Bay Area Abortion Rights

Largely, due to a campaign by the American Medical Association and other physicians' groups abortion became illegal in the United States during the second half of the 19th century. In 1850 California banned all abortion except when the woman's life was in danger. Soon after it became illegal to distribute information about birth control or abortion. Rather than stop abortions from happening, this criminalization led to unregulated, often unsafe "back-alley" abortion practices, which in turn led to the deaths of thousands of women.

Many faced jail time for simply spreading information. In 1929 for example, a labor activist in the San Francisco suburb of Redwood City was sentenced to three months imprisonment for handing out a birth control pamphlet to fellow workers. He proclaimed that keeping such information out of the hands of workers was "one of the greatest social crimes of today".

Since simply handing out information could lead to jail time, many doctors refused to even consider performing abortions. This criminalization of abortion made providing abortions a lucrative business. San Francisco’s most famous abortionist was Inez Burns. She opened her abortion clinic at 327 Fillmore Street in 1922, charging between $50 and $200 per operation, and performing up to 20 procedures a day. Obviously with such large numbers of women coming to Burns her operations was not much of a secret. She was able to operate in the same way as other vice and illegal interests did; by paying off the local police. When the city did raid her operation they were unable to find witnesses who were willing to testify against Inez. She was able to operate for over 40 years, becoming California’s most wealthy self-made woman.This included owning three houses in San Francisco and a horse ranch in Half-Moon Bay. In 1943 San Francisco elected a politically-ambitious district attorney, Pat Brown, who made arresting Burns one of his top priorities. Though the police raided her clinic numerous times and Brown brought her to count a number of times, he was not able to get a conviction until 1946, when Burns and her co-defendants were sentenced to prison. Brown continued to attempt to clean San Francisco of vice such as gambling and prostitution, and eventually became a two term governor of California. His son, Jerry Brown also became governor of California.

By the 1960s second-wave feminism was coming into prominence, as were abortion rights struggles. In 1961 the Society for Humane Abortion formed. It provided women with birth control and abortion information, including self-induced abortion. Because hospitals barred birth control advocates from talking to patients, the Society for Humane Abortion held publicized meetings in private homes. It also kept lists of doctors who would provide abortions, mostly in Mexico and Japan. Along with these lists was information for women on how to get a passport, where to go, how to bribe the police and how to get by without speaking the local language.

There were rare occurrences of abortions being performed by doctors in the United States, but this was a grey area. Doctors were allowed to perform abortions if the woman’s life was in danger. But even then doctors were hesitant, as their medical opinion would be scrutinized and they could face legal charges if it was found that the life of the woman was not truly in danger. In 1966 nine prominent San Francisco doctors were threatened with the loss of their medical licenses due to "professional misconduct"; providing abortions for women infected with rubella. This polarized the medical community, with supporters of the nine doctors forming the Citizens Defense Fund on Therapeutic Abortion. This group was made up of legal and medical professionals with the goal of defending the nine charged doctors. Supporters of the nine voiced their opinions throughout the country. The charges against the nine were eventually dropped, but the storm that the controversy created helped pass the California Therapeutic Abortion Act. This new law helped define what legal rights and boundaries physicians and pregnant women had in regards to abortion. Abortion reform was such a popular idea that conservative Governor Ronald Reagan was pressured into signing the law in 1967. By 1970 the American Medical Association voted in favor of supporting the legalization of abortion.

In 1976, three years after the Supreme Court ruled that abortion is a legal right, San Francisco General Hospital opened the cities first family planning clinic where abortions were one of the services provided. It operates to this day as the Women's Options Center, a part of the University of California, San Francisco.