This book began as a study of women abortionists who were arrested, tried, convicted, and sent to the penitentiary in the decades immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade. To begin with, I amassed more than fifty trial records and appeals court decisions that documented the circumstances of women practitioners in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.
In the process of locating tens of thousands of pages of court records, I had the very good fortune to locate Margaret St. James, the daughter of Ruth Barnett. Maggie provided me with her mother’s privately published memoir, They Weep on My Doorstep, and with her own vivid memoir describing her life as an abortionist’s daughter. She also generously lent me Ruth Barnett’s photographs and diaries, graciously and enthusiastically allowed me to interview her for many hours about her mother’s life and work, and urged Dorothy Taylor, Ruth Barnett’s employee for many years, to speak to me as well. These materials, along with the newspaper accounts and extant transcripts of her mother’s trials, made it possible for me to write this story of one woman’s ordeal as an illegal practitioner in the twentieth century. Chapters 1 and 2, especially, draw heavily on the material that Maggie made available to me. The story of Suzanne Tyler’s ordeal is a composite, constructed from several of Ruth Barnett’s final trials.
The main source for the material in Chapters 3 and 4 is the 1936 Los Angeles trial of Reginald Rankin and the members of his West Coast abortion syndicate. The transcript of this trial comprises over two thousand pages. It is an extraordinary document of the illegal era; it is unlikely that a fuller account exists of an abortion syndicate in the 1930s. In Chapters 3 and 4, as elsewhere in the book, I have used the real names of abortion practitioners, but not of the clients of abortionists or other innocent bystanders. In several cases I have created composite portraits of clients and events in order to ensure anonymity. In one instance, when Laura Miner pays a call on William Byrne, the details of her visit are a composite of the account she gave of the event and several other accounts provided by women involved in illegal abortion elsewhere during the same era.
Chapter 5, which takes Ruth into Rankin’s orbit and to Reno, Nevada, draws on the record of the preliminary examination conducted by Judge Harry Dunseath in the Justice’s Court of Reno Township, County of Washoe, State of Nevada, on December 10, 1940. The material on Julia Ruuttila in this chapter was generously passed on to me by Sandy Polishuk, who is writing a biography of this heroic labor organizer and who interviewed Ruuttila extensively before her death. Chapters 6 and 7 benefitted from Ruth’s and Maggie’s memoirs, newspaper accounts, city vice investigations, and general scholarship concerning municipal affairs in Portland in the 1940s and 1950s. I am grateful to Joe Uris for providing me with a copy of his dissertation, “Trouble in River City: An Analysis of an Urban Vice Probe.” This study explores attitudes and responses to crime in Portland in the mid-fifties.
While the entire book has been shaped by my reading of scores of abortion trial transcripts, Chapter 8 explicitly incorporates details of a number of trials conducted all over the country in the postwar decades. Chapter 9 again uses material from Ruth Barnett’s memoir as well as her prison diaries. It draws on letters to the Oregon State Legislature from citizens eager for abortion reform, and most important, uses material from Ruth Barnett’s final trial in 1966. The transcripts of Ruth’s trials in 1966 exist because only following these did the abortionist appeal her convictions.