwest of Harvard Square, between most of the campus of Harvard College and the former Radcliffe College. (The two, Harvard and Radcliffe -- once all-boys and all-girls schools -- gradually merged in the late 1960s and 1970s.)

In retrospect, I was lucky to have arrived from Oregon the very year (1977) that a small second-floor operation known as the Science Fantasy Bookstore opened just a half block south of Harvard Square. Back then, the street leading down to the river (and the Anderson Memorial Bridge, from which Quentin Compson was said to have leaped to his death by drowning, according to William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury) was known as Boylston. It became JFK Street in 1981.