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Katherine J. Parkin, "The Abortion Market: Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Catherine Parkin about her book titled the Abortion Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. As this title suggests, this book is taking us back in time before the Roe v. Wade key decision to understand what abortion was like at that point. Because it's not like it didn't exist, right? This is really key to understand it did exist. And as I think this discussion is going to show, as the book shows, it was a pretty big deal in a lot of senses. I mean it was a big deal obviously for the women who used the service, but it was also a big deal economically. It was a big deal in terms of networks, in terms of advertising. The there's a whole bunch of strands of sort of social life, political life, media that maybe we don't realize. We're all sort of intertwined in this. And so there's a whole bunch of things I'm quite excited for us to discuss. Katherine, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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A
Oh, thanks so much for having Me.
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B
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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A
Sure. So I am a professor of history at Monmouth University in New Jersey in the United States, and I decided to write this book when I stumbled on an ad for an abortion directory in a newspaper that was published in 1971. And I was shocked. I thought that abortion in the past, before Roe v. Wade, was a really hidden and secretive kind of thing. And I really thought it was part of women's lives. And I didn't have any understanding that it was really public. I thought women. Women were talking in coded language. I interviewed one woman whose mother called it a dusting and cleaning, going in for a dnc. And so I really had no idea that abortions were being advertised everywhere and that they were big business. And so those things converged in kind of the realization that I had uncovered something that we didn't even note a question. And so it was exciting as it all came together to see it in this big picture.
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B
That's a very comforting introduction, I will say, because that is exactly what I sort of was assuming things looked like in this period until I came across your book and was like, whoa, okay. I definitely did not know all these things were happening. So obviously that intrigued me enough to read it, you enough to research this. There's definitely some things to get into here. So I think where I want to start, or at least go to next, are some of these big public aspects of it. And we'll get into some of the advertising and economics, I think. But perhaps as a starting place, there's some political debates going on here that I hadn't really realized were necessarily connected to abortion access around, for example, population control or eugenics, or even some questions around feminism. How are arguments around abortion related, for example, to, like, big public debates about the future of the population and demographic crises?
- [05:03]
A
This was a huge surprise to me. I really had no sense that this was what was driving the conversation and the legality of abortion. I, as a women's historian, had thought, you know, women were the ones who had help to make this happen, and they certainly do. But even the women who are involved, some of them are also driven by concerns around population control. And I really did not have that insight until I began to research. And in some ways, I was seeing it without seeing it. I would be researching, for example, at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and the people I was interviewing and the things I was reading would say that they had a hotline, you know, where you could call. And they shared it, the women's group, with an environmental group. And I didn't blink. I thought, oh, okay, you're sharing resources. You know, that didn't. Didn't strike me that these movements were aligned. And to the extent that they were aligned, the women's movement was really trying to fight for something that they saw as a feminist issue. The people fighting for abortion from a population control perspective were decidedly not feminist. And that was really shocking to discover that the goal of abortion access was really to ensure that people could have abortions to control the population. And. And some of their more, I'll call it extreme rhetoric was that if the population wouldn't do it willingly, that there would have to be some kind of imposition, putting birth control in the water and things like that. And so it really was a very popular movement to control the population. The group 0 population growth has about 30,000 members in this time period. And the women's movement has about 15,000 signed up members. You know, not just adherents, but people who join a group. And so it really is a big part of what's driving this discussion around abortion. One of the things that wealthy people are doing is funding the conversation. They're funding even saying the word abortion. They own newspapers, they're hiring columnists to write about it. They are encouraging the discourse, they're putting it in magazines. Margaret Mead is writing for Redbook monthly column. And, you know, more than a dozen of them center on population control. So it really is a concerted effort to talk about abortion, to normalize it as something that we should be talking about and considering. And they then fund the legal fight. And I again had no idea that these leaders, in trying to control the population, limit the population, were driving the financial fight to fund the legal studies, the scientific studies, and every other avenue to try to ensure that abortion was normalized in the discourse and embraced as a good idea.
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B
Yeah, this is a really interesting alliance to learn more about, especially, as you said, because it doesn't sound particularly feminist. In fact, it sounds like eugenics. Or is that going too far?
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A
This was another surprise. I really understood eugenics to be something that was verboten. The Nazis had, I hoped, done a good job of making eugenics something that we were ashamed of in the United States. And what I learned is that across the 20th century, and unfortunately into the 21st century, we had a very clear eugenics thread in the thinking of American people. And among the leaders in this effort to control the population, I found it somewhat helpful to have a list that I discovered of members of the American Eugenics Society. They were cataloged with their name and address and everything for their mailing labels for their journal, Social Biology. It became renamed after American Eugenics Quarterly. And that reflects kind of their effort to dress themselves up. They hired PR firms to not be quickly recognized as a eugenics group. And. But on that list are many of the leaders in the effort to bring about abortion access. And that was really shocking. It's not entirely clear to the extent that everyone was who was for population control. Well, let me just say it's clear that not everyone who was for population control was necessarily a eugenicist. I mean, I think that is. Is a very clear point to the extent that there's overlap for some that I struggled with a little bit more, and I tried only to assert it when I had clear evidence. The difficulty comes in them, as I said, dressing up their kind of politics. They move away from, for example, the kind of nasty, readily identifiable language that we've seen in the past in legal documents, quite court decisions and so on, of the people who they were sterilizing, for example. But I think it is still clear with the history of some of these leaders in this effort that they are emerging out of a eugenic past and into a population control present in terms of their actions.
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B
Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, obviously we don't want to kind of paint everyone with the same brush and overgeneralize it. So this sort of nuance is important. So thank you for helping us understand kind of where the overlaps are and the extent to which we can understand and navigate if we then think about what these efforts are doing. I mean, some of the numbers there in terms of members of the movement are pretty big. You mentioned money being involved in terms of normalizing ideas and getting the word out. Did this actually impact the availability of abortions?
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A
I think they absolutely did. I mean, and this is another difficulty is that for all of my condemnation and disapproval of their ideology, ultimately their efforts do create the legal apparatus that eventually gives us, for however long, five decades, Roe v. Wade, and help to establish all of the legal precedent. They funded the studies that were then cited in the decision. They are helping to support financial access. It really is across the board, their investment in making not only abortion available, but making it acceptable to the extent that they're able to in. In American culture.
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B
Okay, that definitely is helpful to understand and probably worth interjecting at this moment, kind of how big a market we're talking about that they're having an influence on. So how big was the abortion market when it was still technically illegal?
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A
The estimates at the time were that 1 million girls and women were seeking abortions each year. I've seen also the speculation that maybe as many as 2 million were looking. We're thinking about it, we're trying to find them. So the 1 million is really who was able to do it. So the numbers are tremendous and really suggest that a very high percentage of women knew of someone who'd had an abortion or themselves had had an abortion. I mean, those are really large numbers for the population.
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B
Yeah, those are definitely some very big numbers that are helpful to keep in mind as we discuss more in detail what that means. First of all, the point you just raised there in terms of the women who actually had abortions versus women seeking them, one of the reasons I would imagine there's a gap between those two numbers is wanting something doesn't necessarily mean you know about how to go get it. So how did women who wanted an abortion when it was illegal find out how to do it? Was this easily accessible information?
- [15:00]
A
For women who were looking for abortions, there were a number of paths. First, women often tried to self abort. This was the worst option, and it really never worked. It was incredibly dangerous and could be deadly. But it didn't stop people from still trying. Gloria Steinem, for example, describes jumping off the porch and taking mustard baths and so on. I mean, people were trying anything to end their pregnancies. But for the other women who did know they needed to seek out help, many turned to friends, many turned to their doctor. Many sought out the quiet ways in which they were encouraged to get information. They would ask a bellhop at a hotel, they would ask a taxi driver. They were trying to find people who might have information. Um, and it's only with legalization that they were able to look in the phone book and look in advertisements, to look in newspaper coverage which were telling them how to go about it, what kinds of words to use, where they could look, what cities were offering it, and so on. So it really is across the era before Roe, it really is a time where people are desperately looking, trying to get answers. And for many, they're really elusive without the connectivity to a professional class. For poor and working class families who didn't have a family doctor or a doctor they could trust to ask, they had tremendous risk. For wealthier women, they may well have had access to a doctor. As in New York, one doctor said, oh, all of my patients go to Puerto Rico. It's like A status symbol. And so it really ranged depending on race and class and location in terms of where women could find this access.
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B
I mean, that makes a lot of sense, especially, as you said, when connection. When connectivity was a lot harder and obviously travel was too. One group, however, that you didn't mention there, that seems like maybe they'd already have some ways around. This is women on college campuses, right? Those are locations where there's lots of connection and information running around. What kind of access to information did these women and girls have?
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A
I would say for them, too, even though there are a lot of them and they're together, the network to get access and information before legalization in New York in 1970 is still quite hidden and difficult. They do have it. They do have networks are sharing that information. But there are tremendous numbers of pregnancies. And this is actually a huge motivation for women on those campuses that they're outraged that their classmates, their roommates, are getting pregnant and being forced to drop out of college. And so without that access to abortion and without that kind of even awareness of it as a possibility, they're only seeing dropping out and continuing the pregnancy as their only option. So as the legalization takes hold in New York, this opens the opportunity for college newspapers to provide this information. And every campus is clamoring for it. Southern schools, big state schools, small private schools, everyone wants this information. And they want it on all male campuses, too. And a lot of colleges were still all male. And even in those schools, they're running abortion ads and talking about abortion in ways that are trying to give the information. College campuses like Cornell create an alliance with the local Planned Parenthood. They're overwhelmed with the number of people who are seeking this. I interviewed someone at Penn State University, which is a huge state school in Pennsylvania, and they were wrapped around the health center trying to get birth control. So both things are happening. People are seeking contraceptives, and they're seeking abortions, and they're really pressing each other in terms of women's groups and environmental groups, but they're also pressing their administrations to provide to help them to stay in school. And they really see it in the. In this early 1970s as a right to get an education and to be able to access reproductive control for themselves.
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A
I think it's a really important point and, and maybe I'll use it to kind of spell out some of the costs that are involved before legalization in New York helps to LOW so before 1970 and before July 1st of 1970, the average cost of an abortion was $1,000. This is a stunning amount of money. It would be a lot of money today. And in 19, in the 1960s, it was the equivalent of about $10,000. It was an enormous amount of money. And that's just the abortion. That's nothing about travel, needing to stay in a hotel, the pregnancy test, the cost of the phone calls, every bit of the process of getting an abortion cost money. And particularly for college students, the average cost of tuition, room and board was about $1,300. So you're talking about your whole year's tuition and going to college as what you're going to spend for an abortion. It was astronomical, the cost for these women. And even when the costs drop, as you point out, traveling someplace else adds on additional costs and can press that costs upwards of $1,000. And so the ability to raise that kind of money, you can't just wait more tables. You've got to have the money and get it fast and get there, because the risks and the costs and the consequences as the pregnancy continues are dire. And so the women are aware of this. And with legalization, women and men began to organize and try to Create mechanisms to raise the money so that women can borrow it and get the abortion. I interviewed several people who worked to create abortion loan funds. Some of them did so by getting donations for their funds. Other schools, like the University of Maine and Duke University, worked to use student fees. They really saw it as an unfair situation for students who couldn't afford it, whereas wealthier students would be able to get the money. And so they really wanted to empower the poorest among them to be able to access abortion. And so they're. They're registering their banks with local, legitimate banks that, you know, name brand banks. This is not a hidden operation. They are working with their student body. They get approval to do this, they vote to do it. And so there are formal mechanisms. There are also informal mechanisms of creating what one person called a feminist kitty. Pooling your money together so that if, if someone in your group got pregnant and needed an abortion, you would together recognize it could be you and you would put in money to help your friend. And so there are all manner of ways in which people are raising the money through their networks and through their schools. There are also banks in Iowa that are publicly declaring that you can come and get an abortion loan there. And so the openness with which people were accessing money, sometimes, of course, through kind of hidden mechanisms of getting a vacation loan and then using that to, you know, take your vacation, as it were, to Puerto Rico to get an abortion. But these were expensive to take bank loans in this, in the early 1970s is a time of economics recession and difficulty, and they were able to charge exorbitant rates. And so it was quite costly for people to get the money in many instances.
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B
Yeah, those are some big numbers. Even today, as you said, and especially if we go back in time, the numbers get a lot bigger. So not surprised to hear about these sort of many different efforts going on to try and surmount that. But let's say, for the sake of argument, obviously you mentioned earlier, the market here is pretty big. The number of women who are able to access abortion is pretty big. So let's think about those women who have figured out where to get it from and what they need to do, have figured out how to pay for it. Where are they going? We've mentioned New York, we've mentioned Puerto Rico. Is that. Are those kind of the two main destinations? If so, why there? Like, what's determining where people are able to go?
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A
The answer is, I say at one point in the book, everyone thought that they were the abortion capital of their area. And What I mean by that is that there were abortions everywhere. There were people providing abortions everywhere. It didn't matter whether you were in rural Montana or South Carolina or wherever you were, there were providers. What I study in the book, beyond those kind of smaller scale individuals, and they're largely people doing it in their homes or in some kind of setup like that, are the bigger destinations where there are multiple people kind of converged in one space. And the first place that people are headed in the 50s is Cuba. With the revolution there, the doctors flee and many of them go to Miami. So that becomes a city with a large abortion presence, provider presence, and many of them go to Puerto Rico. And so early on, those are good destinations for people that are seeking them. And there are. They're pretty close to the East Coast. And I think for many of us studying this, we've kind of only understood there to be kind of Puerto Rico and then the border of Mexico, the border towns. And there's many excellent studies of those border towns and what it meant to go to Tijuana or other smaller cities along the border. What I discovered is that the businesses that crop up to provide abortions referrals and get women to abortions are sending them to Mexico City and they're flying. And so that was a big surprise that this was not something I think we had seen in understanding where women were going before New York legalizes. The other two big places that were known to be places women could get abortions were England, specifically London and Japan. And I do think and know that women, American women were going to those countries. It was difficult to do. So they were both expensive places to get to, and for Americans, they were not getting, you know, health care through the English system. They were paying the outside fee. And so it was quite costly. It was also quite costly in terms of time because not only was it a long flight and so you're losing kind of a day to travel on each side, but the procedure there was to be hospitalized, to be in the clinic. And so it was a much more involved process. Japan, too, was a very quick process. They had a tremendous amount of experience having been providing abortions to their population since the 1950s and had become that was their preferred kind of practice of contraceptive, but it was very difficult and that the government was not interested in encouraging people to show up. So it really was quite limited, the number of people flying to these other countries. In terms of the United States, with legalization in New York, it obviously becomes the destination. But there are other efforts across the country driven largely by population control, to advance the effort to relax the laws regulating abortion. And this was a big movement called abortion reform. And the two states that really are successful in doing so are California, which I think many people expect to be one of the states that would have played this role. I found some contradictory things. They are doing a large number of abortions over time, but it's only late in the game that their number. Not game that this is a game, but late in the time period that they're. That they're able to really expand the number of providers. And they do so through entrepreneurs who are taking over kind of failing hospitals and reimagining them as moneymakers to do abortions. And so it's with the kind of entrepreneurial enterprise, particularly in Los Angeles, that that takes off. The other place was a big surprise, and that is the state of Kansas. And I would suggest that Kansas takes off especially because of population control, but also because they're aware that there are so many women having illegal abortions and dying and being injured and so on. And there is some real compassion, I think, there. And they're able to convince the legislature to allow them to offer what are called therapeutic abortions without restrictions, meaning other people from other states can come and have them. And. And what this means is that they're able to serve all of the surrounding states. And so I really see Kansas as kind of an island and with all the other states around them seeking abortions there, and they do something really important. They start to offer these abortions, and hospitals across Kansas do them. It's not just one. It's not just in the one big city or something like that. They're being offered across the state. And that was a really important model to normalize it just being available. It just should be healthcare and you should be able to get it. And it was a really significant shift in abortion access. And it gave people an opportunity to. To again cut down on travel times, to have quicker access and therefore more affordable. The final place is also maybe not as well known, and that is Washington, D.C. and I hadn't really understood its role in serving the South. Southerners are much more likely to go to Washington because it's close to them, again closer proxim, but also less foreign or alien to go to New York than less alien or foreign to go to D.C. than to have to go further north up to New York. And so there was some familiarity there for them to go to Washington, which is able to set up early abortion clinics and serve large numbers of People not only in, in Washington D.C. and the surrounding metro area, but across the south as well.
- [35:28]
B
These are some really interesting places for abortion access to be more available. What if anything, sort of links them? Like why dc, New York and Kansas? Why not? I don't know. I'm trying to think of other, like a particular Richmond, Virginia and Iowa and Maine. Like, like do we see any sorts of similarities that make it make sense why these places and all others?
- [35:53]
A
I think if we look to legalization, I think the concept of an island is helpful. The idea that you're separated from access as Hawaii and Alaska were they legalized early in 1970 and they restrict to anyone who's not from that state for 30 days. So you can't just fly in and fly out and they're meeting the need of people in their states. I think the same principle holds true for Kansas. As I said, I think the other three examples of California, D.C. and New York are really emerging out of this decades long effort to try to reform the laws. They have been trying and this is all coming from the population control movement. Just to bring us back to that point that particularly in California you have a real concerted effort, including by doctors to try to legalize abortion. The environmental movement is also burgeoning in California. It's a vulnerable state, as we know, to smog, to fire, to earthquakes there. And so they're particularly interested and attentive to environmentalism. And the people that are concerned about overpopulation, as they characterized it, really have a strong hold on a number of people playing a role in this state. The effort to meet the needs of its citizens in terms of preventing maternal death, in terms of preventing the, you know, the consequences of illegal abortions are also playing out in these cities. And I think they're places of leadership in so many aspects of our economy, of our medical profession and in our political profession, political world that the three of them, I think it makes sense that there are places where these laws and practices are being challenged.
- [38:38]
B
Hmm. That's helpful to understand what the sort of, I suppose strands are that link these sorts of places and they come up in these islands, as it were. I think one thing that has been very clear though throughout our whole discussion is kind of so many elements of all of this is surprising. Was surprising to me to read about. Was surprising for you to research. Is there anything else that really surprised you in figuring all of this out that we haven't mentioned yet that you want to include?
- [39:04]
A
I will say that I actually, even though I was surprised, my surprise kind of built over time that population control and eugenics were so central. And I actually added the chapter, chapter one on Population Control and its role, because I didn't, even though I was seeing it, I almost couldn't believe it in terms of its importance and centrality, as you said, in weaving all these threads together. And so I just, I guess that is, it still was a surprise, even after I'd essentially thought I'd written the book and had to go back and add it to really fully understand and then rethink everything I had said in the rest of the book as I went.
- [39:59]
B
That's, I think, a really interesting insight into the sort of behind the scenes of putting this all together. So thank you for sharing that with us.
- [40:05]
A
Us.
- [40:06]
B
And in fact, that is the theme as well of my final question. I know obviously this book has only just come out, so this might be mildly unfair, but if you are willing to continue to pull back the curtain just a bit into your own processes, are you continuing to work on this sort of thing for your next project, or do you have any current or upcoming work you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [40:30]
A
I am continuing. I mean it. I learned so much and I'm interested in many of the people that I discovered and, you know, the, the importance of their role. And I my next, one of my next projects is going to be about changing attitudes toward abortion because into the 21st century we continue to have strong majorities of Americans who believe in abortion access, and yet we're facing all of these restrictions. I thought it would be helpful to go back and look at how these individuals and organizations tried to change attitudes about abortion and what it was that got us to that majority of believing that abortion is a human right and not something that should just be bandied about, but something that should just be guaranteed. And so I'm going to be pursuing, you know, the, the ideas that, that help to shape that.
- [41:31]
B
Well, that certainly sounds interesting. And for listeners who want to engage with the ideas we've been discussing here, of course they can read the book titled the Abortion Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Katherine, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [41:48]
A
Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was great fun.
- [41:57]
B
Sam.