Review: From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920–1969, by Alicia Gutierrez-Romine

Abstract

Alicia Gutierrez-Romine’s From Back Alley to the Border might have been better titled “From Back Alley to Relatively Safe Abortion Mill to Border.” Or at least that title would have reflected the book’s argument, even if it is less snappy. Truly, this book centers on the sites and safety of illegal abortion provisions in California before 1969. Gutierrez-Romine argues that before the 1930s, women sought abortions from a variety of practitioners with a broad spectrum of experience and credentials. At this point, more women died from the procedure because the law had created a black market without a regulated product and because the procedure was relatively easy to botch. The first four chapters of the book cover various types of abortion providers, how the media represented them and how the law punished them unequally, depending on race, gender, and professional status.Gutierrez-Romine gets to the meat of her story beginning in Chapter 5 on the Pacific Coast Abortion Ring (PCAR), an extensive abortion syndicate that linked doctors up and down the coast beginning in 1934. The PCAR was the brainchild of Reginald Rankin, a Southern California doctor, who joined forces with Seattle doctor George Watts. Watts had pioneered the vacuum aspiration technique, making abortions much safer. Together they trained and recruited a host of abortionists. Some of the syndicate’s procedures—like moving providers frequently—made abortions safer for the abortionists, and Watt’s medical innovation made the procedure safer for patients. Because of decreased mortality from illegal abortion, there were more women to testify against the PCAR when its members were eventually prosecuted.The U.S.-Mexico border appears in the book’s last chapter. By 1953, Rankin’s two stays in prison had motivated him to innovate once more. He continued to find clients in California but moved the medical part of his practice to Tijuana. This move across an international border helped him escape additional conviction. Gutierrez-Romine argues that in the 1950s and 1960s, Mexico became “a beacon and a specter,” symbolizing the possibilities and perils of illegal abortion (p. 174). Eventually, doctors in California used the assumed danger of the Tijuana abortion to argue that they were preserving the lives of women by providing abortions in California. In the resulting case, People of the State of California v. Belous (1969), the court found California’s abortion law was “void for vagueness,” decriminalizing abortion in the state.Through her attention to California, Gutierrez-Romine adds to the history of illegal abortion in the twentieth century; Leslie Reagan’s eastern- and midwestern-focused When Abortion Was a Crime (1997) remains an essential read. Gutierrez-Romine’s story of the PCAR offers fascinating insight into an elaborate crime syndicate that also provided women with an essential medical procedure. Additionally, the final chapter on abortion tourism to Mexico helps shed new light on the state’s important abortion liberalization campaign. Popular culture has kept the “back alley” in our collective historical memory. Gutierrez-Romine suggests that the relatively safe illegal abortion mill and the cross-border abortion should be there too. Hopefully all three can remain in our past.