Abortionist, page 27
One defense attorney was very clear on what the proceedings were about. His opening argument drew the battle lines of perversity. “The prosecutor is going to paint this girl here to be a Simon Pure girl and say that this woman [the abortionist] here is a terrible woman. I am sorry this little girl here got herself messed up, but it’s not the fault of my client. What did this girl do? She got herself in a desperate situation and Lord knows what these girls will testify to. She would have done anything to get rid of that fetus. The girl took sixteen ergot pills, day after day. Day after day she was taking hot baths, doing anything to get rid of that baby, and then she goes out looking for someone who is going to save her. It makes me angry how a girl like that gets up on the stand and wants to hurt somebody. Now,” he concluded, “do you think a girl like that is on the square?”
Sometimes these women on trial spoke out for themselves, or tried otherwise to defend themselves against the vicious attacks. Most often a woman was direct and honest and tried earnestly to get the court to understand that she was a good person. A forty-year-old mother of two who had been crudely described in court as a “divorced woman who during the month of December 1953 had intercourse on two occasions with some man not her husband” was heart-wrenchingly straightforward on the stand. “Well, I didn’t feel I was in a position to have a child. I was divorced and I had two children to take care of and I didn’t feel I could take care of another child. It was not a matter of not wanting the child. It was a matter of not being able to support it and take care of it.”
Other women were not so plaintive. But no matter how they tried to defend themselves, the gesture was swept aside or used against them in the abortion courtroom. In a 1948 trial in Sacramento, the defense attorney demonstrated a most effective way to discredit a woman who had tried, in her own way, to hold onto her dignity. The prosecutor should have “prevailed upon Mrs. Albert,” he said contemptuously, “to either remove the gum from her mouth or at least not to chew it with such gusto. For some reason this woman was most antagonistic toward me. As the old saying goes, if looks could have killed, I would have been stretched out on the floor of this courtroom like the proverbial block of ice. Mrs. Albert is hard-boiled, she is unfemale.”
At some point during the course of the trial, the defense attorney inevitably used still another strategy to discredit such women. He invited them to tell stories about the cruelty and coercion the police had used to get them into court. In another sort of case, in another cultural climate, stories like these might have created sympathy for the women; here they simply deepened the sense that a woman who got an abortion was sickeningly weak, vulnerable, open, and probably lying under pressure. The Woman’s Home Companion reported in 1955 that when the law tracked down an abortionist’s client, “in all probability the detectives will threaten to arrest her unless she tells who treated her,” despite the fact that an arrest was counter to abortion statutes. The women involved, however, were usually terrified and shamed when cops showed up at their homes or offices with photos showing them entering an abortionist’s office. They were not familiar with the letter of the law. And now in the courtroom, they were forced to relive the degradation of the police interrogation.
At Laura Miner’s trial in California, for example, Jackie Temple, who was shaking in the witness box, was grilled by the defense lawyer: “Did they tell you that they would drag your name through the mud in the newspapers unless you came here and testified?” Jackie whispered, “Yes. They said it would be a lot of unpleasant publicity for my little boy. They just kept hammering and beating questions at me and I had to answer them.” The lawyer did not take a chance that the jury missed the point of all this. He said, “They told her they would prosecute her if she didn’t come down and they would throw her into jail and take her little boy away.” Don’t forget all that, he insisted, when you evaluate this woman’s veracity.
Another woman who testified at Miner’s trial told how she had sought an abortion because, during the first weeks of her pregnancy, she had contracted German measles. She was aware that if she carried the pregnancy to term, the baby would likely be born deeply damaged. She told how a policewoman posing as the receptionist in Miner’s office suddenly grabbed her arm. Then, she said, “Two men rushed in and grabbed me by the other arm. And I was so scared. I tried to call my husband but they wouldn’t let me. They said they were taking me to the County Hospital for an examination. But they took me to the D.A.’s office. I was there about an hour, being hounded over all the questions.” Again, the defense attorney tried to show the jury that a woman who had been treated brutally was a female who could not be believed. She was, instead, a pitiful dame who was coughing up the story some legal tough wanted her to tell. In this case, the woman told an effective tale of the police coercion she’d endured in Laura Miner’s office. It was, she said, “a feeling like you see in the moving picture shows of two Nazi agents. I was being kidnapped, and I was completely paralyzed at the time.”
Sadly, it was not unusual for the prosecutrix to feel paralyzed when confronted by the police, by the typically aggressive defense lawyer, by the courtroom setting. A seventeen-year-old Oakland girl named Marlene, whose parents took her to Sacramento for an abortion in 1950, found herself being grilled several months later in court by her abortionist’s lawyer. The man was trying to establish, in the usual fashion, that the girl had implicated his client merely because she had been threatened with prosecution herself if she refused to do so. Here the defense lawyer began his job of reducing Marlene to the status of an unbelievable and pitiable fool by badgering her about her use of words like “erect,” which he implied a “good girl” would not know. He needled her about how she came to use such a highly technical term as “fetus” in her testimony (“Who fed you this word? Who have you been listening to?”). And then the lawyer hammered away at the role that shame played in bringing her, finally, into court. “You and your mother and father determined that your pregnancy would expose you and your family to a disgraceful situation, is that true? And you determined that you would quietly attempt to eliminate such a thing transpiring, is that so? You were cognizant of the embarrassment that it would bring upon you and your family? Your father was very concerned about it and wanted the condition eliminated and the family saved from disgrace? Likewise your mother? You were fully alert to the fact that it meant disgrace and embarrassment to you and your family, is that correct?” To each question, Marlene whispered, “Yes,” and by the end of the session, the lawyer felt quite sure he had made his rather odd case that a young girl and her family facing the disgrace of illegitimate pregnancy would do anything, including lie about his client, in an effort to protect themselves.
The defense lawyer’s perverse sensitivity to the shame that haunted a girl or woman who’d gone for an abortion hardly stopped him from pushing the shame into full-blown public humiliation if it would help to further discredit his client’s accuser. One surefire way to do this was publicly to shred a woman’s claim to sexual modesty and propriety. A popular tactic was to get the girl to admit that she had slept with a man not her husband, or that she was just plain promiscuous. In the trial of Ida Steadman, for example, the defense attorney’s trajectory was typical. “You have been pregnant before?” he asked Polly Smith, the girl who had gone to Steadman for help. “And you were not married? You have never been married, have you? Who is the father of this child, if you care to tell, or would you care to tell us if the same man was the father both times?” At this point, the prosecutor objected. (Polly, of course, had no lawyer of her own, despite her obvious need for a champion; she was merely a witness for the prosecution.) But the judge found none of the foregoing questions objectionable. Not surprisingly, Polly did. “Well, I’d rather not answer these questions,” she said, but the judge made her respond.
In all of these trials, girls and women were pressed in the same way. In California, a young woman was asked, “Do you remember telling Mrs. Garcia [the abortionist] that it was not your regular boyfriend who had caused your pregnancy, but another man? And that at that time you didn’t want your regular boyfriend to know this?” In St. Louis, a defense attorney who established the unmarried status of the prosecutrix as soon as she took the stand remarked, “You should have thought of marriage before you got whatever you got.”
In a variation on this strategy, some defense attorneys believed they could help their case by shredding a woman’s integrity because she had been willing to disassociate sex and maternity. In a 1956 trial the lawyer addressed Vera Black: “You are the girl who said you and your husband could not afford a child, is that right? I believe you own a 1957 hardtop automatic, don’t you?” When the attorney was asked to justify his question, he said, “If she can afford a new car and not a baby, it certainly casts doubt on her credibility as a witness.” A bit later, the lawyer added, “It is easy for me, as a lawyer to swing into a girl like Vera Black. I have no malice toward her. My position is to be a lawyer. Her business is to be a mother which if she would be, she would be a very good one, probably.”
Unfortunately, it was all too common for the defense lawyer to claim he was only doing his job and to assure the woman, “I’m not trying to embarrass you, you understand.” Nor was it uncommon for the woman on the stand to experience her appearance in the courtroom as a kind of living death. A young woman in San Francisco tried hard to participate in the proceedings as she had been instructed, even though it was much, much worse to be on the stand than anyone had told her it would be. Her attempt to explain herself makes that clear. “Well,” she said, “I had—had an abortion. I mean, you know, they. … I mean I don’t know how to explain it—Let’s see. She said something—I can’t remember. I’m so nervous I can’t think.”
Quite often, prosecuting lawyers seemed to act on the theory that the more sexual references and sexual innuendo they could spread around in the courtroom, the more perverse the case and the more perverted and culpable the accused. So, in the name of cleansing the community of the foul stench associated with abortion, the prosecutor did spread sex around quite thickly. Over and over and in every trial, women were forced to describe how they undressed in the abortionist’s office. They were made to respond to questions like this: “Miss Smith, when Dr. Jowers examined you—I don’t like to be unpleasant about the thing—but I just want to know if he inserted his hand or finger into your vagina?” And then, “Miss Polly, maybe somebody may not know what you mean when you say your ‘privates.’ Which of your privates was it that she injected her instruments into? Did she insert it into your rectum?” To which Miss Polly answered weakly, “I know where she put it, but I don’t know how to tell you.”
As in Suzanne Tyler’s trial near the end of the pre-Roe v. Wade years, girls and women in many of these postwar trials had pictures of their “privates” drawn on courtroom chalkboards (“to a pretty large scale, please”) for the edification (or delectation) of the audience. They sat in the witness box as the abortion table was wheeled into the courtroom and placed in front of them. They were told to speak up and describe exactly how they were placed on the table (“How far apart would you say your legs were spread?”). They were made to identify the “macabre” tools of the trade, also brought into the courtroom, and tell which ones were placed inside of which of their orifices.
Even after all this, the lawyers did not stop. Perhaps their own libidos were uncontrollably loosened by the eroticized atmosphere they had strategically pumped up. In many courtrooms, men began to play with sex and sexual references as if to make sure that the parties in attendance personally felt the erotic charge. In a California trial, for example, the judge noted “in all fairness” (in a setting, incidentally, where all the jurors were female) “You can get a person up on a table for a large number of things. I take it most of these women jurors have also been examined, most of them have been on a table.” A moment later, after everyone had gotten a chance to imagine the ladies of the jury with their legs spread, the defense attorney gazed at the abortion table thoughtfully and remarked, “Ah, but I don’t think I could get Mr. Macomber [the prosecutor] on that table, to tell you the truth.”
Sometimes the cryptoporno atmosphere was brutal. In a 1950 Georgia trial, a glass jar was brought into the courtroom. It contained a tiny fetus and, much more prominently, the vagina of a woman who had died at the hands of a real back-alley butcher. In the name of public morality and the need to display “the nature and the kind of injuries inflicted on this woman’s female organs,” the judge justified the presence of the jar in the courtroom, no matter that for some, the contents of the jar evoked the darkest, most violently perverse associations imaginable, and its contents were hardly necessary to prove the pregnancy or the death of the woman.
The fact was, the lawyers and the judges running these trials, along with the journalists covering them and the doctors and politicians who testified, and even the interested citizens who filled up the courtrooms, did not seem to find the eroticization of the court inappropriate or unseemly. In Portland, when women’s bodies were the subject of rough discussion during Ruth Barnett’s trials in 1952 and throughout the decade, the men in the room, at least, did not squirm, because such displays were not out of line with the tone of other public hearings in town. Many of them must have known, for example, what was going on down the street in the City Council chambers where their professional colleagues, their brothers-in-law and country-club bridge partners, could sometimes be found indulging in a bit of cryptoporno themselves. This was in the fifties, when Ruth often felt that every time she turned around, she was arrested again. At that time, the City Council was, as usual, avoiding the topic of abortion in chambers but having a pretty good time looking into the matter of the Star Theater, a downtown burlesque house that some council members believed should be shut down for “presentation of lewd, indecent performances on stage” involving nude women. The City Council members called a hearing on the subject, they said, because such performances tended “to create a public nuisance and a menace to the peace and general welfare of the city.”
Here again, in the name of public morality and decency, upstanding men in the community had—and took—the chance to share with each other their visions of women’s naked bodies. In the City Council meeting devoted to the goings-on in the Star Theater, things got hot quickly, and they stayed that way. A number of men who had attended the burlesque show were invited into the august chamber on the evening of November 19, 1955, to tell the council members what they had seen. Apparently, the members did not feel that one or two reports would suffice. They wanted to hear a lot of versions. The string of men who appeared before the council members described “a pretty animal type show.” They described girls who “showed everything they had” in as “good a solo orgy you will ever find presented.” After reviewing the stripping and the bumps and grinds of performers dancing completely in the nude, one added that there had been “no attempt at hiding from the audience any portion of their private parts, but on the contrary,” he said, “there was nothing left undisclosed, and the act was just plain raw.” Each witness provided the same details, almost verbatim, as the man who came before him. Indeed, the City Council members urged each one to leave nothing out. In the end, all the reports were explicit, appreciative, and censorious in the way that cryptoporno always is.
The authorities directing the cryptoporno shows in the council chambers, just like the men in charge at the courthouse, shared a dreadful sense in the postwar decades that the gender roles and gender relations they’d depended on were threatening to give way. The fact that they and their peers around the country conducted such proceedings so brutally is an indication of how sharply the authorities perceived the emergence of a cultural shift and how sharply they felt the threat it represented. In these public venues where women were on trial, the script called for degraded, humiliated, thoroughly vulnerable females, divided against each other and exposed. The most private facts of their lives were publicly revealed and reviled: their bodies, their sexuality, their wombs, the intimate sources of their personal dignity. At the same time, the script allowed for men—doctors, lawyers, judges, journalists, and myriad expert witnesses—to stand up, one by one, and reaffirm their prerogatives over women’s bodies and their lives.
These scenarios were enacted against a backdrop of postwar demands for the domestication of women after a generation of Depression and war and the economic and social responsibilities women had shouldered then outside of their homes. Cultural arbiters of every sort—teachers, clergymen, magazine editors, fashion designers, novelists, as well as obstetricians, psychiatrists, and other medical men—ordered women to go back home, to be proper wives and mothers, to be content. The incidence of abortion after the war provided distressing evidence that many women were resisting some parts—or all—of this prescription. The trials provided the opportunity to humiliate resisters, to drive the injunction home once again, and to underscore an important source of cultural as well as legal authority.
The politicians and the law enforcement officers who cancelled the old arrangement that had tolerated abortion as a “needed necessity” in town as long as nobody got hurt, and the courthouse men in charge of naming women’s guilt and setting their punishment, were together resisting the spectre of a community in which women could decide when and whether to associate sex and marriage, sex and maternity, marriage and maternity. In the 1950s, these men had the institutional power they required to resist this spectre by targeting individual women. But their leverage extended even farther because the displays in the morning paper after an abortion bust and the scenarios played out in the courtroom where abortion trials were heard carried powerful cultural messages to the general citizenry in the decades after World War II. These spectacles announced the danger and the just deserts that any woman associated with abortion could encounter. They also announced that the law was predicated on a willingness to place women in danger and also on a contempt for women’s self-determination. Anyone could see that enforcing anti-abortion laws involved the degradation of women. In this way, the mid-century prosecution of women associated with abortion embodied the message that every woman, whether or not she ever had or ever would climb up on the abortionist’s table, was endangered by the statutes that criminalized abortion.
