By CONNIE ZEIGLER, Contributing editor
In 1958 Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute published a report titled Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion. In the report, according to February 1958 coverage in The Indianapolis News, it stated that one out of 10 “American women of the upper middle class” would become pregnant outside of marriage.
Even more shocking, most women would abort their unwanted pregnancies and, in an era when abortion was illegal at both state and federal levels, one in seven women in the nation, according to the 1958 report, had a “premarital” abortion.
Excerpts of the report on which The News article was based revealed that the study included intimate interviews of almost 8,000 women. More than 5,200 of these women were “white, Protestant, upper class, living in large and small cities.” The remainder were Black women (“Negroes” as they were called in the newspaper) who were segregated in the report in a separate chapter.
One thing the report could not do was determine how many of the abortions reported by these 8,000 women were conducted by physicians. The women’s statements as offered in the study about this were considered “worthless” since, The News reported, “most abortionists claim to be ‘doctors.’
A survey of Indianapolis newspapers in the 1950s gives a more personal view of the women, sometimes girls, who sought abortions here. Unfortunately, the clandestine nature of the procedure ensured that generally the cases reported in the newspaper were those with bad, often the worst, outcomes.
Alice Faye Crouch, a 31-year-old mother of three children, was living at Coffin Trailer Park on W. Washington Street when she sought and received an abortion on May 7, 1950. She died the following day at Long Hospital (now part of the Indiana University Medical Center) in Indianapolis. Doctors at the hospital said her death was caused by an incomplete abortion.
The Indianapolis Star reported on May 8, 1950, that Alice Faye had left the trailer at 8 a.m. with a man and woman in a car and returned two hours later. Her pain became severe and she went to the hospital that evening. She and the children had returned to Indianapolis four months earlier from Las Vegas where her husband, Army Air Force Sgt. Glenn (Glen) Lee Crouch, was stationed. The Star reported that he had flown in from his base to be at her side after she was admitted to the hospital and was with her when she died. The tombstone on her grave is inscribed with her birth and death dates, her name, and a single descriptor, “Mother.”
Little more than a year after Alice Faye Crouch’s death, a local man was arrested on charges of performing an “illegal operation” – an abortion – on Sept. 18, 1951. A 56-year-old chiropractor, Charles Alton Beck, was arrested at his home and office on Brookside Avenue with charges of performing the abortion on an unnamed 30-year-old woman then recovering in General Hospital from an infection caused by the procedure. At the time of his arrest he was awaiting trial for charges in an earlier case involving a 15-year-old girl who had also been hospitalized for an infection after he allegedly performed an abortion on her several months earlier.
In a grand jury appearance Beck claimed that he had merely given the two females chiropractic treatments. According to the Indianapolis Star reporting on Dec. 11, 1953, charges against Beck were dropped because one of the witnesses refused to testify and the other could not be found.
On Jan. 10, 1955, The Indianapolis Star reported that a 46-year-old physician, Dr. Russell Lowell Arbuckle of the 3700 block of Watson Road, was arrested along with Roy V. Richardson, “the natty operator of a Fountain Square barber shop,” for what was believed to be an “established ‘abortion business on the West Side.” This was not Arbuckle’s first run-in with the law, as he was awaiting sentencing for the sale of narcotics at the time of this arrest.
The police reported to The Star that they had found surgical equipment and a “carefully coded record book,” which the police captain said indicated the “records of an abortion business of long standing” at Richardson’s home on Fleming Street. The police were alerted of the operation by an “18-year-old North Side girl, who said she underwent an abortion in Richardson’s house.” According to the mother of the 18-year-old, who had reported the incident to the police, her daughter had the abortion a month before the young woman’s New Year’s Eve wedding.
The day after the arrests of Richardson and Arbuckle, The Indianapolis News reported that the coded record book contained the names of 75 women with addresses in Indianapolis and other states, and the names of several local physicians. This story also reported that Arbuckle was charged as an accessory for referring a “young woman to the barber for the alleged illegal operation.” A month later, on Feb. 24, The News reported that the grand jury refused to indict Arbuckle for the abortion case.
The case against the barber was still pending at the time, but there is no record to be found of a trial for Richardson. The next time Roy V. Richardson is mentioned in local newspapers is on Aug. 10, 1957, in his wife’s obituary published in The Star. The obituary did not mention the abortion charges; Roy is listed as spouse. The death certificate for Clarine Richardson states that the 27-year-old mother of two had died of leukemia. Two years and two days after his wife’s death, 56-year-old Roy Richardson’s own obituary appeared in The Star. Again, there is no mention of Richardson’s charges in the abortion case. He was still living in his home on Fleming Street at the time of his death.
In 1958, the year that McCall’s magazine published the Kinsey Institute report, two abortion cases made headlines in Indianapolis newspapers. In July, The Indianapolis News reported that an ex-policeman and Jacque Durham and Wilfred Michaels, a Navy (or Marine, according to The Star) medical corpsman, were arrested after Michaels confessed to performing abortions on six different women, three of them referred to him by Durham. Durham had been indicted the previous month for procuring underage girls for prostitution. In this case, the police also arrested a 24-year-old woman for “submitting to an abortion.” A month later, on Aug. 6, The Indianapolis Star reported that all charges were dropped “for lack of evidence.”
The following week, on Aug. 13, The News reported that a former doctor, Gerald S. Lowery, was arrested after a 19-year-old woman reported that he had performed an abortion on her at his home in the 4100 block of Graceland Avenue. Lowery had previously been found guilty of illegal narcotics sales, received a suspended sentence, and had his medical license revoked three years earlier in 1955. The young woman was hospitalized at General Hospital with serious complications from the abortion. In December 1958, The News reported that Lowery was indicted on two counts of abortion. However, Lowery died the following August presumably before he could face trial on these counts. His obituary did not mention the abortion kerfuffle and referred to him as “Dr. G. S. Lowery. . . retired.”
In the years following these cases and the publication of the report on Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion, stories of women and girls in Indiana who were hospitalized or died after illegal abortions continued to appear in local newspapers.
The landmark Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade finally made abortion legal at the federal level in 1973. But in 2022, the U. S. Supreme Court overturned that ruling, removing the federal right to abortion and leaving the states to decide whether or not to criminalize them. Indiana did so in August 2023. n
Connie Zeigler holds a master’s degree in history. She enjoys digging up a surprising, forgotten story and sharing her pirate’s booty with Urban Times readers.
