There will be abortions
NEW ORLEANS, La. The summer of 1963 is fast approaching in the Crescent City. The lives of two women are about to intersect, with a tragic outcome.
A 19-year-old college student faced with a dilemma not so rare among young women is about to meet up with an 84-year-old woman who runs a not-so-rare lucrative illegal operation.
The dilemma which faces the young woman is created by an unwanted pregnancy. The endeavor in which the elderly woman engages is an abortion operation.
The tragedy itself about to unfold was not an entirely rare one… not in this period of time.
As it has happened through hundreds of years, there are women from all geographies and all walks of life who seek to terminate unwanted pregnancies. And… where there is a need, there are those who step in to fill that need. Basic supply and demand.
Where demand is involved, supply always falls in line. The criminal classification of abortions neither removes the demand nor the supply for them, but rather only removes “safeguards” for them. Criminalizing abortions makes the procedures themselves inherently dangerous. Outside of the bounds of our laws, proper safeguards are absent from a medical procedure which should require proper facilities, knowledge and care. And yet, the fact is… there will be abortions.
Back in the 50s and 60s, supplying abortions was lucrative enough that abortions themselves were listed as the third largest racket of the day, behind gambling and narcotics. (This, according to a three-part series I found in The Saturday Evening Post , 1961). Abortionists were rarely physicians. Too much risk, doctors reasoned. Instead, abortionists could be anyone at all… but whoever they were, they less often than so had any signficant degree of medical training.
Police once called abortionists mechanics , according to the aforementioned Saturday Evening Post feature penned by John Bartlow Martin.
They (abortionists) may be anything… They regard their work as do other professional criminals— a lucrative job with risk. - Saturday Evening Post , 1961
The mechanic in this case I write about was Anna Corrine Richardson Sharp. She is how I came about this story, after deviating from an entirely different story I was seeking.
In brief summary, recent discoveries in my own life regarding my adoption in the late 1960s left me trying to connect some dots in my world, which led me to the archives of The Times Picayune , the leading daily newspaper in New Orleans. Whilst looking in a 1966 issue, I took notice of a woman appealing her prison sentence for the death of a teenager following a botched abortion in 1963.
The report immediately caught my attention and sidetracked my initial research intent. While the irony of my quest for information involving an adoption jumping tracks for a quest for information regarding an abortion didn’t escape me, timing was mostly responsible for my keen interest.
It so happened that the date of my search was precisely one day after news sources reported a leaked opinion of the U. S. Supreme Court. This leak set the stage for the impending dismantling of Roe v. Wade, the half-century old ruling which gave constitutional protection to women seeking abortions. Thus, fresh on my mind was the question of implications for women in America once abortions were no longer legally allowed across the nation.
I had ideas, I had thoughts… as do we all. But, delving into this took me down a deep, dark rabbit hole I didn’t expect… a rabbit hole exposing the very real dangers women faced when they were forced to go “underground” to have their pregnancies terminated for whatever the reason they may have had at that time in their lives.
The “Mechanic”: Anna Corrine Sharp
Anna Sharp was one of at least six abortionists I found in New Orleans during the 1960s, by looking at news reports on arrests of persons performing abortions. Only one of the six was actually a physician. I feel confident there were more abortionists, but these were the ones I’m guessing who were easiest to find for a young lady in a desparate situation.
Sharp herself had possibly performed hundreds of abortions in a little over 10 years’ time. Who knows this number and who ever will know? Police testified in Court that she “was one of the better known abortionists in town.” She had been arrested on abortion charges at least four times before 1963, but each time she simply moved her place of operation and continued her racket.
The demand remained, and thus… the supply was barely interrupted. I found that other abortionists continued on as well in spite of arrests. It was not an easily-deterred racket.
An arrest in 1957 led to a three-year prison sentence for Sharp, but that sentence was suspended and then later commuted by La. Gov. Earl K. Long. The district judge who suspended the sentence did so because of Sharp’s age, which at the time was listed as 76.
Age never deterred her, however, time would tell. Neither did the threat of prison.
I was curious about Anna Sharp and wondered if I could find any visible path to her becoming an abortionist. I found she was a life-long resident of New Orleans, born in or around 1880 (reports differ give or take two years). She was one of six children born to her parents, also native New Orleanians. She married a police office and the couple had two children.
One of her children passed away early, though I was unable to find any record of him or her and concluded he or she must have died in infancy. Anna’s husband died in 1949. Looking at Census data, I found only one profession attributed to her, which was in 1920 when she was listed as a “midwife.”
Her first arrest for performing an abortion was in 1952, less than three years after she was widowed.
Her son, Stanley, appears to have never married and was documented to have lived with her through much of his life and to be usually unemployed. On the occasion of at least two of her arrests, he was charged also with being involved in the abortions.
The Stories Matter
It was in May 1963 that the teenager in this case died following an abortion by Sharp. I became especially curious about the story of this young lady… who she was, anything. Her life was needlessly lost, and it was a tragedy which struck my emotions.
I soon realized that women who died during or after abortions were not necessarily identified publicly by name, even though their cases would be often be tried as homicides. I can guess this was because there was a sad degree of shame for the fact that the now deceased woman had been getting an abortion.
The dilemma facing the young woman with an unwanted pregnancy indeed must have been unimaginable… the fear of the illegal nature of what she was faced with having to do … and the physical danger to her well being and even her life.
The danger. The shame. The darkness of it all. That occured to me painfully.
Still, I find myself wishing their stories were told then and if not then , then at least now as we edge closer to repeating a dark past of underground abortions. Their stories do matter. Because their stories are moving. Their stories are real. Their stories are, indeed, history. A history that we are dooming ourselves to repeat.
Thousands of women are estimated to have died each year from abortions. In a widely published 1963 newspaper article entitled, “Illegal Abortion Like Playing Russian Roulette,” (written by Martin and Marcia Abramson), annual abortions were estimated to be between 750,000 and two million. Deaths each year from abortions were estimated to be approximately 5,000.
I have seen these figures repeated in other articles I came across in the 1960s, but I don’t put a huge amount of stock in them because there simply weren’t any formal records maintained regarding abortions when they were illegal. In New Orleans, during a 5-year period of time in the 1960s, I found published record of four women who had died following abortions, and several women who were seriously injured.
In 1969, the homicide division of the New Orleans Police Department reportedly handled five abortion cases. In Louisiana during 1968, six abortion-related deaths were reported by the state Department of Health and Hospitals, but this figure was just “the tip of the iceberg,” according to then Department Director Dr. Andrew Headmeg. “Abortion deaths are generally reported in other terminology,” he said.
Whatever the case… and let’s just say we think of numbers far fewer than the widely reported estimates… When hundreds of thousands of women risk their lives each year in order to preserve their futures or for whatever their reasons may have been, and each year a few hundred ot more of these women are lost forever, _the stories matter. _
June Wall
By following the information that I knew: the date of the young woman’s death was May 8, 1963, at Tuoro Infirmary in New Orleans, and the victim was listed only as “a 19-year-old coed,” from Harvey, Louisiana (on the “West Bank” of New Orleans), I found in the May 9 death notices of The Times Picayune : “June Wall, 19, Tuoro Infirmiry.” The following day, a full obituary was posted for June Emily Wall. It stated she died at 1 a.m., but did not give a cause of death. A search online found her gravesite, but little else initially.
Along with Anna Sharp’s manslaughter arrest and her son being arrested as principal in the case, Wall’s boyfriend was also charged in the case. He was charged as being a material witness. (The charges against him were later dismissed). I found that his address listed was located immediately off of the campus of Tulane, which led me to look through the pages of Tulane’s yearbook from 1963 to see if I could find June Wall. I did. She was listed as a Freshman at Newcomb, Tulane’s elite, private coordinate school for women.
Once I had a name and connection to Tulane, I searched online again and found a Tulane alumni newsletter in 2014, in which the writer had the same curiousities as I regarding the identity of the victim. She explained that while she was attending a Tulane class reunion (in 2013), she had heard discussion of a student death in 1963 from an abortion. The author, Gabriela Betancourt, sought the victim’s identity and reached the same conclusion … June Wall’s life had been claimed by this abortion.
According to news reports from The Times Picayune , Wall’s boyfriend took her to Sharp’s house at the 2000 block of Esplanade on Friday, May 3, back again on Saturday, May 4, then again on Sunday, May 5 and once again on Monday, May 6. During this period of time, Sharp performed several operations on Wall.
“The police and district attorney’s office allege that Mrs. Sharp performed several operations on the girl between May 3 and May 6 at Mrs. Sharp’s home, 2221 Esplanade,” according to The Times Picayune.
Because of the unskilled nature of illegal abortions, multiple operations were not necessarily uncommon for the pregnancy to be successfully terminated.
“Some women abort more easily than others,” Dr. Howard Brady stated during a 1960s murder trial of another New Orleans abortionist, explaining why multiple trips were made by the victim in this particular case.
Sharp was paid $300 for the abortion, Wall’s boyfriend would later tell police.
June Wall was taken to Tuoro Infirmary in the early morning hours of Wednesday, May 8. She was pronounced dead upon arrival at 12:30 a.m. She had been hemorrhaging and went into shock before arrival at the hospital, according to the parish coroner’s report.
During the subsequent investigation, numerous instruments allegedly used in abortions were seized by police from Sharp’s house. Some of the instruments had the initials “RRR” scratched into them… markings that authorities later concluded were made by a detective involved in a previous abortion case against Sharp. According to then-District Attorney Jim Garrison, a district judge ordered the instruments be returned to Sharp after a previous arrest.
Underground Networks
Wall and her boyfriend most likely came across Sharp pretty much by asking around, as was the way most women looking had to find an abortionist during this time. It was a frightening, confusing process with few if any safeguards. In some cities, more organized underground networks were eventually developed, according to The Saturday Evening Post feature series which delved into these networks.
In New Orleans, however, (and all of Louisiana for that matter) there were only scattered, informal “networks” for finding an abortionist, which further depleted any sort of reliability if you could even say there was reliability in any sort of black market.
If there were “qualified abortionists” (namely, physicians), they were deep underground and intentionally difficult for the general public to find… part of the process. In other words, you had to know someone who knew someone. Having access to safe abortions wasn’t something that women generally were afforded without having the right connections. And the right connections were intentionally very elusive.
For young women like Wall, it is a terrible truth that they were willing to take severe risk to their lives to terminate their pregnancies.
You wonder why they take the chance, but you have to consider the mental outlook of a desperate girl… When someone says, ‘I can get you an abortion,’ that’s all they want to hear. They don’t give a damn about the abortionist’s credientials” - unnamed law enforcement source quoted in The Saturday Evening Post series entitled, “Abortion,” 1961.
Under time pressures and feelings of despair, Wall probably had to act hastily on what was likely her frenzied search for an abortionist. If she had not been under duress and the better options (if there were any) had not been so deep underground, she probably would have passed on Sharp just based on her age alone.
Even the “System” itself seemed to understand the dilemma presented to the innocent woman desiring to terminate a pregnancy… a dilemma which itself was created by the criminal classification of abortions. In a 1964 advertisement sponsored by the Office of the Orleans District Attorney, the most serious crimes in the New Orleans area were listed as “Murder and Rape, Armed Robbery, Abortion, and Narcotics”. In describing the offense of Abortion, the advertisement states:
“Abortionists engage in one of the most vicious rackets in our society. An abortionist makes money by taking advantage of bewildered young women who are faced with the prospect of becoming unwed mothers. The danger to the life of a woman so unfortunate as to fall prey to an abortionist, as well as the viciousness of the racket itself, was pointed out by two recent tragedies (referring to Wall’s death and another fatality of a young woman).”
The fact that these words **** come from the office of the prosecutor of the largest district in the State of Louisiana **** is stunning . This one sentence speaks volumes :
An abortionist makes money by taking advantage of bewildered young women who are faced with the prospect of becoming unwed mothers.
The desparation of June Wall’s situation can further be illustrated by the fact that she had to return to Sharp’s home three subsequent times, as surgery after surgery failed.
Abortions, by their haphazard and unregulated nature, were often performed out of kitchens or bathrooms in houses, in backs of “cover” offices, in detached buildings such as enclosed garages… all sorts of undesireable locations for surgery. Sterlilizing equipment, oxygen, plasma, a nurse were not generally present. Anesthesists certrainly weren’t on site. Dangers posed by illegal abortions included infection, uncontrollabe hemorrhaging, perforating of the uterus, and air embolism.
Adding to the trauma, abortions were excrutiatingly painful without the use of anesthesia or sedatives, and without proper post-care.
The most common method of abortion was a dilation and curettage (D and C), where an instrumet (speculum) is inserted in the vagina to dilate the cervix, then another instrument (curette) is used to scrape the products of conception out of the uterus. Because the pregnant uterus is soft, bleeding is common yet there is no way to control it in the settings abortionists utilized to perform the operations.
Injury and death were not the only risks women took with abortions. I found numerous instances nationwide where the abortionists also sexually assaulted these women. Locally, in New Orleans, I discovered in 1964 archives at least one abortionist prosecuted (and convicted) on rape charges alongside abortion charges. Russell Longest, 43, would deliver a heavy dose of barbituates and then rape or “commit indecencies” on women who came to him, according to testimony presented in Court.
Left to Die
June Wall must have suffered horribly in the day and a half after the last operation was performed on her. Her last visit to Sharp’s house was sometime on Monday, May 6. She probably became very ill soon after her last operation. Her boyfriend did not take her to the hospital until early Wednesday, between midnight and 1 a.m. By the time she arrived, she had died.
Adding to the tragedy is the possibility that if she would have gone to the hospital earlier, she might have been saved. But even to consider going to a hospital would have been a frightening dilemma itself.
I found at least three published accounts where women who used New Orleans abortionists were saved after suffering injuries that could have been lethal. The fact was, time was critical. Yet, the hesitation to seek medical care in spite of agony, suffering and obvious threat to life sadly was part of the whole ugly process. One 24-year-old woman in New Orleans died almost three weeks after her abortion. Though her last of multiple operations was on or about March 1, 1964, she wasn’t brought to the hospital until March 20. She died 19 hours after arrival.
The resistance, one could reason, was with understable reason. Because there was a reasonable fear of legal and social consequences, many waited to seek professional care until it was too late.
The shame. The danger. The darkness of it all.
Back to Basics: Supply and Demand
From all I have gathered in my barely scratching-the-surface research, there weren’t ever shortages of shady abortionists. There were, however, shortages of competent surgeons performing abortions in qualified settings, but again, that is the nature of the criminalization.
As with any criminal enterprise, it took a lot to stop an abortionist from engaging in the lucrative trade they had discovered. Anna Sharp, for instance and as mentioned earlier, kept on keeping on after multiple arrests and even after jail time. She had been arrested for severely injuring a 22-year-old Alexandria, Louisiana woman during an abortion less than three months prior to June Wall’s death.
Time told that even the manslaughter conviction involving Wall’s death did not stop Sharp.
She was convicted for Wall’s death in October 1963, and was sentenced to three years behind bars. However, while out of jail on bond during an appeals’ case, Sharp continued her racket. She and her son were arrested again on abortion charges just shy of one year after Wall’s death, for severely injuring a 27-year-old woman from a neighboring parish. The victim, who had been admitted to an area hospital in serious condition, told police that Stanley Sharp escorted her to his home in Abita Springs (45 miles from New Orleans), where the abortion was performed.
Just looking at New Orleans alone, there were always abortionists around. Juliette Pailet, Mary Lou “Honey Day” Hawkins, Ivy Boyett, Frances Welch, Russell Longest. One might cease operation for a while, but then they would come back, or another would enter the scene in their place, or two others. It was like “whack a mole,” one police detective noted in The Saturday Evening Post series.
Making abortions illegal doesn’t make them go away. What criminalizing them does do is determine what kind of abortions happen and whether women will be punished through pain, suffering or even death for having them.
Whether abortions are safe or dangerous depends on whether they are protected by law or criminalized. They are going to happen, regardless.
There will be abortions.
And in the absence of legal protections, there will be lives needlessly lost.
