Twelve police officers with walkie-talkies and binoculars hid in the nearby fields and in the farmhouse next door, waiting and watching. It was dark. After seeing a car drive up carrying two women, who then went inside the house, the officers unlocked the front door and went in. They walked down the halls and into the bedrooms, where they found one woman wearing only a slip in one room, two lying in bed in another, and two more who, having removed their skirts and underwear, sat waiting for their abortions in a third. The police questioned, photographed, and fingerprinted each woman. Then they drove them in police cars to a doctor, to be vaginally examined while in police custody.
This is the beginning of a true story of a raid on an underground abortion clinic by Pennsylvania state troopers in the late 1950s. It began when a suspicious neighbor called the police after listening on her party-line phone and overhearing her neighbor’s conversation about a pregnancy. The raid was easy: Since the landlord had given the police a key, they walked in and surprised everybody there. The police didn’t act in response to reports of injury or deaths. Abortion was simply illegal, and police raids based on reports from suspicious neighbors or doctors were standard methods of enforcing the law.
Standard, too, was the approach of capturing women in the midst of an abortion procedure and gynecologically examining them for evidence. Women who sought abortions were not targeted for prosecution (although some states allowed it). Prosecutors who tried to go after women who sought abortions in the 19th century had quickly learned that juries refused to convict and shifted to pursuing abortion providers when women died. By the 1940s and 1950s, though, police were shutting down providers even if they were safe. The law treated aborting women as “victims” and used them for evidence. Being captured, examined, interrogated, occasionally jailed, and forced to testify in court, however, punished women for seeking abortions even if they were never prosecuted or convicted of a crime.
The Texas abortion ban that took effect last week is designed to encourage private citizens to spy and report on suspicious people and activities, in the same way that the Pennsylvania woman reported her neighbor in 1958. In fact, the Texas statute permits only nonstate actors to bring civil lawsuits against individuals or organizations they suspect have “aided” or “abetted” any abortion that occurs after six weeks. This unusual law excludes state officials and police from enforcement—typically their job, of course—in order to make challenging its constitutionality difficult. And the Texas statute, like those in some states before Roe, doesn’t allow women themselves to be sued for getting abortions. This tactic allows anti-abortion activists to claim they are “on women’s side,” and don’t intend to harass them, but rather to target what they call the “abortion industry.”