Printer-friendly versionAbortion by John Bartlow Martin (in The Saturday Evening Post May 27, 1961)   Criminal Abortion
is the third-largest racket in the United States.  Here is a reporter’s portrait of
the abortionists-who they are, and why they practice their trade.—Second
of three parts   Captions: 

1. Det. Dan Galindo (left) and Lt. Hugh
   Brown show how they “staked out” the house occupied by Dr. Donald Curry Allen, a Los Angeles osteopath who
   was ultimately convicted of abortion.
2. Here in the Los Angeles Police
   Department, detectives Paul LePage (in hat), Brown and Galindo display the
   contents of the abortion kit which Allen carried
3. Another Californian, Frank L. Rollins,
   alias “Doctor Parker,” was arrested after a client tipped off
   the police.  He was one of the
   abortionists that police call “mechanics”—those who have
   no medical training and who ply their nefarious trade as a strictly
   business proposition.
4. To avoid detection, abortionists
   sometimes work in bizarre headquarters.   One of them, Leon Greenhill,
   operated aboard this yacht while it cruised in Los Angeles harbor.
5. A secret telephoto of an abortionist on
   call.  This “case”
   ended—at least temporarily—the careers of Donald Curry Allen and his assistant, Joan
   Bunker; police caught them at the scene of an abortion, and both were
   later sentenced to prison. 

  At nine AM one balmy day in Los Angeles last December Lt. Hugh Brown and
Sgt. Paul LePage of the abortion squad of the Homicide Division pulled up to
the curb behind a parked car on a quiet residential street.  Detective Dan Galindo got out of the
parked car and, pointing, said, “That’s the house.”             Earlier
a hospital had notified the detectives that it had received a girl who had been
aborted.  She said her ex-husband
had put her in touch with the abortionist’s contact, a woman.  The detectives found the woman, who said
the abortionist was a Doctor Parker and gave them his phone number.  It checked to the “United
Detective Service” in a private home.  There the detectives found a car with
license plates issued to a Frank L. Rollins.  Their files showed that a Frank Lee
Rollins, alias Frank Lee Parker, alias Doctor Parker, had applied for a private
detective’s license several years earlier, had once been arrested for
assault with a deadly weapon, and a month previously had been arrested for
abortion.             The
night before, they had persuaded the contact woman to telephone Rollins, and
Detective Galindo, posing as the aborted girl’s boy friend, had angrily
told him that the girl was sick and he wanted his money back.  Rollins had replied that he had done the
job for half his usual fee, that is was always the cheap jobs that made trouble
and that he would not return the money.             Now
the detectives gathered in front of Rollins’s house to arrest him.  It was a tiny stucco bungalow with a pink
door, a tile roof and a palm tree by the door.  They blocked the driveway with their
squad car and rang the doorbell. 
Inside, a dog began to bark loudly. 
Through a window the detectives could see woman in a nightgown scurrying
around.  Galindo banged heavily on
the door and then said loudly, “Think we better kick the door
in?”  A moment later the door
opened, and the detectives crowded in, saying, “Police officers;
you’re under arrest.”             A
stocky middle-aged man faced them, looking sleepy and hastily
dressed—Frank Rollins. 
“What for?” he asked, and Lieutenant
Brown said, “Abortion.” 
LePage and Galindo found Mrs. Rollins in the bathroom, wearing a
nightgown and bathrobe, her hair in curlers.  Lieutenant
Brown was searching Rollins, turning his pickets inside out.  Galindo called headquarters for a
photographer, then began searching the bedroom Sergeant LePage told Mrs.
Rollins, “Come on back in the bedroom and sit down.”  Sullen, she went.             Lieutenant Brown asked Rollins when he was last
arrested.  Oh, he said, about three
years ago.  What for?  A.D.W. (assault with a deadly weapon).
He hadn’t been arrested since? 
No.  He wasn’t arrested
last month at Santa Ana for abortion?  Oh, yes, that was right, he’d
forgotten.             Sergeant
LePage came in from the bedroom with a gun in his hand, a loaded snub-nosed
.38.  LePage said, “This is
the gun you usually carry?”             “Yes.”             “Then
how does it happen one shell has been discharged?”             Rollins
said nothing for a moment.  Then,
“I don’t know.” 
Another pause, then, “Oh, we were doing some target practice last
summer.  Maybe it’s from
that.”             LePage
unloaded the gun and put in on the dining-room table, went back to the bedroom
and came out with two more loaded guns. 
Silently he unloaded them and went back to the bedroom.  Lieutenant
Brown, who was sitting on the floor, pulling out the drawers of a des and
examining their papers slowly, resumed talking to Rollins, apparently idly,
about his previous arrest for assault. 
Rollins go to his feet and took a step toward the table where the guns
lay.  Lieutenant
Brown said sharply, “Sit down.”             He
stopped and said, “I just wanted a cigarette.”             Brown
said, “O.K. But don’t get up again without asking
permission.”  And he watched narrowly while Rollins stepped to the table and picked
up the cigarettes.  As the
detectives moved from room to room, searching, questioning, they seemed casual
and even careless; but they knew exactly what they were doing.             Galindo,
a good-looking young man, cam in and said breezily, “Stand up for a second,”
and Rollins did, and Galindo searched him thoroughly, then started going
through his wallets, asking, “How much money do you have there?”             “I
don’t know.  Ten, fifteen
dollars.”             “Well,
count it.”             He
counted $350, including two fifty-dollar bills.  He said, “We got an insurance
policy cashed for Christmas.” 
The detectives said nothing. 
LePage brought Mrs. Rollins out and told her, “Stay here,”
and went back to the bedroom. 
Rollins said, “May I call my attorney?”             “Sure,”
Lieutenant Brown said.  “Not right now.  We’ll let you call as soon as we
book you, sir.”             From
the bedroom Sergeant LePage called out happily, “Here we go,” and
came out with two packages.  Wrapped
in a towel were a hypodermic needle, a bottle labeled “pituitary
extract,” a flashlight, a rubber catheter tube and a forceps.  Wrapped in newspaper were a catheter
with a bulb syringe, some bloody cotton and a speculum, an instrument used in
performing uterine operations.             Lieutenant Brown said mildly, “You a doctor, Mr.
Rollins?”             “No.”             “What
you doing with a speculum and catheter?”             “I
don’t know where it came from.”             “Brown
turned to Mrs. Rollins.  “How
about you?  You know where it came
from?”             “No.”             “You
don’t know how it got in your house?”             She
thought a moment.  “That might
have been in there when we rented this place.”             Rollins
said eagerly, “It must have been.”             And
his wife said, “We’ve only been here going on two months.”             Lieutenant Brown said, “Those people ought to be
ashamed, leaving stuff like that around to get you in all this
trouble.”  Then, “How
come the cotton’s got wet blood on it?  Doctor, how you figure it wouldn’t
dry out in two months?”             Rollins,
chin in hand, said, “I don’t know.”             Mrs.
Rollins asked, “Can I get dressed now?”             Brown
said, “No, you just sit still. 
You’re not in any hurry to get in that jailhouse, are you?”             The
phone rang.  Galindo hurried to it
and answered.  The caller hung
up.  Galindo asked, “Friend of
yours?”             Rollins
said, “I don’t know.” 
His hands were trembling.             LePage
asked, “Who uses the back bedroom?”             Rollins
said, “It’s a spare.”             Does
this belong to you?” LePage asked and showed him a little red cigarette
box which he had found under the mattress.             The
woman said, “To me.”             “What
is in it?”             “Money.”             “How
much?”             “I
think there’s three hundred dollars or something,” she said.  “I had to show the place where we
used to live.  The landlady told me
if I’d show the place and take care of it, she’d pay me.”             LePage,
riffling through it, muttered, “Five fifties.”             She
went on, “And some I got from an insurance policy.”             LePage
handed it to her and said, “Count it.”  It came to $445.  LePage turned away looking disgusted,
and resumed his systematic search. 
Finished at last, the detectives took the suspects to headquarters and
booked them for abortion.  Except
for the guns, it had been a routine arrest by the Los Angeles abortion squad.               Criminal abortion is considered the third-biggest racket
in the United States.  How does it work?  Who are the abortionists?              A
few abortionists are actually physicians. 
A policeman says, “They’ll stat out doing one as a favor to
a friend.  She’ll send him two
more, and each of them will send more, it snowballs, and before he knows it
he’s making so much money he can’t quit.”  Some doctors turn abortionists because
they lose their licenses or, having been educated abroad, cannot get an
American license.             The
vice chairman of the American Medical Association’s section on obstetrics
and gynecology, Dr. Keith Russell, says, “When I first started to
practice nearly every big medical area, like Los Angeles,
Chicago, New
York, had two or three M.D.’s who did
abortions.  They were
good—they used aseptic techniques, knew how to control hemorrhage and had
a knowledge of anatomy.  They seemed to feel they were rendering
a service to the community.  It was
simply their specialty.  But most of
them are dying off or retiring, and the younger men don’t seem to be
going into the field.             A
Baltimore
doctor carried on an abortion practice for twenty years, operating on 5210 patients and only losing two.  Once during a public furor over abortion
he retired; “ethical” doctors besought him to resume.  Although 401 of his patients were themselves
associated with the medical profession and although 353 doctors sent patients
to him, when he was arrested no single doctor came forward “to share the
responsibility with me,” as he put it, and indeed three testified against
him.             Most
commercial abortionists, however, are not physicians at all.  Police call them
“mechanics.”  They may be
anything.  One was a bartender,
another a confidence man, another an aircraft mechanic, another a real-estate
salesman.  They regard their work as
do other professional criminals—a lucrative job with risk.  They often employ an assistant who poses
as a nurse.  They kick back at least
25 percent of their fees to bartenders, druggists, doctors, nurses,
hairdressers, former patients and others who send patients to them.             Occasionally they operate openly—a few years ago
Chicago police found three abortion rings operating on a single floor of a
downtown office building, and so keen was competition among them that they kept
shills at the elevator to solicit patients—but usually they work in great
secrecy.  One,
Leon Greenhill, operated
aboard a yacht while it cruised Los
Angeles harbor and contacted his patients through an
answering service that could be triggered only by an electronic device.  Last year Lost Angeles police arrested a
man who had several abortionists and dozens of referring people on his payroll
who arranged to meet patients through coded messages and an answering
service.  Meeting one, he would put
her on the floor in the back of his car, give her sedatives, put a blanket over
her head and drive her to the abortionist motel.  The abortionist was always masked; the
patient never saw his face. 
“They operated all over the Valley,” says a detective,
“like a floating crap game.”             Not
uncommonly, convicted abortionists are involved in other crimes—narcotics peddling, prostitution, fraud.  Robert Spears was free on bond from a Los Angeles abortion charge when on November 16, 1959, a
National Airlines plane supposedly
carrying him went down in the Gulf of Mexico,
killing all aboard and creating a mystery still not satisfactorily
unraveled.  Spears, convicted years
ago of fraud, once health director at a movie studio, a self-styled “naturopath,” in 1958 asked Donald A Loomis, a chiropractor turned abortionist, to
send patients to him.  Loomis
refused to abort women pregnant more
than two months; he began sending his rejects to Spears.  Spears bungled two, and on July 31,
1959, he and Loomis were arrested.             When
the plane went down, Spears’s body was not found, but his name was on the passenger list, so the abortion case
against him was dismissed.  It was
reinstated months later when he was discovered alive in Phoenix, Arizona.  Authorities suspect he had purchased a
seat on the doomed plan, then induced another man, perhaps by hypnosis, to
occupy it, hoping when the plane went down to collect insurance and escape the
abortion charge at a single stroke; but they never could prove anything more
serious than that he embezzled the automobile of the man who took his place on
the plane.  For that he was
sentenced to five years in Federal prison. 
He was given a concurrent state prison sentence for abortion.             Many
abortionists and their assistants seem to lead somewhat disorganized
lives—numerous divorces, alcoholism, drifting from job to job and place
to place.  Police sometimes find
pornographic literature in their possession.  Sometimes abortionists have sexual
relations with their patients before aborting them.  Like professional
burglars or confidence men, abortionists tend to stay in the racket, even after
being convicted.  One abortionist,
while on trial, performed an abortion during noon recess.             The
career of Dr. Frank L. Nathanson of Chicago
began in 1929 and continued into the 1940s and perhaps until his death in
1950.  He was arrested at least nine
times for abortion and once for narcotics,
but convicted only once.  Once he
shot two men dead in his office, claiming they were robbers, but police
suspected they were trying to blackmail him.  Once a man and woman were accused of kidnapping him because he had aborted their
daughter.  Once his home was bombed;
once the Black Hand tried to blackmail him.             Abortionists
are fair game for extortionists.  A
policeman says, “A real M.D. won’t go long in this racket till the
hoods pick up on him.  The hood
offers him ‘protection’—for so much a week he’ll
guarantee immunity from the police. 
One doctor was quite surprised when we arrested him.  He’d been paying $2000 a month in
juice.  It turned out to be lemon
juice.”  One fixer took money
from an abortionist on the pretext of protecting him, then, after he was
convicted, sold his telephone number to another abortionist and commenced
“protecting” him.             In
recent years hints have appeared that the organized-crime syndicate has taken
over the abortion racket.  It seems
doubtful.  But a while back gambling
interests offered a California
abortionist $50,000 a year plus living expenses to set up shop in Los Vegas,
and from time to time hoodlums connected with organized crime syndicates have
been discovered in the abortion racket.             Charges
of police payoffs are common in the abortion racket, just as in the
bootleg-liquor, gambling and prostitution rackets.  Wide-open towns where gambling and
prostitution flourish are often abortion centers.  And in big cities an abortionist who
operates openly in a down-town office building must be assumed to have
purchased immunity, for the constant stream of women to his office would
quickly attract attention.  But an
abortionist who moves from place to place and employs an elaborate system of
coded messages, answering services and anonymous referrers and transporters
must be presumed to lack police protection, else why go to so much
trouble?  On the whole, abortion is
probably protected less than gambling or prostitution.             Criminal abortion is extraordinarily
difficult to control.  A prosecutor
says, “There is a low rate of prosecution, a lower rate of convictions
and not enough punishment to deter.” 
Only when the patient dies or is badly hurt is an abortion reported to
the police at all.  Spears estimated
that from 150 to 200
abortions are performed in Los Angeles
every day—yet fewer than one a day is reported.  A prosecutor says,”The satisfied
customer never complains.”  Even if not satisfied she is
reluctant to testify—she dreads publicity.  If single she wants to conceal her
abortion from everyone; if married, from her husband or children.  Not infrequently she is threatened or
bought off.             Some
years ago in Chicago
a man and his wife accused Dr. Lou E. Davis, a woman, of aborting the wife, but
at her arraignment refused to identify her, and the judge said angrily,
“This woman pays off with filthy money.”  In a career that began in 1913, Doctor
Davis was arrested many times for abortion and several time for murder by
abortion, but she never served a day in prison; finally
convicted in 1949 at the age of seventy-seven, she was adjudged insane and
committed to a state mental hospital. 
Only then did the state licensing board suspend her license.             Medical
societies and state boards almost never discipline a physician until he has
been convicted.  Courts are
reluctant to punish physicians. 
Moreover, corroborative medical testimony is hard to
get—physicians are reluctant to testify against other physicians or to
testify flatly that an abortion was performed.  Jurors are inclined to blame the girl.  Defense is easy—the abortionist
need only claim that he operated after someone else, unknown to him, aborted
the girl.             In
some states abortion is punishable by long prison terms, and murder by abortion
is punishable by death, but many courts tend to be lenient.  A first offender is likely to get off
with probation and a fine—“they can pay the fine with a couple more
abortions,” says a policeman. 
Joliet penitentiary in Illinois contains no inmate convicted of
abortion alone and only one convicted of murder by abortion.  An Ohio physician who admitted performing 300
abortions a year between 1934 and 1956 for fees totaling $1,000,000 was
sentenced to four months in the county jail and put on probation for five
years.  An Indianapolis
doctor who was charged with aborting three women, one of whom died, was given a
suspended sentence and a fine.             The
present author knows of only one case where the death penalty
was imposed for murder by abortion, that of Dr. Amante Rongetti.  Doctor Rongetti, in 1927 the proprietor
of a small private hospital in Chicago,
aborted a nineteen-year-old unmarried girl who was six months pregnant. 
The baby was born alive and, a nurse testified, Rongetti ordered it
thrown into the furnace.  The girl died a few days later.  During the inquest and trial two
witnesses reported they had been threatened with death, a witness attempted
suicide, and a relative of the dead girl was kidnapped
at gun point, beaten and held prisoner three nights.  Sentenced to death, Rongetti appealed,
and the state Supreme Court reversed. 
A second conviction was reversed. 
At a third trial Rongetti was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to
one to fourteen years.  He served
eight.             The
Los Angeles
abortion squad, one of the best in the nation,
consists of five detectives and a lieutenant
(out of forty-two policemen assigned to Homicide).  “It is a tough squad to
work,” says chief of Detectives Thad Brown.  The detectives have developed elaborate
cross indexed files containing dossiers on hundreds of abortionists, their
assistants, contacts and methods of operation.  They have guided girls through the long
legal process of indictment, preliminary
hearing and trial without revealing their secret to their families or
employers.  One girl told them that
she and her husband were unable to
have children, that she had been impregnated
by a neighbor and that her husband didn’t know she’d been pregnant or aborted.  They prosecuted the abortionist without
revealing her secret.             They
are expert at persuading girls to talk. Detective Galindo, a handsome, likable
man, tries to persuade them gently; if he fails, his partner, Sergeant LePage,
a big man with a cigar, talks tough, to them. Once a girl agrees to co-operate,
they stay close to her until the trial is over months later. LePage says,
“We go out there, and she cries on our shoulder; it’s not pleasant
for a girl to tell some big, burly policeman her troubles.” Galindo says,
“It’s like playing a game all the time. Any little abortion case is
as interesting as a murder.”             In
the last ten years the abortion squad has handled eighty murders by abortion.
Only two cases remain unsolved. In ten months last year it investigated 247
abortions, dropping forty-five persons in the remaining cases and convicting
all but five, an exceptionally high
conviction rate. Vigorous
enforcement, however, drives the price of abortion up, but does not reduce the
number of abortions. Enforcement campaigns once raised the Chicago
price from forty to $300 and the New
York price to $1500.             What
kind of men are the abortionists? Let us examine the lives of two, one a
physician, the other not.             The
police consider Robert Olson—a fictitious name—a
crude abortionist. Olson is thirty-seven, but looks younger. His face is almost
childlike. He is sandy-haired, weak-chinned, soft-spoken, and he has a certain
effeminate manner. He seems
immature, dependent, needful. He thinks he never got a break. While working as
an abortionist, he fondled his patients, but never proposed intercourse. He has
a confidence man’s fawning way. He is shrewd—but not shrewd enough:
Trying to dupe others, he is more often duped himself. It is likely he became
an abortionist because of some sexual deviation. He denies it. He says it was
purely accidental.             After
a period of drifting from job to job, he was running a restaurant in a town
near San Francisco
when a waitress who worked for him became pregnant.
A man who hung out in the restaurant was an abortionist, and Olson arranged an
abortion. “It came out beautifully,” Olsen recalls. “He used
a special medicine from Austria.
It comes in tubes.” Soon the waitress brought in a girl friend who was
pregnant. “From that one
waitress he probably received at least four others,” Olsen says.
“It looked like a pretty good thing. So I asked him to show me how he did
it. I went along with him on one, and I stood behind and watched what he did.
That’s how it all started.”             The
abortionist left town owing Olson money and, to repay it, gave him his
“practice”—his telephone number and the mysterious
“Australian tubes” by which Olson set such great store. (Actually
they contain an ordinary
intra-uterine paste.) Olson performed several abortions. He says, “I felt
then-and I still do- that there should be an agency set up for these girls.
Because these girls will try anything on themselves. Anything. They’ll take quinine or brown Ergotrate, the
‘football,’ or the small white tablet, pure ergot-anything.
They’re puncturing uteruses right and left- this is all wrong,” and
he trailed off, his apology for being alive concluded.             In
1957 he sold his restaurant and went to Los
Angeles, schemed to get control of a bankrupt bar, got
it, and went broke. “I’d have done anything for money.” He
still had a few of the “Austrian tubes” left; girls came into the
bar looking for abortions, and he aborted them charging about $200. Soon a
woman whom we shall call Billie, long involved in the abortion racket, invited
Olson to her house. “She said there was a lot of money in it,” he
recalls. “I said, ‘Like what?’ She said, ‘I can guarantee
you four a week at five hundred dollars a piece. It could go higher.’
This,” he says, “looked awfully inviting. I told her I didn’t
know much about it. She said, ‘That doesn’t matter. I’ve got
a book.’”             She
owned, he says, a medical textbook on abortion.  “I read it for ten days like
crazy.  She introduced me to ergot,
pure ergot, a dangerous little bastard,” smiling.  “I was over at Billie’s
house every day for six days, studying. 
Then one day she called me, and I went to her house and did my first
abortion there.  The girl had a
terrific personality,”
fondly.  “I did one or two
more.  Then they brought the little
girl from out of town there, fourteen years old.”             Her
mother had brought her to Los Angeles
and arranged the abortion.  Five
times Olson tried to abort her; five times he failed.  She was at Billie’s house ten
days.  Her mother visited her.  They called Olson “doctor,”
and he wore a white gown.  “I
kept referring to the book between attempts.  First I put the Luenbach solution in the
uterus and left the tube in overnight. 
It didn’t work.  I
tried it again next day—started her off on Ergotrate tablets.  I tried every type pill in the
book.”  Finally he sent her home.  Two days later her mother called:  The girl was running a temperature.  Olson ordered her to a hospital.  Doctors there saved her life.             The
hospital notified the police.  Olson
and Billie went into hiding, but continued operations, using an elaborate
contact system.  Olson says his
average fee was $400, but police say Billie held out on him.  Olson complained to her that she was
forwarding more lucrative cases to another “doctor.”  Finally
she sent him to a Sunset Boulevard motel to abort a Las Vegas show girl, telling him, “This
is where you start making the big money. 
She’ll pay you six hundred and fifty dollars.”  The girl had only $400, but Olson
accepted it, partly, apparently, because she was so beautiful.  Next day she telephoned:  She was in pain.  “I could have told her to take an
ergot tablet,” he says, “but I thought maybe I’d drive out
there, and this friend of mine wanted to meet a Vegas stripper anyway, so we
went.  I had a giant feeling that
this would be the end.  Actually I
had decided to stop after the fourteen-year-old girl, but I was under a promise
of a few profitable cases.  Well, I
walked in the door of the girl’s room, and I was met immediately by about
three thousand D.A.’s men.” He was sentenced to a year in county
jail, another “mechanic” to nine months and Billie to a year.             Olson
said a while back, “Today a lot of abortions are actually done by
so-called ethical doctors—but some idiot like me gets ‘em
started.  The girl goes to a doctor,
and he says, ‘I don’t care where you go or how you have it done,
but get it started, then come in here tomorrow and I’ll finish
it.’  These doctors should get
together in their medical associations. 
They’re hypocrites.  Why
do they send their patients out to be butchered?  They should get together and clean up
their own mess.”               Sigmund
Rosen—a fictitious name—is
a sharp-featured, thin-lipped, rather dapper man of fifty, born in Newark, the only son of intellectual immigrants from Central Europe. 
He received a premedical education at Wayne University
and an M.D. at the University of Vienna,
Austria.  He interned in Chicago, where in 1940 he
met and married a graduate nurse. 
Licensed, he conducted private practice in a small Illinois city.  Discharged from the Army in 1946 as a
captain in the Medical Corps, he resumed his practice, earning more than
$20,000 a year.  Soon his troubles
began.  This is how he tells the
story:             His
wife had borne four children.  Pregnant with the fifth in 1948, she developed a
dangerous, painful gall bladder condition, and her doctor prescribed small
doses of morphine.  She became
addicted.  After her child was born,
she was withdrawn from the drug. 
Rosen went to New York
to study gynecological surgery and, returning, found she had been stealing his
medical narcotics and taking
them.  He put her in a private
sanitarium, then in the Federal institution as Lexington, Kentucky;
but when she came out, she reverted to addiction.             “It
was a nightmare,” Rosen says. 
“I had five children at home. 
My housekeeper quit every week. 
I couldn’t do my work. 
My wife would barricade herself in my office and yell and scream till I
gave her narcotics.  I started to use narcotics
myself.  The situation finally came to the attention of the police—the
neighbors called them.”  To
cover up his wife’s thefts, he falsified his narcotics
records.  He was sentenced to two
years in Lexington.  His wife was institutionalized, and his children were put in an orphanage and foster homes.             Paroled
in 1953, he felt he could not resume his old small-town practice because of the
scandal.  His wife had
disappeared.  He went to Chicago alone and went
into practice.  In 1954 the state
board revoked his license because of his conviction.  He continued to practice, intending to
appeal, but soon was arrested for possessing narcotics—without
a license he had no right to medicinal
narcotics.  He was sentenced to two years in the
Chicago House of Correction. 
Released in 1956, he found a job selling medicine to doctors.  “I made the round of
doctors’ offices,” he says. 
“I was a poor salesman. 
I had had a pretty good reputation myself, I’d been on all the
hospital staffs, and every time I went to a doctor as a drug salesman I’d
sit next to his desk and think, ‘I used to sit there.’”             A
man offered to introduce him to a nurse who could send abortion patients to
him.  He accepted, “to make a
living till I could get my license back.”             He
performed as many as four abortions a week, charging $300 each and splitting
with the nurse.  “I would
arrive at the nurse’s apartment. 
The patient would be there. 
I would examine her to see if she was in good health, how far along she
was, whether there were any contraindications, such as kidney disease, high
blood pressure, heart diseases.  I
would have everything sterilized.  I
would put her to sleep with intravenous Pentothal Sodium, then do a D and C.  I would take patients only up to three
months.  I’d call her every
four or five days and make a house call if necessary.  I never wore a mask or tried to
hide.”             He
estimates he performed 200 operations in two years.  Nearly all his patients were married.  Some were society women.  Some were show girls.  “The married ones didn’t
want any more children.  Some of the
single ones were girls that had been left in the lurch.  The strippers, it was a matter of
business with them.  One had had it
done eight times.”  His wife
came back, and they lived together off and on.  He was making $500 a week, spending most
of it on the night-club strippers.             In
October, 1958, he aborted an Italian woman, and she developed pneumonia.  Her mother, a devout Catholic, upon learning
of the abortion, called the police. 
Arrested and released on bond, Rosen continued to operate, though more
carefully, using a different apartment each time.  In August, 1959, a night-club girl sent
to him a man who said that his sister was pregnant,
that she had three children, that she nearly died bearing the last one fifteen
years earlier and that she wanted an abortion.  Rosen set his fee, $200, and next day
sent her to an apartment and aborted her. 
“I kept her there and called on her every day for four days
because I suspected peritonitis.  On
the fourth day when I arrived for my evening call, the police were
waiting.”  Her husband and
brother had called the police and taken her to a hospital.  Rosen had perforated her uterus and
bowel.             “It
was a slip,” he says. 
“Those things happen. 
I know a very good doctor who perforated the uterus while doing a legal
D and C.”  Rosen’s
patient died.  He was charged with
murder.  On trial, he did not deny
the abortion, but claimed it was justified by her advanced age and previous
difficulty in childbirth. 
Convicted, he was received at Joliet
penitentiary September 21, 1960, to serve four to fourteen years for
involuntary manslaughter and concurrently, one to four years for abortion.             Looking
back, Rosen says, “The trigger was that time in 1948 when my wife became
addicted.  Up to then we had a
well-organized home life. 
It’s a history of someone well-intentioned that’s gone
wrong.  I’m classified as a
criminal but it doesn’t seem
possible to me.  I never had any
criminal intent.  I never had the reputation of cheating
my patients.  I always tried to be
considerate of humanity.” 
When he is paroled, he hopes to have his license reinstated.  “I did have a good professional reputation at one time.  I was a member of quite a few
societies.  And if they give me a
chance to, I do want to go back to medicine.”   Next week John Bartlow Martin
explains the problem of ethical doctors who believe the present abortion laws
are unreasonably rigid.—The
Editors