I recently responded to someone here at DU who wanted to know why women were not speaking out and why only doctors were speaking out.
I felt such a sense of exhaustion when I read that. I gave a very brief answer, and then gave them the link to this group and begged them to please just start reading.
One thing I wanted to draw people’s attention to is how at least one cop saw it — it was The Law. That, I guess, makes it simple.
Then, concomitantly, there were mentions of service manuals regarding all aspects of crime and law enforcement related to those crimes. Deep, deep, in the archives, are records of that.
In the moment of reading this article, it’s weird how I saw the cops’ role. They can fulfill their duties well or ill (and the ones who are brutes fill the headlines these days) — but in this instance I find my wrath goes to the men who write the laws and the judges who are complicit in ratifying and justifying egregiously bad law.
From the article at link:
The police were relieved when it became legal for women to have abortions and they didn’t have to pursue those cases,” said Margie Galindo. “It opened them up to other pressing duties.”
Inside the Los Angeles Police Museum in Highland Park… There’s no visible sign here that an abortion squad ever existed.
LAPD Sgt. Dylan Wells, a police museum volunteer and amateur historian, came across mention of the detail for the first time last year, while researching Josephine Serrano Collier.
A remnant of that time lives on in the LAPD homicide manual, which was most recently revised in 2021. In a chapter titled “Unusual Circumstances,” methods used in abortions are listed, including “the production of a toxic state” and “a mechanical action intended to directly harm the embryo.”
“Murder, as a result of criminal abortion, is practically non-existent under current law and practice,” a paragraph reads. But the information was still being provided “for its value in other death investigations because of the possibility of a change in the law, and for those unique occasions when an unlawful abortion may be performed.”
The way Wells sees it, police must “adapt to something that changes, that includes the criminalization and decriminalization of an act in society.”
After the fall of Roe vs. Wade, Tom Sherman, a Delaware journalist, dug into his collection of antique and vintage historical documents — specifically searching for old New York Police Department manuals he’d rescued from a dumpster a decade earlier.
The NYPD had formed its own squad after an abortion ring bust in the mid- 1950s. A 1968 training bulletin titled “ABORTIONS” detailed the use of wiretaps and tails placed on women visiting a doctor’s office for an abortion.
“It was this weird moment,” he said, “of digging it out and looking into the future by reading about the past.”.
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