In the summer of 1936, former San Jose resident Violet Pellegrini was arrested in Seattle, Washington for alleged involvement in an illegal abortion operation ring, according to an Oct. 14, 1936 San Jose Mercury News article.
On Oct. 9, 1954, Gertrude Jenkins, a San Jose abortion provider who was set to be tried for her involvement in an underground surgery ring, died by suicide at the San Jose St. Francis Motel, according to an Oct. 14, 2019 article on Archive408, a San Jose based historical and political publication.
San Jose State student Angela Barrett obtained an abortion after visting a counselor on campus in 1973, according to a Feb. 28, 1973 Spartan Daily article.
These are a few of the many stories of people who have performed or received abortions in the San Francisco Bay Area during the years in which the medical procedure was criminalized.
On June 24, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortions, according to a June 24 NPR article.
SJSU political science lecturer Donna Crane said the history of abortions shows that while states can now ban or heavily restrict abortion procedures, abortions won’t be stopped.
“When it's illegal, it is much more deadly for them,” Crane said in a Zoom call. “But, women who are determined to take charge of their life are not going to stop choosing abortion just because it's [federally] illegal.”
Abortions weren’t taboo in the American colonies from 1600s to the late 1700s, said Grace Howard, an SJSU justice studies assistant professor.
“Abortion was such a normal, commonplace, everyday thing in England, in colonial America,” Howard said in a Zoom call. “We weren't legislating it because why would we? Do we legislate boxed cereal? No. Do we legislate pants? No. Because people are just wearing them and it's fine.”
It wasn’t until the 1800s that abortion became contentious, as male doctors appeared in delivery rooms, places usually occupied by female midwives, according to a May 19 episode of NPR history podcast Throughline.
“They [were] also trying to professionalize medicine at the time and so they drew this line between these gentleman doctors with white coats who went to medical school,” Howard said. “We didn't even know what germs were yet. So they didn't know what they were doing. But midwives had been doing this forever and so, you know, you need to put these midwives out of business.”
In 1847, founders of the newly established, all-male American Medical Association (AMA) pushed for public respect. One AMA doctor, Horatio Storer, worked to criminalize abortions and defeat the competition midwives posed, according to the NPR episode.
“There are times in history when either women [who] already occupy a profession that men decide they want, or when they temporarily fill the need, because men are off doing something else,” Crane said.
In 1873, the Comstock Law was passed, making it illegal to mail obscene materials including abortion pamphlets, Howard explained.
Storer was also trying to increase the white birth rate at the same time and feared that people of color would outnumber white Americans, according to the NPR episode.
“There was certainly a push and a concern about the white birth rate in the United States,” Howard said.
As men returned from World War II and resumed their prior occupations, women were pushed from their jobs and into the domestic sphere including bearing children and becoming housewives. Laws restricting abortions continued to increase in support of this nuclear family dynamic, according to the NPR episode.
But, women including Gertrude Jenkins of San Jose and other unnamed people found ways to provide abortions despite it being illegal, unless the pregnant woman’s life was at stake.
“One of the really interesting things about [Jenkins] was the way that [she and others] made [houses] appear for sale so that people wouldn't notice the foot traffic coming in and out . . . It's like this suburban house that while I was there, there were dog walkers everywhere and it's quiet,” said Li Patron, an essayist at Metro News who wrote an article about the history of abortions in San Jose for Archive408, in a Zoom call.
Jenkins died in 1955 and shortly after her death, a California court loosened the restrictions on abortions.
In People v. Ballard in 1959, the Justices from the the California Court of Appeals ruled that no imminent threat to a woman’s life is necessary for an abortion, according to an April 21 CalMatters article.
CalMatters is a non-profit publication highlighting California stories, according to its website.
Many Americans began to shift their views of abortion during the 1960s, Howard said.
“So it's 1965. The sexual revolution is happening, all of these kinds of things are changing people's attitudes about sex,” she said.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the first birth control pill in 1960 and in 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut allowed married couples to buy contraceptives without government approval, Howard said.
This court case provided the first reference to the right to privacy in which the decision to use contraceptives was between married individuals, according to the Cornell Law School Privacy webpage.
In the same year,, Republican U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and Democratic U.S. President Harry Truman led Planned Parenthood, according to the book “These Truths: A History of The United States” written by Jill Lepore.
In the 1950s, abortion legalization was widely supported by doctors across the U.S. and Planned Parenthood leaders, many of whom were conservative, according to the same book.
“So back in the 60s, both political parties were pro-choice. And in fact, the Republican Party was the first party to pass a pro-feminist plank on its party platform, [they] did it before the Democrats did.” Crane said.
According to Lepore’s book, Republicans had been in support of abortion because they believed in family planning. In the 1950s, conservatives made up the leadership of Planned Parenthood, a birth control organization started in 1916 by activist Margaret Sanger.
In the 1960s, as radical and liberal feminism become more popular, conservative women reacted by starting a movement against one of feminism’s largest campaigns: contraception and abortion.
Catholics also began to be more vocal about their stance on abortion and in 1971, President Richard Nixon was recommended to change his opinion from pro-choice to pro-life in order to get their votes.
Prior to this shift, however, conservatives took many actions to legalize abortions.
Conservative California Governor Ronald Reagan passed the Therapeutic Abortion Act in 1967, which attempted to define when an abortion would be allowed, according to a Feb. 1 “California History” research article.
The law determined that abortion was only legal if a medical committee or law enforecement approved it for the woman, according to the same “California History” article.
The law stated a woman can terminate her pregnancy if “there is substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother.”
With overwhelming support from doctors and the general U.S. public, the right to abortion was legalized in the 1973 ruling of Roe v. Wade.
Roe v. Wade gave woman the constitutional right to abortions and furthered established the right to privacy, according to May 3 PBS article.
“But in the 1980s, politics changed in America, and Republicans became staunchly anti-feminist and Democrats became much more overtly feminist and embraced abortion rights,” Crane said.
Howard said those on the religious right, or politically conservative started to shift their attentions from segregation to anti-abortion initiatives in the 1980s.
Partially in response to the rising feminist movement, conservative and anti-feminist women including Phyllis Schlafly fought against abortion among other prominent women’s issues, according to Lepore’s 2018 book.
“She's the one who led opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and she's largely credited for moving the entire Republican Party from a pro choice position in the ‘70s to an anti choice position by 1980,” Crane said.
But, California officials continued to increase abortion access.
In 1981, the California Supreme Court ruled that Medi-Cal, a service that provided medical assistance to in-need state residents, couldn’t restrict coverage for abortions, according to an April 21 CalMatters article.
Despite California having liberal abortion laws, Howard said she still desires change.
“I would like to see more [abortion] providers allowed to provide abortions in California. Advanced nurse practitioners and midwives should be able to legally perform them and in California they're currently not, and that is a big issue, especially as we're gonna see people flooding into the state for care,” Howard said.
Recently on June 24, state Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1666, which protects California abortion providers from bans in other states, according to a June 24 California Governor’s Office news release.
Crane mentioned that despite California’s abortion protections, nothing can protect the state from potential national restrictions passed by U.S. Congress.
She also emphasized the importance of history, which tells us exactly what lengths women may go through when abortion is fully illegal.
“If you don't go back and look at the history, what you won't learn is that women have always ended pregnancies and that it's almost always been safe . . . the only time it's unsafe is when it's illegal,” Crane said. “But, I am going to say it can't be illegal because that's when women pay the price with their lives. And if you don't look at the history, you would never know that you would just think the question is what do you think about abortion?”
