Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, "From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
In\xa0From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969\xa0(U Nebraska Press, 2020), Alicia Gutierrez-Romine examines the history of criminal abortion in California and the role abortion providers played in exposing and exploiting the faults in California\u2019s anti-abortion statute throughout the twentieth century. Focused on the patients who used this underground network and the physicians who facilitated it, Gutierrez-Romine provides insight into the world of illegal abortion from the 1920s through the 1960s, including regular physicians as well as women and African American abortionists, and the investigations, scandals, and trials that surrounded them.\n\nDuring the 1930s the Pacific Coast Abortion Ring, a large, coast-wide, and comparatively safe abortion syndicate, became the target of law enforcement agencies, forcing those needing abortions across the border into Mexico and ushering in an era of Tijuana \u201cabortion tourism\u201d in the early 1950s. The movement south of the border ultimately compelled the California Supreme Court to rule its abortion statute \u201cvoid for vagueness\u201d in\xa0People v. Belous\xa0in 1969\u2014four years before\xa0Roe v. Wade.\n\nGutierrez-Romine presents the first book focused on abortion on the West Coast and the U.S.-Mexico border and provides a new approach to studying how providers of illegal abortions and their clients navigated this underground network. In the post-Dobbs\xa0moment,\xa0From Back Alley to the Border\xa0shows us how little we have learned from history.\n\ufeffJeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies