Let’s Talk About Abortion
May 22nd, 2012 § 10 Comments
We’ve been talking to a reader who knew Paula and has some insights into the availability of illegal abortions in Cedar Rapids in 1970. Here’s what she has to say:
[A friend] and I both found ourselves pregnant and single at about the same time and were given possible ‘solutions’ along with names of CR abortionists. However, we both got married and were in each others weddings (I had my daughter in April, she had a son in December). These were things we talked about…. and shuddered over…. and as happens, generally knew what others in the same situation did…
My personal take on it was that Paula was not pregnant. Relatives and other adults in positions of assistance may not have been consulted, but friends would know… we knew how things are at that age… gasps and panic over a missing period or two, phone calls agonizing over what to do. Running out in the middle of the night for a medical rendezvous? Unlikely. But all of this gets back to how difficult it was to get an abortion or even ask around in Cedar Rapids… unless you had some connections to the sleazoid underbelly of a basically clean cut, ” wholesome” midwest area. Usually, people opted for marriage or adoption, but a little black baby would have been unwelcome for either. And Paula wanted a modeling career…
You mentioned the Allison (ugh) hotel, and that’s what made me think. Woman, mid-40′s, no credentials, [she] would make appointments there. [I] wasn’t interested and have no idea of her name. Second possibility was an optometrist, downtown office… [I] stopped by. Atrocious creep, 50-60 yrs old, one syllable last name. He made it clear he expected sexual favors plus money. A girlfriend from work (I worked part-time at Bishop’s) told me about him. She opted out and had her baby in Davenport, then put him up for adoption. Third possibility was a Waterloo doctor… lived on Prospect Ave in Waterloo… wall plaque said he got his diploma at Lausanne, Switzerland. Asked for $250. He performed abortions in his clinic & called them D & Cs. He was later arrested when a prostitute died after an abortion with him. I lucked out by being “too far along.” Though I remember obscure details, I don’t remember how I was directed towards him. But I DO know, my closest friends knew about my dilemma. And I also know that you don’t run out casually the way Paula did for a last-minute procedure.
Further:
This whole concept of back-alley was not in an alley, near a dumpster or any such thing. Most had offices and encouraged a friend to come along. If it was at a hotel/motel like Allison or Unique, you got a room in your own name & made arrangements to stay the night, if possible, after a daytime abortion. If you went to an office, you had someone (contemporary) drive you home. There were no nighttime calls of ”come here quick & get it done.”
I think there is a tendency of some people to deduce that she somehow deserved it if she was indeed pregnant and seeking abortion. I doubt she was pregnant, but even if she might have suspected she was, I hate the whole idea of victimizing the victim.
So do we.
Another reader has asked: “Where and when did the abortion story surface anyway?”
We’re looking into that now and will post a response soon.
Meanwhile, we’d love to know what you think.
… and more about CR abortion options … There was a doctor in the Medical Arcade on 1st Avenue SE who performed abortions on weekends. In the mid-late 60′s, an acquaintance was working at the Arcade and found several late-term fetuses in a dumpster. Another option was to go to Des Moines where another physician performed the procedures for $250. That was a lot of money then. Those were, sadly, desperate times.
Also back in “the days” story was that while taking a very hot bath and inserting a coat hanger (sorry so explicit) a miscarriage would be induced. I remember someone who actually tried this…………thankfully her parents got her to the hospital, but she was severely damaged, infection followed and left her sterile. It could be possible that “if” pregnant, Paula could have tried this method with deadly consequences, perhaps even at her boyfriend’s. Supposedly there were also people who offered this “solution” who were far from credentialed in ANY way. I knew two people in the 60s who had abortions and I never knew until afterwards. I was very close to these people. You never know how each person will react to such a situation.
The coathanger mode was often mentioned, but the instrument of choice was actually a sharpened knitting needle… those uncredentialed abortions often meant heavy blood loss because of the retention of fetal tissue, and in some cases, uterine perforation. Often, these people showed up at the ER & received D&Cs for incomplete ABs (usually indistinguishable from spontaneous abortions, known in lay terms as miscarriages). Nobody asked questions. Some patients admitted for bleeding or ‘period’ problems had D&C’s… fetal tissue was often noted. Physicians feigned surprise. Pregnancy tests were quite unreliable until 6-8 weeks back then.
During this time I was a medical technology student at Mt Mercy. Had various jobs… the lab at St Luke’s & also the Medical Arcade on 1st Ave for Lehr Lake, & Swaney. I interned at the Mercy Hospital lab. Graduated with a BS in 1973. Married an OB/GYN 5 years later. Addressing the rumors about the Arcade, I know the doctors I worked for were incensed… in fact Dr lake said if anyone asked in their office, we were to take names & call the police. Never did find out who might have been performing ABs there.
Thanks everybody, for your insights. It’s great that we can talk about this now, after all these years. There is a lot of data here on this site to go through and we don’t have the hyperlinks up yet, to make it easier. But we’ve done a search of the original documents, and here’s some of what Dr. Percy Harris, who was the County Medical Examiner at the time, had to say [http://www.whathappenedtopaula.com/?page_id=326] when we interviewed him in the summer of 2008:
“We had a body… at that time, we didn’t know anything about an abortion. There was no evidence, as I recall, of an abortion.
“The death certificate says the cause of death is unknown, but her hands and feet were bound and we know that was something that they did to make it look like a homicide.”
[One reader has questioned, what made Dr. Harris think this. What was it about how she was tied that caused him to draw the conclusion that this was done to make it look like a homicide?]
“But not much of her body was there. The skeleton was there. I don’t remember there being any blood. There was little left of her. She was just tied up, dried up, and mostly bones and ligaments.
“We don’t know where she died, but first, clearly she didn’t die there. That’s one thing.”
[Why clearly? Could she have been alive still when she was dumped there, and that's why she was tied up?]
“Second, we knew also that the bounding of her extremities was something that was done to make it look as though it was something else. What else, I don’t know.”
[Again, what makes him think this?]
“And third, there was not much flesh on her. Time, animals and such. They did know that there was no trauma to her bones.
“We didn’t have any idea that she died from an abortion. Although, of the possibilities, that one was good, because there was no other evidence of any instrument that could have been used.
“To do an abortion was simple. You put a speculum into the vagina and you take a catheter and you just push that catheter into the cervix, up into the uterus. If it were successful, that would act as an irritant, so the uterus would just kick the pregnancy out. And what happened with the lady from Waterloo… [The woman who died and was left in a parking lot. Joe Abodeely went to prison for abetting this one.]… they tried more than once, because they had been paid. And what they used, I don’t know. I don’t know what they would have tried on a second time. They could have then resorted to using a clothes hanger. For self-induced abortions, the clothes hanger was something that women used.
“Probably what they had told her, they would have shown her, said, ‘This is what we’re going to do. And your uterus is going to reject this. And when that uterus rejects the catheter, you’ll bleed, and sometime after that, could be in the next hour, next day, next couple of days, you will no longer be pregnant.’ And that could have been any time.
“If it didn’t work, then on the second try they could have used a larger catheter or they could have used a smaller, stiffer catheter. Just get into the uterus. All they have to do is slip it up in there. In most abortions, that would do the job. The catheter is put into the uterus and left there.”
“You would walk around and you might not have any symptoms at all. If you felt cramping, then that was an effort on the part of the body to get rid of that foreign body. And if everything was going well for the abortionist, the catheter might come out first. The fetus might have come out at the same time. But it would take longer than an hour. A day or two, maybe. They’d send her home. After they’d asked her, ‘How do you feel? You’re not bleeding? Call me if you start bleeding.’
“So, I don’t think that she died immediately after. I think that she had that catheter and if she called and she wasn’t bleeding, they would ask her, ‘Are you cramping?’ And if she said, ‘Yes,’ the abortionist would have said, ‘That’s a good sign, everything seems to be all right, give it a little bit more time.’ But if she wasn’t, she probably called them again and they got her and that’s when she died and she died in the place over behind the fish market.
“So, she could have been in that house for longer than that night.
“Then they didn’t have any place that they could hide the body. It’s difficult to get rid of a body. They wouldn’t have left her there if she was still alive. She was dead when they dumped her.
“There wasn’t any blood there. The first thing the pathologist showed me was sheets. He said, ‘Percy, this is the way we do this.’ She’s lying there and he puts the sheet down below her, all under her body as far as it would go. And then with gloves on, they just dug out everything around her and collected it and put it onto the sheet. So we didn’t lose any evidence there.
“We don’t know that she bled to death. We just know that she died, and it’s pure speculation that they were using catheters. They could have used something else, but a catheter is used as an instrument to produce an abortion, which if everything went well, the uterus would have expelled the fetus and the catheter would have come out. So when she started to bleed and they couldn’t control the bleeding, they put her in the trunk of a car…”
And so on. All of this is what the official explanation for what happened to Paula has been. But it raises more questions than it answers, doesn’t it?
Talk about brain lapse… I also worked for Dr Harris & Estes after graduation. (They shared a small lab). Percy was the medical examiner, but not a pathologist On cases, he often consulted with Dr Kingsley Grant at St Luke’s. Which pathologist looked at Paula’s remains? Any info there?
The pathologist was Earl F. Rose, in Iowa City. We have the autopsy and we’ll type it up and give it a page here on the website asap so you can have a look at it. We’ve heard from a friend who worked for Dr. Harris that he had a tendency to be cozy with his nurses. Any truth to that that you know of?
Okay, we’ve got the Autopsy page up. You can comment with your thoughts.
First of all, I don’t think it was “made to look like a homicide” (re Harris), it was a homicide. Too bad her body wasn’t discovered earlier. I think the saddest implication is that she might have still been alive when her body was placed on the incline. That doesn’t sound like the actions of anyone who might have cared for her.
And yes, I know for certain that Percy Harris dallied with office personnel. I walked in on him & his office manager (who later took off after embezzling $30,000+ from his account)and there was no doubt as to what they were doing. He was known for his flirtatious nature… one of Estes’ nurses & the person who’d worked the lab before me cautioned me to be very careful. I was buddies with one of his sons (Bruce).
Why would you would tie up someone who was dead? The detectives tried to answer that by saying that they tied her up to keep her from “flopping around” when they carried her. But according to the autopsy, her hands were tied behind her back. Percy tried to answer it by saying that she was tied to make it look like a homicide (which, as you correctly point out, it was). It IS too bad she wasn’t found sooner. If they had spent more time looking for her in the first place, maybe… Some bits in the police file make us wonder whether some people knew she was there, long before her remains were discovered.
Also, we have gone out and looked at the site. Her body was found below a culvert that ran beneath the railway tracks, where it was caught on that steel guy wire pin. The detectives thought she was probably left farther up, in the woods on the other side of the tracks, and washed down through the culvert to the other side of the tracks and the road. We’ll put a map up to illustrate this. On the Wednesday night after she went missing there was a huge storm in Cedar Rapids, that brought down a lot of trees. It may have been then, or later, that she was washed down through the culvert.