Letters to the editor poured in deep into January, bubbling with praise and outrage and frank evaluations of relations between the sexes. Another letter, under the title “Bring the Husbands to Book,” raised the issue of rape. Still another, from a female doctor, said patients had asked her for abortions three hundred times in her first year of practice. A doctor who didn’t sign his name confessed that the Girl Reporter’s entreaties might have swayed him. He had turned a woman away, only to be called to her family’s house days later, after she had killed herself. “It is our duty to preserve life whenever possible. Did I do it?” he asked.
Dr. Sarah Hackett Stevenson, who had refused the Girl Reporter an abortion, wrote in a letter to the editor that the burden of parenthood should be shared: “The social order that permits a father to disown his child without the loss of public esteem is the very social order that permits a mother to destroy her child. Destruction is the mother’s only method of disowning.” One way to make men face consequences, another female physician suggested, would be to outlaw sex out of wedlock.
The December 17, 1888, meeting of the Chicago Medical Society overflowed Parlor 44 of the massive castle of the Grand Pacific Hotel. Attendees waited, perhaps jostling, perhaps impatient, perhaps shoved into the hall, through debate on new members, through a paper on “A Novel Treatment of Gonorrhea” and a display of specimens of pathological lesions resulting from typhoid fever.
Finally, they carved into the meat of the meeting: the claims unfolding in the Chicago Times over the past week. The paper implicated many society members, including the president, Dr. Etheridge. According to the published story, he had told the Girl Reporter, when she asked for an abortion, “I don’t handle such cases. . . . You know it is lawbreaking,” and sent her to see a man at the corner of Wabash and Harmon Court. The very day of the meeting, the Times started publishing names and addresses of doctors under the headings “Physicians who would commit abortion” and “Physicians who would recommend others who would commit abortion.”
No one knew who would be named in the next issue. Tempers flared. The doctors must have been running through all their recent patient encounters in their heads. Some suspected a doctor was behind the whole thing, colluding with the Times to put competing physicians out of business. A Dr. Franks insisted the society needed to support its members, ignoring “what any woman might say who went sneaking around like a snake, trying to make a reputation.” Her disguise and ambition made her inherently untrustworthy. A medical journal suggested, sneeringly, that she told her sad story with “many a pearly tear trembling on her pretty little eyelids.” On the other hand, Dr. N. S. Davis said, if no one was held to account, the whole series became just a big advertisement for abortionists listed.
In the end, the Judiciary Committee was instructed to investigate three doctors only: E. H. Thurston, F. A. Stanley, and C. C. P. Silva. The case against the society president was dismissed with a unanimous vote in his support.
Earlier, Etheridge had met with a cooler reception at the newspaper office, where he’d gone to justify his actions, maybe to have the Chicago Times make a correction. When he explained that he only referred the Girl Reporter to the other doctor to catch him in the act, a reporter pressed him. Was Etheridge saying he set up a trap?
Not a trap, exactly, Etheridge fumbled. He knew her “brother” would find someone eventually, so he might as well send him to an office where he knew the address. If “anything happened I could locate it and we could get a hold on him.” Etheridge seemed to imply that if the Girl Reporter died, police would know which doctor to arrest. The paper found this a thin excuse, and published, along with the letter, an editorial scornful of doctors whose only interest was in keeping their hands clean.
At the January meeting, the Judiciary Committee kicked Dr. E. H. Thurston out of the society but declared another doctor innocent. The society then decided to stop looking into the Chicago Times reports unless a doctor requested it. Despite the vocal stance many had taken against illegal abortion, their priority was shielding their own. At the meeting after that, they stopped investigating entirely. And at the meeting after that, they resolved to inform the State Board of Health of their concerns about personal cleanliness among midwives.
All in all, the Chicago Times’s abortion exposé was owner West’s dream—a sensation. The paper, which eight months before had run ads for an abortifacient marketed as Chichester’s English Pennyroyal Pills, packed its editorial page with demands that abortion be stamped out.
The situation was particularly dire, the paper argued, as American-born Caucasian women, wanting small families, vibrant social lives, and careers, took advantage of abortion more than others, a trend that threatened to give “control of our government and country to the foreigner.” The paper proposed remedies. Women needed instruction on the delights of motherhood. Maybe there should be a lying-in hospital. Or doctors should meet stricter certification requirements. Preachers shouldn’t be squeamish about addressing abortion from the pulpit.
Though the Times’s editorials railed against the evils of “infanticide,” the paper’s reportage raised more questions than it answered. For example, there was the case of the father who wrote in and said he’d reluctantly decided to let his eighteen-year-old daughter read the articles. What was she supposed to think? Despite the paper’s moralizing, it would be hard to avoid the impression that abortion was common, available to anyone who could steel herself to ask for it. She might even meet with kindness and understanding. As many readers
