![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The fact was that just about every city in America had someone like Inez Burns. A necessary evil, with two mandatory components: the services had to be safe and discreet. Let the abortionists do what they do, as long as no woman gets killed or maimed in the process. Their husbands often didn’t have a clue that their wives were even pregnant.Īt the time, the prevailing standard in San Francisco and other American cities when it came to abortion was that if the woman undergoing the procedure didn’t die, the police looked the other way. Apart from some high-profile Hollywood starlets, along with women like Corinne, most of Burns’ clients were married women who couldn’t afford another mouth to feed. Through that underground woman-to-woman network, they’d end up at one place – 327 Fillmore Street, just south of San Francisco’s lively Jewish district, filled with butchers, bakeries, markets, synagogues, theaters, and kosher restaurants.īurns performed abortions on rich and poor alike. Whether they arrived in San Francisco by bus, automobile, train, ferry, or plane, they’d discreetly ask other women, sometimes strangers on the street, “Know where that Burns woman lives?” Women came from around the corner and across the nation. Word circulated, as it always does, when what you do, you do exceedingly well and your particular skill is highly specialized, in demand, and illegal. From Burns’ years as a young unmarried mother toiling in a Pittsburgh pickle factory to her starring role as a national fixer for women “in trouble,” she was an outrageous, larger-than-life figure, a kind of combination of Wallis Simpson, Mae West, Margaret Sanger, and Coco Chanel. Neither a doctor nor nurse, she was known for her hygienic clinic, performing abortions on as many as twenty women a day. Delving into Burns’ life and times, I discovered that she had performed a staggering 50,000 abortions over a 40-year period. ![]()
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