Abortionist, page 18
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.”
