In my research, I talked to women who told me that whether they arrived by bus, automobile, train, ferry or plane, they’d quietly ask other women, sometimes strangers on the street, “Know where that Burns woman lives?” Every woman seemed to know, and if they didn’t, they knew someone who did.Īt the time, the prevailing standard of enforcement was that abortion was a necessary evil with two mandatory components: The procedure had to be safe and it had to be discreet. Women came from around the corner and across the nation to Burns’ clinic. Word circulated, as it always does when your skill is specialized, in demand and illegal. In an era when women had few rights, Burns gave them the most basic. (When Burns started out, abortionists routinely took out thinly veiled advertisements in newspapers promoting their services.) Burns was considered a kind of public utility, only more reliable. While abortion was illegal during that entire period, the medical procedure hadn’t mushroomed into the divisive political issue it was to become. The Texas ban is likely to remain in effect for the foreseeable future.
Politics Supreme Court won’t speed up challenge to Texas abortion limits Hollywood studios pointed actresses her way. Physicians sent their patients to her, as did lawyers and pharmacists, who referred clients and customers. Her clinic was tacitly endorsed by nearly everyone up and down the state. The majority of Burns’ middle-class patients already had children and lacked the financial resources to feed another mouth. Between 19, she performed dozens of safe, sterile and hygienic abortions every week in her two-story clinic on lower Fillmore Street in San Francisco. She learned the procedure when she apprenticed in a physician’s office. Wade, Burns’ cautionary story underscores a basic, undeniable truth: Banning abortions will do little to stop women from having them.īurns, who wore couture fashions and had a closetful of 500 hats, was the state’s worst-kept secret. While the Supreme Court weighs whether to overturn Roe vs.
Burns lived in California and terminated more than 50,000 pregnancies when abortion was illegal across the U.S. For more than two decades, I researched the life of Inez Burns, one of America’s most successful abortion providers.
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