By the summer of 1936, Reg Rankin and his confederates had gone too far. Rankin’s chain of abortion clinics, his chain of credit bureaus, his small army of doctors and nurses and shills—and the occasional mistakes they made—had all begun to draw the attention of law enforcement officials. It was not as if the district attorneys and the cops in San Francisco and Los Angeles, San Jose and San Diego didn’t know about Reg Rankin’s syndicate before June 1936. They knew. But they honored the agreement that had generally governed relations between abortionists and the law since the state of California criminalized abortion in 1849. It was the same agreement that protected Ruth Barnett in Portland: no death, no prosecution. But Reg Rankin’s brash demeanor and his open operation of abortion offices up and down the coast had pushed the tolerance of the authorities beyond the breaking point, especially because the Internal Revenue Service had also gotten interested in Rankin’s business.
That summer, the district attorneys in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego all cracked down. In L.A., police raided abortion offices in Hollywood, downtown, and Long Beach on June 5th and arrested Rankin, Watts, Shinn, and Byrne. They arrested three doctors, James Beggs, Jesse Ross, and Valentine St. John, and three nurses, including Violette Pelligrini. Also netted were a couple of individuals associated with the abortion ring’s credit bureau, the Medical Assistance Corporation, including Rankin’s brother-in-law, J.C. Perry. Three others were sought by the police but never apprehended: Dr. Houston, who had sold his Oregon drugstore to go in with Watts and Rankin; Beatrice Bole, Rankin’s solicitor who had paid calls on Dr. Tatum, the drugless man; and the nurse at the Dryden Apartments who had watched silently over Diane McDermott. Others, potential witnesses, were subpoenaed in June, and some were offered immunity if they testified for the prosecution. Laura Miner, the San Diego abortionist and her assistant, Nedra Cordon, were offered this deal and accepted. Dr. Norman Powers, arrested with the others, agreed before the trial began to be a witness for the state. Paul De Gaston, so deeply involved in the complex life of Rankin’s syndicate, was only too glad to turn state’s evidence.
From October 5, 1936, through the 24th of that month, in Los Angeles Superior Court, prosecution witnesses provided gruesome tales and gory details in support of the charges contained in the nine-count indictment against the members of the abortion syndicate. The first count was the most inclusive, and ultimately eleven out of the thirteen defendants were found guilty on this count. It charged them with conspiracy and asserted that the defendants “knowingly, willfully, unlawfully and feloniously conspired, combined, confederated and agreed together and with each other to provide, supply and administer to divers pregnant women, citizens of this state and elsewhere, medicines, drugs and substances, and to use and employ instruments and other means upon such divers pregnant women with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such women and each of them, the same not being necessary to preserve the life of such women, or any of them.” The other eight counts were more pointed, charging the defendants with “the commission of a criminal abortion” on specific, named women.
Testimony lasted for fifteen long days, but the courtroom remained a riveting place almost every minute of that time. Hard-boiled witnesses like Paul De Gaston alternated with soft, vulnerable women like Diane McDermott. Laura Miner described how her business worked on a day-to-day basis, and then the distinguished head of the State Board of Medical Examiners told how Rankin came to his office and brazenly threw his weight around. Unwitting participants and erstwhile collaborators took the stand and told stories about how and on whom the syndicate operated, and most of the time, one young woman or another was waiting in the wings or sitting in the witness box, compelled to describe how she got on a table and spread her legs.
In all, forty-three witnesses testified for the prosecution. Only a handful testified for the defense, and Reg Rankin, George Watts, and J.O. Shinn were not among them. Nor were the doctors Beggs, Ross, and St. John. Bill Byrne did get up on the stand as the final defense witness, but only for a moment. After providing a shifty answer to one question put to him by his lawyer, Byrne was excused. The team of defense lawyers, supported by the judge, made it impossible for Byrne, under cross-examination, to shed any light on the question of his relation to the abortion syndicate. The judge ruled that questions about whether he knew Reg Rankin and whether he took a trip with Rankin to Seattle were incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial, as the defense contended. The prosecution did not press hard. They had made their case and felt confident by the time Byrne was called that anything the man said the jury would disbelieve.
Indeed, the prosecution had made its case. After a short deliberation, the jury found all the defendants but two—Rankin’s brother-in-law and a woman more or less arrested by mistake—guilty on various combinations of the counts. It is notable that in fifteen days of testimony, the issue of the unborn child, its potential life, its rights, was not a recurring theme or even a concern. The trial was about displaying the practices of a criminal syndicate, just as if it had been a bootlegging syndicate or a group of gamblers on trial. The difference, of course, was that in Rankin’s operation, the client bought a chance to efface the wages of sex, and the clients were all women. So in addition to displaying the low-down tactics of a group of men willing to use the law to line their pockets, the trial provided a venue for displaying the sexuality and the vulnerability of women. Regarding the latter, the trial was an unqualified success.
But in the end, the jury’s verdict was not the last word on the fates of some of the syndicate participants. Rankin himself made a few gestures toward appealing his conviction. He retained a lawyer and filed the necessary documents in the fall of 1936. In January 1937, though, he dropped his appeal and entered San Quentin. The three female defendants, Violette Pelligrini, Grace Moore, and Lillian Wilson, were permitted to file applications for probation, as was Mr. Shinn, Rankin’s right-hand man.
Among the defendants who did not enter prison by the end of 1936 were William Byrne and the three doctors, Jesse Ross, James Beggs, and Valentine St. John, all of whom vigorously appealed their convictions to the State Supreme Court. The chief contention of all four men was that if the testimony of individuals who were accomplices to the syndicate’s crimes—people like De Gaston and Laura Miner, and the women who had sought criminal abortions—were excluded, the evidence was insufficient to warrant conviction.
To be sure, the law was settled in California that a person could not be convicted of a crime upon the testimony of an accomplice unless that testimony were corroborated by other evidence that connected the defendant with the crime in question. What’s more, Section 1108 of the California Penal Code specifically stated that the testimony of a woman who sought an abortion was tainted. It said, “Upon a trial for procuring or attempting to procure an abortion, or aiding or assisting therein, or for inveighing, enticing or taking away an unmarried female of previous chaste character, under the age of 18 years, for the purpose of prostitution, or aiding or assisting therein, the defendant cannot be convicted upon the testimony of the woman or with whom the offense was committed, unless she is corroborated by other evidence.”
The identity established here between prostitutes and women seeking abortions was important not only in revealing the basis of the law’s objection to abortion. The connection also shaped the outcome of the case because eventually this provision of the law did work to the benefit of the three doctors who appealed their convictions. On November 26, 1937, the Supreme Court of the state of California denied the strenuous efforts of the L.A. County D.A. to prove that the evidence against the medical trio was abundant and untainted. The Supreme Court found that the only substantial evidence amassed against the doctors had been offered, inadmissibly, by accomplices—the women who had received abortions and others involved with the syndicate. Consequently, the court decided, “Applying the foregoing rules to the instant case, we find with reference to the appellants Beggs, Ross, and St. John, that, after eliminating entirely the testimony of their accomplices, the record is completely devoid of any evidence even slight, which connects or tends to connect any of them with any of the crimes of which they were convicted [and] the judgments as to these appellants must be reversed for the foregoing reason.”
Whether or not the State Supreme Court’s decision in the Rankin case was an expression of solidarity between legal and medical professionals, the decision was consistent with the trial outcomes in abortion cases across the country during the illegal era: doctors were almost always exonerated on one grounds or another, especially if the charges did not include murder, and sometimes even if they did. In the Rankin case, community morals were outraged by the conspiratorial nature of the syndicate, but the court’s decision suggests that professional ethics could absorb and tolerate abortion-performing doctors. After all, in 1936, perhaps as many as one thousand “therapeutic abortions” were performed by doctors at L.A. County Hospital, a number that would plummet to one-tenth that many in less than twenty years.
William Byrne, however, was another story. The men and women who came to court and testified about his activities were mostly the same crew that testified against the doctors, that is, accomplices according to the law. But unlike the doctors, Byrne could not convince the state’s highest court that his claim of tainted testimony was valid, and in the end, the court defined his situation entirely differently. Byrne was not a doctor. He could not claim medical expertise or draw on established collegial relations with other professionals to protect himself. In fact, his professional status was his undoing. As an investigator who consorted with his criminal targets, he had violated the public trust in the most fundamental way. There were no gray areas in his case, and the Supreme Court judges had no trouble dismissing his appeal.
Early in 1938, Byrne joined Reg Rankin and George Watts in San Quentin. Each man had been sentenced to a term in excess of ten years by an angry Superior Court judge, Arthur Crum. According to the Los Angeles Times, which followed the case closely, Crum “meted out the severest possible penalty by providing that the sentences on each of the five counts must run consecutively and not concurrently.”
It is impossible to know much for certain about the activities of Watts and Byrne once they were incarcerated. Ruth Barnett wrote that her old mentor Watts died in San Quentin, but her account of this period is untrustworthy. What is known, however, is that Reginald Rankin, like most men convicted of the crime of abortion, did not stay behind bars for more than a fraction of the time Judge Crum intended.
By the summer of 1940, Rankin was out of jail, apparently unrepentant and unreformed. He was, in fact, busy trying to resurrect his former business, but on new terrain. Following an adage that advised, “If you can’t do it at home, go to Nevada,” Rankin had settled on Reno as a promising venue for an abortion clinic.
Rankin knew about Reno’s reputation as a haven and an opportunity for all sorts of men who’d served time elsewhere. It was a small city in 1940, with no more than twenty-three thousand residents, but the word was that there was always room in Reno for a guy with shady ideas about how to turn a buck. The welcoming hand extended to Al Capone, for example, was legendary. When the gangster was scouting prospects in the Truckee River town, the mayor answered inquiries from his front men genially. “Al Capone is welcome in Reno as long as he behaves himself,” he said. Later, Bugsy Seigel, too, made his headquarters there before moving across the state to Las Vegas. One person who observed Reno closely in those years explained why the city was so hospitable to such types. “The city police force increased in size, improved in equipment, and vanished from the scene of any important misdoings. The average citizen was living in a community of gangsters, bought politicians, thugs, and bootleggers, a community in which ancient bums had been pensioned into police uniforms.”
Reg Rankin had reason to believe that Reno was a city that not only would tolerate a man in his business, but that needed him. After all, it was a town that built a big share of its economy on the trade in women’s bodies, and where that was the case, abortionists had a ready-made clientele of some size. One Nevadan described Reno in those years as a “modern amalgamation of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Hell,” where prostitution was a business “on a supermarket scale.” The Stockade and The Bull Pen were the places to procure choice female flesh in 1940, and the two joints attracted locals and visitors alike. Common knowledge had it that The Stockade, particularly, catered to the tastes of travelling salesmen on the San Francisco-Salt Lake City route, and to businessmen from all over California. Years later, an historian recalled drily that the immense gross earnings both places produced proved unequivocally that “there were distinct possibilities in the area of unconventional approaches to attract visitors” to Reno.
Along with prostitution, gambling was entering its commercial heyday in Nevada. The year before Rankin showed up in town, William Hurrah opened his Tango Club on Douglas Alley, and a number of entrepreneurs followed. Reno was jumping as it pulled in a certain kind of man who associated money and short-term pleasure. The fact that nine thousand divorces a year were processed in Nevada during that era, the lion’s share in Reno, added to the transient flavor of the place and to the population of women who might be carrying pregnancies they could not manage. Rankin knew all this when he laid out his plans from San Quentin.
Between July and November 1940, Rankin put a great deal of effort into setting up an abortion business in Reno. First, he assembled a team of men to whom he could assign duties, just as he had six years earlier in California. As for him, he took on the familiar jobs of scout and strategic planner. He went to Reno in the first part of July and met with a real estate man who showed him office space appropriate for what Rankin called his “finance business.” Later in the month, Rankin dispatched Paul Cushing, a San Francisco man, to sign a five-year lease for space in a downtown office building. Rankin had approved the terms of the lease, which called for a seven-room suite in exchange for a monthly rental fee of two hundred dollars.
His brashness undiminished, Rankin instructed Paul Cushing to take the real estate agent into his confidence and explain what the offices were to be used for. Cushing complied. Before the lease was signed, he explained to Norman Blitz, the real estate broker, that the suite would be used by doctors for the treatment of women’s diseases, and that abortions would be done on the premises. He hastened to explain further that the physician in charge, one Valentine St. John, was retired but had controlled many such clinics and was used to having the best doctors refer their patients his way. Cushing told Blitz that St. John had spent his lifetime developing his abortion method and the instruments used to perform the operation, and that doctors particularly liked St. John’s work because it was painless and safe. He said that St. John had trained many efficient young surgeons and, leaving out the mess that St. John had recently escaped in L.A., he said that the doctor had never had any trouble and had, in fact, been welcomed in any community he came to because doctors felt he was a “needed necessity.”
Having laid the groundwork for opening the abortion clinic in Reno, Cushing now asked Norman Blitz a question that reflected the murky status of abortion in the pre-World War II era. He asked if the real estate man thought that the medical community and the law in Reno would be receptive to an abortion clinic in their city. Blitz replied that if everything was as he described, he was sure Cushing, Rankin, and St. John would have no difficulty. Blitz remembered this part of the conversation. “I said the town and state were level-minded, and if the doctors approved of it, I didn’t think they would make any trouble unless they made some mistakes.”
Then Blitz gave Cushing a list of doctors in Reno who might be interested in sending patients to such a clinic. Maybe Norman Blitz was aware that the Nevada penal code stated that anyone who performed an abortion not necessary to preserve the woman’s life could be imprisoned for up to five years, and that if the fetus had quickened before the operation, the sentence might be ten years. Maybe Blitz was not aware of the law. But his answer made it clear that the idea of an abortion clinic in a building he managed and shared ownership of with a physician did not raise a warning flag in his mind.
After obtaining this degree of assurance, Cushing and Rankin went ahead with their plans. They engaged a contractor to renovate the suite of offices and brought Valentine St. John to town to look over the premises. The chances that the trio would be able to open for business by September were looking good, but one outstanding detail remained: St. John was not licensed to practice in Nevada. This was a problem because Rankin was adamant, as usual, that they must have a proper doctor in charge. Blitz volunteered to arrange for St. John to pay a call on Vernon Cantlon, a longtime Reno physician and surgeon, and a member of the State Board of Medical Examiners. The plan was that Dr. Cantlon would expedite St. John’s Nevada license.
Blitz, however, had sent the doctor to the wrong man. Vernon Cantlon did not think much of Valentine St. John that afternoon of July 20th, or of his foreign credentials. Sometime later, the Reno doctor remembered the details of the visit vividly. “We commented about news of local interest, and then Dr. St. John produced a container ordinarily used for diplomas and other credentials, and withdrew from the container several diplomas and other credentials; among them was a small credential which purported to show that Dr. St. John was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, London. I don’t remember all of the papers he showed me. Among them were a list of the publications he had, with an appalling number of papers he had written. Also there was some sort of notice that he had been a professor of surgery in one of the Balkan states. I don’t remember just which one it was, but I believe it was Budapest. Dr. St. John said, ‘Obviously this will prove I am qualified to practice,’ and he stated that he had performed over four thousand operations. I stopped him at that point and asked him if he had an American diploma from any American university of medicine, and he said no, that he did not. He intimated that it didn’t matter very much because he was obviously well trained enough. I said that I was sorry, that we were rigidly enforcing the rule in the State Board of Medical Examiners that no one could be licensed to practice medicine in the state of Nevada without an American diploma. He was somewhat upset by my remark and left.”
If Dr. St. John was somewhat upset by this turn of events, Rankin and Cushing were livid. Cushing blamed Norman Blitz for getting him to sign a lease by intimating that he would see to St. John’s license. A week after the meeting between Cantlon and St. John, Cushing wrote to Blitz about “the mutually misleading information you received and relayed concerning licensing of a foreign doctor.” He went on, “The difficulty lies in our absolute necessity of having a regularly licensed physician to act as titular head of the Reno offices. You will understand that the disappointment regarding St. John’s license was a considerable setback in our plans.” Feeling that Blitz owed him one at this point, Cushing made a request. “Efforts are now being made here to find a man eligible to receive a Nevada license for this purpose. In the interim, can you suggest any man in your locality who would, for a consideration, be interested in lending his name to the office? Naturally, such an individual would have no responsibilities other than those implied in the use of his license and name.”
Norman Blitz had nothing to offer Cushing and Rankin in this line. He simply continued to collect rent payments through the summer of 1940, though the offices in the Lyons Building sat idle. In the last part of August, Reg Rankin found himself still committed to opening an abortion clinic in Reno, but without the key ingredient—an abortionist. So at this point, he turned to an acquaintance. He turned to Ruth Barnett.
When Rankin made his proposal to Ruth late in the summer of 1940, she accepted. First she agreed to join him in San Francisco to consider the details of his plans for a Reno clinic, and then she agreed to go to Reno for the purpose of performing abortions. It is difficult to know today what had changed since 1934. Back then she had been adamant that Rankin leave her out of his schemes. She was happy where she was, she had said, in the Broadway Building in Portland, the new owner of Dr. Van Alstyne’s practice, the beneficiary of Dr. Watts’s training and his loyal clientele. It is difficult to know for sure why Ruth accepted Rankin’s proposition, mainly because she took some trouble to efface the episode from the story of her life. She did not want her daughter to know what happened in Reno, nor anybody else. The fact is, from 1952 until the end of her life, Ruth Barnett wrote and rewrote versions of her life as an abortionist, and always she omitted the events of 1940 in Reno.
It is possible, however, more than fifty years later, to piece together some speculations about why the Portland abortionist took up with Rankin when she did, and also to imagine why she altered her life story to erase the episode. To do so reveals the kinds of calculations an abortionist was compelled to make in the illegal era and the kinds of pressures that shaped her professional life. It also reveals the kind of danger that conditioned Ruth’s private life in those days. It was not the same danger that stalked and nearly killed Diane McDermott or that threatened Laura Miner. But the act of altering one’s life story suggests anxiety and fear. The extent to which Ruth could not tell the truth about her life, even though the point of the autobiography she wrote was to expose the abortionist as a good woman, tells us something of the forces that broke her control over her life in those days and beyond. To paraphrase Carolyn Heilbrun, in the fall of 1940, Ruth Barnett was trapped in a script that she didn’t write and could never write about, and that begins to describe her danger.
In the early 1930s the abortionist had plied her trade in the context of the Depression. The traffic flowing through Ruth Barnett’s office reflected the length of the unemployment line, the lines at the soup kitchen, the crowd at the Salvation Army. But by 1940, things were changing. Portland was creeping out of the Depression as the country began to prepare for war. Within a few years, over two hundred thousand youthful migrants would arrive to take jobs in the war industry there, a demographic event that would boost Ruth’s practice enormously in years to come. In 1940, the locals themselves, still disproportionately middle-aged, were feeling the economy warm up. The Commercial Iron Company got the city’s first federal contract for shipbuilding that year, and Alcoa opened a reduction plant to produce aluminum ingots in Vancouver, just across the Willamette River from Portland. Every week things looked better, and more growth was expected. In a hopeful climate—even with the clouds of war forming on the horizon—many women who found themselves unexpectedly pregnant were not as beset by fear and desperation as they would have been a few years earlier when money was so scarce. The men were going back to work, and women had not yet become the welders and riveters they would become soon. For the moment, Portland felt almost flush, as if the best of the prosperous 1920s were coming back home. But by 1940 the conditions of home life had changed in one way, at least, that had direct implications for Ruth’s business.
In the late 1930s, conjugal life in Portland (and elsewhere) began to feel the influence of Margaret Sanger’s national birth control campaign. It had been twenty-four years since the crusader for contraception had come to Portland, and now few people remembered how she had been locked up for distributing birth control literature. Linda Gordon has described the changes of the late 1930s in this way: “Judges, doctors, government administrators, and pharmaceutical houses entering the contraceptive business were all persuaded by an enormous change not only in public opinion but in public demand for birth control.” A poll commissioned by the Ladies’ Home Journal at this time reported that seventy-nine percent of its readers approved of birth control, and over the course of the thirties, the National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control claimed that it had grown from one thousand backers in 1931 to twelve million in 1937. Under this kind of pressure, the American Medical Association at last endorsed “artificial contraception” in the late thirties, and a landmark federal court decision poked holes in the old Comstock Law of 1873 that had defined contraceptive information and materials as obscene. Like many new converts to the birth control cause in the waning years of the Depression, the court expressed its interest in contraception as a “healthy alternative to the national epidemic of illegal abortions” that had been performed during the decade of economic dislocation. It can be argued that these years marked, in fact, the first surge of both mass and elite support for contraception.
This is not to say, of course, that any woman in Portland or anywhere else who wanted to use birth control in the late thirties or early forties could get her hands on the information or materials she sought. Even the women who could afford to pay private physicians in those years had a hard time finding doctors willing to provide them with contraception, yet many did. For the first time, hundreds of married women in Portland, some of them the patients of Dr. Jessie Laird Brodie, a tireless advocate for the cause, now had a choice beyond the old alternatives of an unplanned, problematic pregnancy or a trip to the Broadway Building downtown.
A Portland labor organizer active in the Federation of Woodworkers in the late thirties knew that working women in that city were ready to think about contraception and to do what was necessary to get it for themselves. Julia Ruuttila remembered that during a lockout, the women’s auxiliary of the Federation tried to raise money for layettes because, as she put it, “the people that were locked out had no money to buy clothes for babies.” But the women rapidly moved beyond that strategy. “We got the idea,” she said, “that we should have someone come and speak to our auxiliary meetings on birth control because it was no time to be bringing any more children into the world when we couldn’t even feed the ones that we had. I had heard that Dr. Lena Kenin was interested in birth control. So I went to see her and she agreed to come and speak at a meeting on different methods of birth control, something that most of our members knew absolutely nothing about. It was the largest meeting that we ever had. We advertised it in all areas where the workers lived. It was just absolutely jammed.
“Well, she advocated the use of diaphragms to be used with some kind of antiseptic cream; however, they had to be fitted. So she volunteered her services. I think she agreed to fit diaphragms to a large number of women, maybe twenty. But we realized to get all of our people covered and to get those diaphragms bought, we were going to have to get other doctors interested. So we sent a committee up to the medical school. What a fight that was! The head of the medical school was a Catholic. Well, we had a sit down up there. That’s right! So they finally agreed to fit the diaphragms. We had a tussle with the welfare to make them buy the diaphragms, but we won that one too.”
Julia Ruuttila’s report is strong evidence that women in Portland were prepared to fight for alternatives to unhappy pregnancy and abortion at the end of the thirties, and that, to an unprecedented extent, it was possible to succeed. At least to some degree, the diminished traffic in Ruth Barnett’s office reflected these events and also the demographic and economic shifts in Portland. On the one hand, by 1938 the birthrate there and elsewhere had bounced back to its pre-Depression level, suggesting that women were feeling a new willingness and ability to augment their families. On the other hand, the new birth control option was affecting the number of abortion clients. The abortion business in 1940 was not what it had been just a few years earlier during the Depression, or what it would soon become under wartime conditions. Moreover, while the number of respectable illegal practitioners in Portland was smaller just before the war than it had been, and despite the retirement of Dr. Van Alstyne and the departure of Dr. Watts, Ruth still had a formidable senior colleague in the Broadway Building with whom she shared the trade.
Ever since Ruth came to work for Dr. Watts in 1929, she’d known Ed Stewart as a fellow practitioner, and she held him in awe. In her opinion, Stewart’s reputation was flawless and his office was “the most famous clinic of its kind in the Pacific Northwest, if not anywhere.” According to Ruth, Stewart brought distinction to the profession they shared. At the end of her life, she saved some of her highest praise for this man, whom she considered a very classy gentleman. She said, “He came from one of Oregon’s pioneer families and for years remained a brilliant surgeon. He was a cultured man without pretensions. A connoisseur of art, he kept his impressive collections of paintings both in his clinic and his home. He spent a great deal of money on worthy causes, including sizable grants he made on an anonymous basis to colleges and medical schools. Like the hero in “Magnificent Obsession,” he made these gifts under pledge of absolute secrecy. He was a very generous man.”
What Ruth did not reveal about Dr. Stewart then or ever was that, since 1934 at least, Ed Stewart had a close relationship with Reg Rankin and was more than once in on the entrepreneur’s deals as a silent partner. Stewart was not a man whom Rankin could hector or move around like a pawn on a chessboard, as he did the other abortion doctors he collected in the thirties. Stewart was more dignified and more successful than the others, but not too refined, it turned out, to make deals with Rankin. Unlike most of Rankin’s associates, Stewart knew how to stay in the background, to keep his name off the contracts Rankin was fond of drawing up, and he usually knew how to stay out of the way when things got hot. Yet the evidence shows that he was deeply involved in 1934 and 1935 in a number of aspects of the syndicate.
Early on, Rankin believed he could count on Stewart to participate in underwriting the capitalization of the Medical Acceptance Corporation, the credit business that Rankin hoped would replace the traditional practice of accepting engagement rings and fraternity pins from desperate women as collateral payment for abortions. In the summer of 1935, Rankin told Paul De Gaston that it was time to start such an operation, and he began to plot his strategy. First, he said, “I am going to call Dr. Stewart to see how much cash he can invest in it, and if I can get five or ten thousand dollars from each doctor, I will have something to start with.” Then, De Gaston remembered, Rankin picked up the phone and called Ed Stewart in Portland, and the two men worked out the details.
That same summer and into the fall, Rankin sent De Gaston to Portland to Stewart’s office a number of times. According to De Gaston, he was sent there to “show Dr. Stewart our method of abortion, this local anesthetic and also this sucker, how to use that.” Of course, by this time Ruth was a master of the method herself and occupied an office in the same building as Stewart. If Stewart merely had wanted to learn the aspiration method devised by his old colleague Watts, it is likely that Ruth would have been honored to teach him. But Stewart was, by this time, in business with Rankin, and Rankin generally insisted on using doctors, even when that meant an unlicensed doctor recently involved in a murder trial, as in the case of De Gaston.
In addition, Rankin and Stewart travelled together several times to Seattle and California in those years, and extended their partnership beyond the abortion business by investing together in a ranch in eastern Oregon. De Gaston had a role in this part of the relationship, as well. He said, “I would have, from time to time, to go to Portland and relieve Dr. Stewart while Mr. Rankin and he were away together on trips.”
When Rankin’s clinics were raided in 1936, the authorities in California were well aware that the syndicate had offices all the way up the coast in Portland and Seattle. They were well aware of the nature of Dr. Stewart’s practice, the location of his office, and his connection to Rankin. Yet they and the Portland police left him alone. At that time and for the next fifteen years, the authorities in Portland cracked down on many kinds of criminal activities, but displayed a willingness to recognize abortion practitioners as “needed necessities,” particularly if they appeared content to pursue their specialty quietly and with care.
However Rankin’s arrest and imprisonment may have personally affected Ed Stewart, it did not turn the doctor against the entrepreneur, or make him wary of participating in future schemes with the man. In fact, as soon as Rankin was released from jail and engaged in the task of assembling his old cohorts for the purpose of setting up a clinic in Reno, Dr. Stewart was right there with him. The Rankin-Stewart partnership was the key factor in Ruth Barnett’s removal from Portland to Reno.
The two men made the calculation that Ruth would be a more valuable asset in Reno, and so they sent her there. Business was off in the Broadway Building, and Rankin was desperate for an abortionist in Nevada. Stewart, holding an investment in both locations, could see that Ruth in Reno would be a solution to both problems.
Rankin had plenty of experience putting the screws on people, getting them to move when he said so, and where. He had reason to question whether he could strong-arm Ruth Barnett, but with Stewart’s help, Rankin thought the odds were better than even that she could be moved. Maggie, Ruth’s daughter, has a recollection that Ruth and Rankin became lovers that year. She also remembers that when Ruth left for Reno, she sent ahead her beautiful things—the oriental carpets from her office and the settees, oil paintings, and Chinese urns. She meant to stay for some time.
On the 14th of October, 1940, Ruth Barnett and Reg Rankin arrived together in Reno. Along with her finery, Ruth brought her medical instruments and the books of her trade, volumes she’d acquired during her studies for the naturopathy license in the early thirties and that she always kept nearby. One was a tome entitled Minor Surgery and another was the third edition of Preventative Medicine.
Warren Campbell, a contractor Rankin hired to refurbish the premises, was waiting for the couple in the Lyons Building. As soon as Ruth and Rankin arrived, Campbell pointed out some large boxes stacked in the corner of the suite’s front room. The boxes had arrived over the past couple of days from Bishoff’s of Oakland, California, a surgical supply company. They held a full set of equipment to outfit the sort of abortion clinic that Dr. Watts had taught Rankin to invest in: a Van Burdick aspirator, some rubber tubing, an irrigator and a pail, some operating tables, cabinets, and a sterilizer, all shipped from Oakland to Reno via the Oregon-Nevada-California Fast Freight Company. As Rankin opened the cartons, Ruth ticked off their contents. She was familiar with every item, not only because the pieces duplicated the contents of her office back home, but also because she herself had purchased this set in Oakland the month before.
Ever since he and Ruth had met with Cushing and St. John at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on August 19th, Rankin had been clear about what he wanted from her. He wanted her to take charge of everything—medical equipment, decor, recruitment, and abortions. There was, however, one gray area. Despite the fact that, by this time, Rankin knew that St. John’s licensing situation in Nevada was hopeless, he let Ruth come to Reno under the impression that Valentine St. John was still in the picture. So when she arrived in Reno, she believed that it was only a matter of time before the doctor received his license in that state. Her understanding was that when St. John was properly credentialed in Nevada, he would be nominally in charge of the clinic, and Rankin had assured Ruth that there would be plenty of work for both practitioners. Ruth was used to working under these conditions. And she was satisfied that, under the circumstances, it was in everyone’s interest to have a medical man on the scene.
The rest of October was taken up with getting the clinic ready for business. J.C. Perry, Rankin’s former brother-in-law, the man who had had a part in running the Medical Assistance Corporation in L.A. back in 1935 and 1936, lived near Reno now, and Rankin gave him the job of taking Ruth around to buy the accoutrements still required to complete the office. By the first of November, Ruth was itchy to open for business. Everything was ready, but still St. John did not have a license. Ruth was not pleased that in this strange city where she knew no one but Rankin, there was no titular doctor to lend his protection to her work. At this point, Ruth complained to Rankin. She threatened to pack up her carpets and go back to Portland if things didn’t get moving soon.
Rankin was loathe to lose the only abortionist he had at the time, so the next day, he, his son (a young man in his twenties), and Dr. St. John took a trip to Las Vegas to find a doctor. They were looking for a certain old man who drank too much and didn’t have many patients anymore, but had, at one time, worked as a surgeon in the same hospital as St. John in Los Angeles. What made this man, Z.A. D’Amours, worth a trip to Las Vegas was that he possessed a Nevada medical license. St. John promised Rankin that D’Amours was just the man they needed.
When Rankin, his son, and St. John arrived in Las Vegas, they had some trouble at first locating D’Amours. Fortunately for them, before too long they chose the right stranger to ask, an attorney named Fred Alward who was standing in front of the Clark Building downtown. They asked him if he knew old Dr. D’Amours, and indeed, Mr. Alward had known the doctor well for ten years, and knew where his office was. The lawyer told the trio he would arrange a meeting at the Boulder Drugstore that evening. When Alward went to the doctor’s office to tell him he had visitors in town, however, he found the old man sleeping off a heavy evening of drinking. So at the appointed time, Alward met the men at the drugstore and told them, as he remembered later, that he “didn’t think that the doctor could very well see them that evening, that he was having a little drinking celebration, but that they could see him the next morning when he was sober.”
When Dr. D’Amours sobered up, he was glad to meet the visitors in the drugstore. He was fond of Dr. Valentine St. John, and he was in the kind of straits where unexpected callers bearing a business proposition were welcome. As Dr. St. John well knew, Dr. D’Amours was a guileless old man. It never occurred to D’Amours that there was anything untoward about the proposition that his friend from California and the other two gentlemen made him. No one mentioned the word abortion, and as far as D’Amours knew, Dr. St. John was a good man. Sometime later he described their common history with affection: “I was resident surgeon in the French Hospital in Los Angeles. He was a surgeon there, too, a very fine surgeon. I really did appreciate him, especially after he operated so well on my little daughter’s foot. Then I really learned to like him. In fact, I never knew anything bad about this man.”
The fact was, Dr. D’Amours had been waiting for something good to come along for some time. He was not disposed to scrutinize what the men told him about their intention to open a reputable “medico-surgical clinic” in Reno. St. John was one of many old friends and colleagues D’Amours had written to that fall, hoping one of them could give him a hand. As he put it, “I wrote that I wasn’t doing well in Las Vegas, and now St. John came along and said he could get me a collaboration. I told him I had no money to make a change, but Dr. St. John said not to worry, that they would help me if I could go right and be myself.”
Rankin and St. John left D’Amours that day with the notion that at last his life had turned the golden corner. They said he should wait and as soon as the clinic was ready, they would send for him. In the meantime, they said, they would leave him provided for. Indeed, before the trip back to Reno, Rankin stopped in at the Boulder Drugstore and made arrangements for the old man. Frank Crookston, the pharmacist in charge, remembered the transaction. “I seen Mr. Rankin on that Monday morning, I think it was. He came in the store and said he was about to leave town, and they wanted to leave some money with me for Dr. D’Amours, and I said, ‘Well, allright.’ Mr. Rankin told the young gentleman that he was with to write a check for fifty dollars and then he asked me if I would give it to Dr. D’Amours in small payments. He didn’t think it would be advisable that he get the whole fifty dollars at one time. I wrote a receipt for the check to the gentleman and that was the last I knew.”
That same day, while Rankin and St. John were recruiting old Dr. D’Amours, Ruth Barnett engaged the superintendent of the Lyons Building in Reno to paint “Nevada Clinical Group/ Z.A. D’Amours, M.D.” on the door of Room 307, the main entrance to the abortion clinic. She put in the work order that morning because St. John had assured her that the trip to Las Vegas would yield them the “titular head” they needed. He said there was no need to wait. For the next several weeks over in Las Vegas, and then down in Los Angeles, D’Amours waited to hear from his old friend St. John about when he was to come to Reno and take up his new duties.
Rankin and the others came back from Las Vegas on November 3rd and assured Ruth again that everything was set. Consequently, Ruth began to take abortion patients. Since the clinic was new in town and neither she nor Rankin had ties to doctors who could refer patients their way, the traffic was slow. Day by day, however, word was getting around, from matron to matron, from shopgirl to shopgirl, to the prostitutes and to the women in town waiting out their divorces, that an abortion clinic had opened for business.
One woman who heard about the clinic was Claudia MacDonald, a nurse at the Washoe General Hospital in Reno. Claudia was deeply relieved when another nurse at the hospital told her about the office in the Lyons Building. The other nurse said her sister had gotten rid of a pregnancy there just after the first of November, and everything had been fine. The place had been clean and quite professional, she said. Claudia was relieved because on October 5th, the day her period was due, she had not bled.
When her period did not come on the fifth, or then on the sixth or seventh of October, the nurse was thoroughly distressed because, she said later, the facts of her life could not accommodate a pregnancy. To begin with, she was nearly forty, and she had a daughter in high school. Also, she had a second husband, a disabled man who earned almost nothing. All three of them—her daughter, her husband, and herself—depended on Claudia’s nursing work to keep a roof over their heads. Claudia put it very simply, “I couldn’t afford to have a baby, no way.”
On October 10th, Claudia went to see Dr. Henry James Valenta, a physician attached to the general hospital where she worked. She hoped the doctor would be able to tell her some reason why her period hadn’t come, a reason other than pregnancy, although she was doubtful. By this time, Claudia had been working as a nurse for seventeen or eighteen years, and she knew full well that usually when a woman missed her period, that’s all there was to it, she was pregnant.
The appointment on the tenth, though, did soothe her somewhat. Dr. Valenta was a kind man and he understood her concern. The way he remembered this visit was that Claudia came into his office near tears, and she had a very bad cold. “I decided,” he said, “most likely a physical examination at that time would not determine a pregnancy, being too early. I told her not to worry. Most likely, I told her, due to her bad cold she would be delayed.”
Claudia went home repeating the doctor’s words in her mind, but she said nothing to her husband or her daughter. For the rest of October, as her cold dried up, and then into November, as she began to feel nauseous, she kept her misery to herself. On November 10th, she went back to Dr. Valenta. This time the doctor did a bi-manual exam. He determined that Claudia was pregnant, eight to ten weeks along.
Dr. Valenta was uneasy as he watched the nurse put her clothes back on and leave his office. He saw that she did not try to hide the fact that she thought the pregnancy was tragic. The doctor had seen that look on the face of many a woman, and he figured that this one, being a nurse, would not shrink from doing what she felt needed to be done. He noted that she hadn’t said a word, she hadn’t begged him for a name, but the doctor could tell from experience what she would do.
Indeed, Dr. Valenta could read the face of a determined woman. Two days after her pregnancy was confirmed, Claudia went to the Lyons Building on her lunch hour. She said, “I went over there on the twelfth, to try to contact a Dr. St. John, and the elevator girl went to the door and told me it was locked. But she said there was a note tacked up on the door to call Ruth Barnett at the Riverside Hotel for an appointment.” Claudia tried to reach Ruth that afternoon from the hospital, but the switchboard operator at the Riverside said she was out for the day. The next day, November 13th, Claudia again took her lunch hour to go to the Lyons Building. The note was still on the door, and again, Claudia called the hotel when she got back to work. This time she left a message. She said that Mrs. Barnett could return her call when she came back, and Claudia gave the operator her extension at the hospital.
The night of the thirteenth was not a restful one for Claudia. Mostly she calculated, over and over, how many weeks pregnant she could be. She spent the night trying to squeeze the weeks down and compress the size of the fetus inside her, to make it smaller and smaller. When she was closest to sleep, she could see it vanish. But when she was most alert, she worried about who the woman was who had left the note on the door, about where the more comforting-sounding Dr. St. John had gone, and about whether this Ruth Barnett at the Riverside Hotel knew when he was coming back. If she were ten weeks along, and Dr. Valenta had said she might be that far, then she did not have much more time to hunt these people down.
On November 14th, Claudia went to work in a daze. She had not been there long when a call for her came in to the nurse’s station. Ruth Barnett was on the line. Their brief exchange stayed with Claudia. “I told her I would like to see her. She made an appointment for me to come over to the Lyons Building 307 at quarter after twelve that day. I told her that would be convenient because it was when I took my lunch hour.”
Claudia went for the third time to the Lyons Building that day, and Ruth Barnett let her into the clinic. The nurse was still hoping for Dr. St. John, but inside the office there was no suggestion that anyone but the woman was available to help her. At least, Claudia thought, she seemed like a solid sort. To her medically trained senses, the furnishings and equipment looked professional and the scent of the place was fresh. So Claudia relaxed the slightest bit, and as she put it in her professional parlance, she “began to find out the terms under which an operation would be performed.”
First she asked how much the operation would cost. Ruth, who had been through this negotiation countless times before, was easy with her client, and straightforward. Claudia remembered, “She told me it would be fifty dollars for two months and seventy-five for three, and seeing I was a nurse, she would do it for fifty dollars. I told her I would have to go out and get the money, and she said she would wait until I returned.” The reader must imagine where a nurse with no cash reserves and a dependent family who did not share her secret might find the sum of fifty dollars in the middle of a Friday afternoon. But a determined woman could do such a thing. At 2:00, Claudia came back to the Lyons Building with the fifty dollars in her pocketbook.
Ruth took the money from her, and Claudia watched as the abortionist made a note in a small black book with gold letters spelling out National Date Book on its spine. Then, according to the nurse, “Mrs. Barnett took me into another room and told me she wanted me to undress and put on a gown and lie down for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then she brought me a Nembutal capsule. After I got into the bed there, she brought me a movie magazine to look at, and I did look at it. After about twenty minutes, Mrs. Barnett told me to come into the surgery and get on the table. Then she proceeded to give me the local anesthetic and do the curetting.”
So far, Claudia was comfortable with the abortionist because Ruth seemed comfortable with her work. Claudia could tell, because Ruth chatted with her about the abortion business as she completed the procedure. “She said she preferred to give locals so that her patients could be aware, and then we discussed the office, how nicely it was furnished, and she said they had offices like this one in Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, too. At the finish of the operation, Mrs. Barnett said that should I have any trouble at all to come back to her and that she would take care of that with no additional charge.”
The remainder of Claudia’s stay in Room 307 seemed routine at the time. She climbed down off the operating table and went back to the bed she had occupied before. Now she rested for fifteen minutes or so, with a heating pad on her abdomen. She flipped through the movie magazine some more. Then, as she put it, “I got up and dressed and called a cab and went to work.”
After that, things did not seem routine to Claudia again for some time. “On Friday night I couldn’t sleep. I was having chills and fever. Saturday I went to work as usual, but I had to go off duty and I laid down there for a time and the supervisor called Dr. Valenta to take me home. I stayed in bed all day Sunday. Sunday night I was sick and I became scared and called Dr. Valenta.” On Saturday, Claudia had told the doctor when he drove her home about her trip to the Lyons Building. He had looked at her sadly but had not chastised her, so now she felt it was safe to turn to him again. Besides, she had no choice. She knew that she was very ill.
Dr. Valenta did not hesitate when he heard Caludia’s voice on the phone. She sounded weak and scared. He hurried to her home on Wells Street and found that Claudia MacDonald was very sick indeed. “She had a temperature of 104.6, a rapid pulse. She was quite acutely ill. I did an external manual examination on her since I knew what had happened, and found her quite tender over the lower abdomen. I told Mrs. MacDonald she had better come to the hospital. She tried to refuse, saying that the gossip around the hospital would fire her from her position, but I told her it was a case of either going to the hospital or possible death staying home.”
The doctor further recalled, “I took her to the hospital and got in touch with Dr. Rodney Wyman, chief of staff at the Washoe General Hospital. It is imperative that to do a curettement on any type of abortion, criminal or accidental or natural, I had to call the chief of staff to okay my procedure.” Rodney Wyman sanctioned the curettement. He told Dr. Valenta, “Go ahead, it’s the safest thing to clear her out.” He also cautioned the doctor to be extremely gentle and to pack Mrs. MacDonald lightly afterwards.
With permission granted, Dr. Valenta began the procedure. He saw to it that Claudia MacDonald was prepped and sedated. Then, as he described it, “I caught the upper portion of the cervix to pull it out. With a sound which passed freely to approximately four to four-and-one-half inches, I tested the distance between the superior pole of the uterus and the terminal part of the cervix. A Hagar dilator dipped in Merthiolate to dilate the cervix—the usual procedure—wasn’t necessary in this case because it was quite well dilated already. After that, I proceeded with my curettement.”
There was no question in Dr. Valenta’s mind that Claudia was suffering from a septic, infected abortion. If he had had doubts before, the condition of the woman’s cervix would have been definitive proof. By this time, too, he had the name and location of the abortionist whose services had gotten his patient into this fix.
Claudia MacDonald recovered from the raging infection she’d contracted, though her condition was touch-and-go for awhile. On the face of it, Claudia’s ordeal seems to bear out the truth of the popular idea that lay practitioners like Ruth were dangerous back-alley butchers, women who were not doctors but who plied their trade cravenly and inexpertly for money. But the preserved remains of a criminal life are almost always evidence of failure. The underground abortionist could not keep and so did not leave, a record of the thousands of clean procedures she completed. Ruth Barnett, like the scores of illegal practitioners who were her unacknowledged colleagues in those years, was sometimes defined by the rare errors that sent her patients to the hospital.
Nowadays, it is even more tempting to equate a woman like Ruth with the dark ages of coat hanger-wielding charlatans. The equation serves the cause, of course, of legalized abortion, and at the same time demonstrates that a person without a medical degree had no business doing an abortion. Yet, between 1918 when Ruth Barnett began in the abortion business and 1940, twenty-two years and thousands of abortions later, there were no recorded errors. And again after 1940, there were none for many years.
In the 1940s a botched abortion was, in a sense, not so much a problem of the back alley as it was typical of the risk run by all practitioners, legitimate and illegitimate, who performed surgery before the advent of antibiotics. The history of medicine, after all, is littered with cases of post-operative septicemia. Halbert Dunn, an expert on this issue at the time, estimated that the number of deaths in the United States from abortion—illegal and “therapeutic”—in 1940 was between three and four thousand. Some years later, a study of abortion-related deaths in New York City showed that after the year 1940, the annual number of such deaths declined dramatically because of the introduction of antibiotics. For example, in 1931, a hundred and forty women died as the result of abortions; by 1941, the number had declined to forty-eight, and ten years later, to fifteen.
Where the back alley did play a role was in preventing the practitioner from routinely providing an antiseptic environment for abortions. By 1940, hospitals were performing surgery under good antiseptic conditions, but the professional outlaw abortionist, no matter how skilled, did not have the resources to match the typical municipal general hospital. An article in the Saturday Evening Post pointed out that “even a competent surgeon [operating outside of a hospital] without sterilizing equipment, oxygen, plasma, nurses or anesthetist can easily lose a patient.” It is noteworthy in this regard that Ruth herself was frustrated over her inability to stock her new office in Reno with the all the supplies that she was used to having in Portland. Early in November, she wrote home asking friends to purchase and send her some basic antiseptic preparations that she simply could not get her hands on in Reno.
The fact that Claudia MacDonald landed in the hospital meant that Ruth Barnett would probably be arrested. Indeed, it was not long after Claudia’s fever dropped back down to normal that she had law enforcement visitors in her room at Washoe General Hospital. By this time, of course, the nurse’s cover had been blown; her colleagues had informed each other up and down the hospital corridors, as she had known they would, what was the matter with Claudia.
The policemen who visited Claudia on the morning of November 19th at 11:30 also paid a call on Dr. Valenta, and by the time they left the hospital, their investigation was virtually complete. They had the name of the perpetrator and her address, and a posse was formed to bring in the abortionist. It included John Parks, the chief criminal deputy sheriff of Washoe County, a man named Driscoll who was also a deputy sheriff, and Ernest Brown, the district attorney. The men proceeded to the Lyons Building, third floor, arriving there before noon. It was a classic encounter between an illegal abortionist and the law: Ruth tried to hide the evidence, but she didn’t have a chance.
John Parks remembered Ruth coming into the reception area of Suite 307 to greet her callers. She was wearing what he called a nurse’s smock or apron. He said, “She was dressed in the fashion of a nurse, I would say.” Judging from what Ruth said to the gentlemen, this was her intention—to look like a nurse, like somebody’s helper, not like the person in charge. Parks recalled the encounter. “We asked Mrs. Barnett who ran the place. She said she was taking care of it for some doctor. We asked her who, and she said Dr. D’Amours. She said that her part was to stay there and mind the place while the other offices were being fixed up. We asked her where Dr. D’Amours was, and she said she didn’t know. She said she’d never met the doctor, in fact. So she said at the time. We asked if she’d mind if we looked around the premises. She said no, so we looked into all the different rooms, noticed what was going on, what it looked like.” Specifically, they noted the beds and the operating tables fitted with stirrups, the sinks fitted with suction hoses.
Parks went on, “She wanted to know what we were there for and we told her the truth: we were making an investigation of an abortion that had been reported to the law, and she denied everything. They always do. Then we immediately asked her if she would go with us to the hospital so that the young lady in question could confront her. Mrs. Barnett said okay, and she asked if she could be excused for a minute to put on her coat. Well, we excused her, and she locked the door leading to her main office. I gather she locked the rest of the doors, too. It took her considerable time, longer than it would for a person to put on their coat. Then she did go with us to the hospital. In Mrs. MacDonald’s room, the young lady took one look at Mrs. Barnett and said, ‘That’s her.’ ”
After that, the D.A. took Ruth Barnett down to the police station and booked her while the other men went back to the Lyons Building and conducted a search. They found the abortionist’s medical books, a carton labelled “Dr. Valentine St. John, 307 Lyons Building, Reno, Nevada,” with the return address “C.A. Bishoff Co., 1618 Franklin St., Oakland, California,” and a bill of sale for medical equipment. They found some bottles containing what the deputy sheriff referred to as “poison pills” and some bottles containing hydrochloride, also several prescription pads and Ruth’s appointment book in which Claudia MacDonald’s name was neatly inscribed. In addition, they found an incriminating letter Ruth had written to her associates in Portland several weeks before but had never mailed.
The letter had been hidden inside a nurse’s smock and folded among a stack of freshly laundered linens. It made reference to the many patients Ruth expected to see at the Lyons Building, to “ ‘R’ who called last night from Las Vegas,” and indicated that “he has finally got stuff moving.” It referred to Ruth’s daughter Maggie in San Francisco, who was at the time employed as an abortion recruiter based in the office of Dr. Stuck, the Oakland practitioner long associated with Reg Rankin. The letter ended wistfully. “Sure is going to feel funny,” Ruth wrote home, “on my birthday and Thanksgiving, to be so far away, but it can’t be helped. Hope business there is better.”
Most damning, the police found Ruth’s surgical bag. It had been tucked under a blanket and a pillow on the very bed where Claudia MacDonald had rested with a movie magazine five days before. The deputy sheriff observed laconically about the bag, “I’d say it was hidden.”
At this point, with the case against the abortionist all but sewn up, the sheriff of Washoe County, Mr. Ray Root, got involved. He called a formidable group of five law enforcement officials to the D.A.’s office and brought Ruth Barnett in to face the men and provide them with a confession. Later Root referred to the meeting as “quite a conversation.” Ruth admitted everything, and under the prodding of the authorities she went further than that. As Root put it, “She mentioned a lot of individuals who went in this thing with her. Mr. Rankin and Mr. Cushing. She named Dr. St. John. She mentioned Dr. Stewart. She mentioned Dr. Stuck in Oakland. In other words, she involved more or less all of them.”
Ruth sat with the district attorney and his colleagues on November 20, 1940, and spilled the beans. It was true, she said, she had performed the abortion on Claudia MacDonald that nearly killed the woman. There was no percentage in trying to deny it now, because they had the goods on her. But privately, Ruth was scared and angry. Rankin and Dr. Stewart had put the screws on her to come to Reno, and when she did, nothing was ready. Rankin had promised a doctor, but there was none. There was barely a clientele, and the clinic was still under construction. Clearly, no one had bothered to make friends with the law. It was obvious that the D.A. was taking a serious attitude toward the MacDonald abortion. She could tell that he was about to see to it that she went to jail.
But Ruth was determined not to go down alone, or at all, if she could manage it. So she named names, and in the end, seven members of Rankin’s new Nevada syndicate, including Ruth, were charged with conspiracy to commit what the newspapers in Reno, L.A., and nearly everywhere else mysteriously referred to in those days as “an illegal operation.”
Over the next couple of weeks, the defendants were pulled in. Rankin and Cushing had scattered to points in northern California; hapless old Dr. D’Amours, still waiting for the medico-surgical clinic to open, had gone to L.A., where he was apprehended. Dr. Stewart was brought down from Portland. Valentine St. John had simply vanished. Clearly he’d had his fill of abortion trials back in 1936.
When the Reno trial began late in 1940, Ruth sat in the courtroom with her co-defendants, took the stand, and then, in the middle of her testimony, she turned state’s evidence. Ernest Brown, the district attorney, made a motion to dismiss all charges against her, and at the end of the trial, only Rankin and his assistant, Paul Cushing, were convicted of conspiracy, largely on the evidence Ruth provided. Dr. Stewart, Dr. D’Amours, and Mr. Perry were exonerated; Dr. St. John was never apprehended.
For Ruth the matter boiled down to this: she had to tell the truth to save herself, even though it meant violating her personal creed, a creed that demanded silent loyalty to colleagues. To name the names of the men who had gotten her into this fix was low but understandable in her book, but to turn state’s evidence was a complicated and shameful matter for the abortionist.
After the trial was over, Ruth did not hang around in Reno. As Maggie put it many years later, “She got back to Oregon as fast as her little woofies could take her.” But it turned out that the trip back wasn’t as easy as all that. Ruth brought her shame home with her, and for many years, as she wrote and rewrote the story of her life—which was always constructed as the perfect expression of her principles—she had to lie about her dealings with Rankin in 1940. In a reversal of her behavior in Reno, she was ever after compelled to deny the truth.
Ruth’s sense of integrity was built on more than a commitment to loyalty, although that was always important. Beyond loyalty, in fact, were a number of other convictions, all of them compromised by Reno. Ruth’s story of her life, the story she wrote and told to her family and to strangers, and that she carried in her heart, was first of all about the abortionist as a good, moral, independent woman. It was even about a woman who grew more moral because of her work, and as she grew in this direction, she never wavered. Maggie once observed in this regard, “Let me tell you what influences you in the abortion business. When you listen to the stories, when you listen day after day to the stories these women have to tell, and you become so involved and so sympathetic to their situations, it makes a person out of you. In a funny, offbeat sort of way, it gives a person tremendous strength to be able to do something about all that trouble.”
The way Ruth told the story, being an abortionist was about being good and moral, and about figuring out what was right in her own terms, and on her own. It was about having the personal resources to be truly independent. It was decidedly not about the life of a woman moved around at the will of men who used her, making her do their bidding, employing her.
Ruth once said, “I have heard a number of physicians say that no one can perform as many abortions as I have done without losing a patient. They talk about the dangers of rupturing or perforating a womb and the ever-present danger of hemorrhage. These doctors,” she went on, “whose knowledge of abortion techniques is minuscule at best, are talking through their hats. In all the abortions I have done—maybe 40,000—I never lost a single patient.” These facts were central, really crucial, to Ruth’s identity. It was only okay to be an abortionist if one were crackerjack, up-to-date, virtually infallible. She defined the other sort, the “alcoholic doctor and the untutored butcher,” as her opposite. Yet there she was in Reno, botching the works as an untutored butcher might do. That was shameful and had to be hidden. That had to be written out of her life.
In the story that she wrote of her life, moreover, this paragon of women and of abortion surgeons was protected by forces stronger even than her own integrity and skill. She was protected by the community that needed her and by the police who recognized that her worth outweighed her criminality. But in Reno, no one had come to her defense or recognized her worth. There she was no better than a back-alley woman with no right to her métier. They said she was dangerous and dirty and unskilled, and no one in town but her co-defendants knew otherwise. This was a public degradation too hard to live through once, and so Ruth determined she would never live through it again.
Instead, Ruth’s version of her life would be filled only with evidence that the abortionist was above all and always a woman of principle. To admit to an old association with a man like Rankin would cast the shadows of opportunism, greed, and criminality across her life, and that was something Ruth would not have. Rankin and the law together had forced her into an arena where those motivations prevailed, but she spent the rest of her life denying that she had ever had anything to do with low motives or scum. In the official life story, any arrest reflected opportunism on the other side. Ruth’s arrests in the 1950s and 60s were the work, she said, of “the young, politically ambitious district attorneys who hound the abortionist” when it suits their political needs. A criminal of conscience could argue no less.
More than fifty years later, Maggie, who knew the complexities of her mother’s life better than anyone else, remembered the Reno episode with clarity. Nearly eighty when she summoned up the details of those weeks Ruth spent in Nevada, Maggie acknowledged that her mother had not told the truth about what happened there. The lie was one of many examples, Maggie felt, of Ruth’s compulsion to sugarcoat her life story, to deny the lowdown, raunchy parts. But the irony is that the version of Reno that Maggie knew was sanitized at its core, just as her mother wished it to be. In Maggie’s version, Ruth’s role in Reno was innocent; only the law was corrupt. Ruth told her daughter the only version of Reno she ever told anyone. It had the narrative elements the abortionist loved, and it was a lie. The fact was, Ruth was determined that not even Maggie should know the worst part of being an abortionist, and that meant no one could know.
This was the version Maggie knew: “Mother went to Reno to open an office for Rankin. She went to Reno and took all her gorgeous oriental carpets. But I don’t think she ever had a chance to operate on anyone there. The funny thing was that a girlfriend and I solicited business for their office. I was working out of Dr. Stuck’s office in Oakland, and my friend May and I would travel the road between Reno and Oakland and stop at all the druggists’ and leave our card for them to send their patients who were in trouble to Stuck or to the place in Reno. I don’t know if it worked. But I was in the office when they arrested everybody in the place, and they arrested me, too. It was the first time in my life that I was arrested for soliciting.
“Everything happened so fast, with the roundups, the arrests, the circle being closed. I went to jail. I gave them the name of Cohen [Maggie’s father’s name], not Barnett. I took my I.D. that said Margaret Barnett, and I was very busy quietly tearing it up and flushing it down the toilet, so I didn’t have any identification when they searched my purse. I never said I was her daughter.
“Ruth was in Reno getting arrested at the same time I was getting arrested. Mother just got out of that by the skin of her teeth. She got news of the big bust coming up there in Reno—she made friends with some of the high commissioners or something. They came and told her what was happening with Reg Rankin and the rest of them. They told her that the best thing she could do would be to get her butt out of there, and leave what she had. They said the only way they would let her go back to Portland scot-free was for her to turn over all her oriental carpets and leave all her beautiful things, five or six thousand dollars worth, and that much in cash payoffs, too. They let her back out of it that way. She just scooted back to Portland.
“But she always felt she shouldn’t have been there. She had bad vibes on it. The thing was, Rankin was a good talker, and they were flirtatous together. He was just a smart business con man. The whole experience did have an effect on her life to the day she died because any talk, any talk at all of a syndicate made mother gag.”