Abortionist by Rickie Solinger

Author:Rickie Solinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 1995-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

* * *

PORTLAND

As soon as Ruth was released by the authorities in Reno, she rushed back to Portland, to safety. The irony of the situation did not escape her: a few weeks’ sojourn and a couple of abortions in the sin capital of the West—where anything and everything could be had for a price, including police protection—had very nearly landed her in jail. Portland, on the other hand, was never in the Sodom and Gomorrah league with Reno, but it had always tolerated the abortionist. At the time Ruth left for Reno in the fall of 1940, she had been plying her trade in various respectable downtown locations for twenty-two years, with no trouble from the law.

Now it was good to be home, and back at work in a town where everyone who counted knew she was a quality practitioner. But the experience in Reno had raised some questions in Ruth’s mind about abortion and the law, about why the cops in some towns winked at illegal operations in one season but not in another, while their brethren elsewhere, charged with enforcing substantially the same statutes, kept a different schedule entirely. But as World War II began, just months after the Reno caper collapsed, and Ruth’s offices were swamped with unwillingly pregnant defense workers and the girlfriends and wives of men who were shipping out, she did not have a great deal of time to ponder these questions. But the questions that occurred to Ruth in 1940 point to the heart of the law and how it works. They point, as well, at the subjective meaning of “crime” and “criminal.” In fact, Ruth’s questions are just the place to start to understand what the world was like when abortion was illegal yet commonplace, when the laws ostensibly written to stamp out the practice were rarely but selectively enforced, and when they were enforced, it was more often than not a sensational media event. Ruth’s experience in Portland is a far from unique case study of these matters.

Ruth Barnett returned to Portland in early 1941, just as the city was beginning to need her services more urgently than ever. Maggie says that in the early 1940s, “the fat years began to roll. The shipyard workers were swarming to Mama and the war brides and sweethearts. Ruth kept a nurse and a receptionist in each of her two offices in the Broadway Building, Dr. Van Alstyne’s old place and Dr. Watts’s chambers, both of which were now hers. Portland so openly acknowledged her competency, she just worked two or three hours in each office and carried her instruments wrapped in a towel with her up and down in the elevators. She was a busy woman.” During the war years, business was always good. The abortionist was not bothered by politicians or police; nor was she harrassed by individuals like Rankin, seeking to shake her down or control her business.

Even if Ruth had attempted to hide her practice in those years, chances are her efforts would have been to no avail.

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