Abortionist

May 1, 1995
This compelling study of abortion as practiced before Roe v. Wade legalized it in 1973 focuses on the skillful, doctor-trained, compassionate Ruth Barnett, who allegedly performed 40,000 illegal operations between 1918 and 1968 without losing a patient. An empathetic Solinger (Wake Up Little Susie) records Barnett's career and life against the backdrop of the Depression and WWII-especially busy times for willing abortionists among physicians, nurses and midwives, along with ``back alley practitioners'' often employed by racketeers who exploited antiabortion laws. Portland, Oregon's ``Queen of Abortionists,'' Barnett practiced openly in her clinic until post-WWII ``crime hysteria'' forced abortion into the shadows. Barnett, 74 and suffering from melanoma, was released from her third prison term shortly before her death in 1969. Photos not seen by PW.

September 1, 1994
The abortionist, Ruth Barnett, had an abortion herself as a teenager in 1911. This experience led her eventually into a 50-year career in which she performed some 40,000 abortions. Solinger has drawn on Barnett's unpublished memoir and diaries, her daughter Maggie's memoir, and many interviews to produce a lively and graphic account of abortion from the time when it was illegal but overlooked on into the 1950s and 1960s, when it was not only illegal but prosecuted. As an assistant to accomplished abortionists before she started out on her own, Barnett learned her business well. She developed a large and attractive clinic in an office building in downtown Portland, Oregon. Some 80 percent of her patients were referred by physicians (Barnett did not have an M.D.), and her lifetime earnings amounted to $17,000,000. But after World War II, she was in court and jail several times. Besides limning her career, Solinger shows how and why attitudes toward abortions and abortionists changed. ((Reviewed September 1, 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)