The Pig Farmer’s Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice by Mary Frances Berry

Author:Mary Frances Berry [Berry, Mary Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79729-2
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2011-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

One evening in 1956, Lewis Grubbs drove his girlfriend, Virginia Crowe, to Lexington, Kentucky, to Dr. C. B. Dotye’s office, where—without her knowledge—he had arranged for her to have an abortion. Crowe complained that when she learned the purpose of the trip, she refused, but Grubbs insisted that she terminate the pregnancy. She reported that Dr. Dotye “inserted an instrument into her body,” causing her to bleed, and that Grubbs paid Dotye $100 for his services. Grubbs and Dotye were charged and indicted separately. Grubbs claimed the privilege against self-incrimination and refused to testify about what transpired in the doctor’s office. Dotye admitted that he examined Crowe at her request, because she asked if she was pregnant, and he claimed that upon the examination he found she was already having a spontaneous abortion. The trial jury apparently did not believe his testimony. On the basis of Crowe’s testimony, they convicted Dotye, who was described as “a negro doctor,” of attempted abortion. The Kentucky state appeals court reversed his $500 fine and one year prison sentence.1

The appellate court objected to the prosecutor’s repeated attempts to use a racial narrative to gain a conviction. They noted that he tried “to elicit from the appellant (who is a Negro) a statement that it was unusual for a white girl to go to a Negro doctor at night.” Dotye’s counsel insisted that “by persistent repetition of questions,” the prosecutor had “deliberately attempted to inject racial prejudice into the case.” Indeed, it was unusual for a white person to visit an African American physician. However, the court was unwilling to convict a physician, even an African American one, for performing an abortion on an unmarried female who survived the procedure. They reversed the conviction deciding that “any undue repetition of questions” on the racial theme was impermissible.2

The Dotye case and others involving abortion, infanticide, and child support touched on some of the most sensitive issues of race, gender, and class. The court heard and evaluated sometimes starkly conflicting stories from the participants as they dealt with the consequences of having sex. One story was that of an unmarried woman who wanted to avoid having a tarnished reputation and blighted future prospects. A second story was of the married couple who agreed they could not afford to care for more children after a wife became unexpectedly pregnant. A third story emphasized respect for physicians’ judgment and practice and decried nonphysician abortionists who butchered women. Yet again, the courts wanted to indulge men’s sexual desire but not their refusal to support their out-of-wedlock children. In the courtroom, discussions of family values and appropriate sexual conduct became intermingled with legal rules and judicial decrees. At issue was patriarchy and power.3

The abortion issue, raised in the Dotye case, was and remains both sensitive and explosive. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and James Mohr document, abortion, in the early stages of pregnancy, was a readily available remedy until being criminalized in the 1880s. Thereafter, access to safe abortion was problematic until 1973, when the Supreme Court decided Roe v.

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