"How the LAPD abortion squad went after women and doctors in pre-Roe era" Front page, LA Times

[Hekate]

The array of newspaper clippings from that era hits you in the face. The dead women’s photos from better days, names, personal info — all there. Actual doctors describes as “butchers” along with the amateurs who didn’t know what they were doing.

I got a screen shot but couldn’t figure out how to get it here.

Cross-posted in Women’Rights and GD

🌺 Hekate


https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?token=42e23962a5d74614be16bae3d62d13e7&utm_id=92075&sfmc_id=1778350&edid=891f1f52-2fe9-4fd8-a818-f63155a467c3

COLUMN ONE
How the LAPD abortion squad went after women and doctors in pre-Roe era

Los Angeles police officers boarded the yacht with guns drawn.

The Westerly had been under surveillance for two months and came with a sordid history. The bodies of a wealthy couple were found after an onboard blast; their daughter was acquitted of murder. Now officers suspected the vessel of being the mobile headquarters of an abortion ring.

Danny Dyer would steer the nearly 50-foot yacht out on the water. His wife would assist another man, who didn’t have a license to practice medicine, as he performed the procedures. They usually charged $450 per operation.

As officers moved in for an arrest that chilly winter morning, Dyer pulled a gun.

“Don’t try it,” Det. Danny Galindo warned Dyer as he raised his firearm. “I’ll kill you.”

It was Feb. 24, 1960, and the abortion squad had arrived.

Housed within the Los Angeles Police Department’s homicide division, the detail investigated what were often known then as “illegal operations.”

Officers on the squad questioned young women who had gone to the hospital for antibiotics after an abortion and were reported to law enforcement. They interviewed loved ones of women who died from botched operations. They went on stakeouts and kept dossiers on hundreds of providers of illegal abortions. They posed as boyfriends or brothers to trap people into confessing.

[niyad]

1. There are words, but most of them would net me a visit from the suits. What

vicious, despicable, woman-hating monsters.


Thank you so much for this appalling information.

[Hekate]

2. I think it's important for people here to read the article all the way through...

I recently responded to someone here at DU who wanted to know why women were not speaking out and why only doctors were speaking out.

I felt such a sense of exhaustion when I read that. I gave a very brief answer, and then gave them the link to this group and begged them to please just start reading.

One thing I wanted to draw people’s attention to is how at least one cop saw it — it was The Law. That, I guess, makes it simple.

Then, concomitantly, there were mentions of service manuals regarding all aspects of crime and law enforcement related to those crimes. Deep, deep, in the archives, are records of that.

In the moment of reading this article, it’s weird how I saw the cops’ role. They can fulfill their duties well or ill (and the ones who are brutes fill the headlines these days) — but in this instance I find my wrath goes to the men who write the laws and the judges who are complicit in ratifying and justifying egregiously bad law.

From the article at link:

The police were relieved when it became legal for women to have abortions and they didn’t have to pursue those cases,” said Margie Galindo. “It opened them up to other pressing duties.”

Inside the Los Angeles Police Museum in Highland Park… There’s no visible sign here that an abortion squad ever existed.
LAPD Sgt. Dylan Wells, a police museum volunteer and amateur historian, came across mention of the detail for the first time last year, while researching Josephine Serrano Collier.
A remnant of that time lives on in the LAPD homicide manual, which was most recently revised in 2021. In a chapter titled “Unusual Circumstances,” methods used in abortions are listed, including “the production of a toxic state” and “a mechanical action intended to directly harm the embryo.”
“Murder, as a result of criminal abortion, is practically non-existent under current law and practice,” a paragraph reads. But the information was still being provided “for its value in other death investigations because of the possibility of a change in the law, and for those unique occasions when an unlawful abortion may be performed.”
The way Wells sees it, police must “adapt to something that changes, that includes the criminalization and decriminalization of an act in society.”
After the fall of Roe vs. Wade, Tom Sherman, a Delaware journalist, dug into his collection of antique and vintage historical documents — specifically searching for old New York Police Department manuals he’d rescued from a dumpster a decade earlier.
The NYPD had formed its own squad after an abortion ring bust in the mid- 1950s. A 1968 training bulletin titled “ABORTIONS” detailed the use of wiretaps and tails placed on women visiting a doctor’s office for an abortion.
“It was this weird moment,” he said, “of digging it out and looking into the future by reading about the past.”.