Lisa Riggin’s San Francisco’s Queen of Vice (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) tells with impressive research the story of abortionist Inez Brown Burns, who from the 1920s through the 1940s performed or oversaw about 150,000 abortions and became one of the wealthiest women in California history.

Riggin gives the specifics: Burns owned abortion centers and conducted abortions at 325-27 Fillmore Street in San Francisco (on the other side of Buena Vista Park from Haight-Ashbury) and 435 Staten Avenue, Oakland. At her Fillmore abortion center each of three white-tiled surgical rooms included two sinks, which fed into an oversized concrete incinerator buried in the backyard: Almost every night it burned up the remains of unborn babies.

Regardless of the law, Burns’ abortion business was an open secret, with payoffs to police and politicians who might otherwise raise a ruckus. She was largely unimpeded until 1938, when two San Francisco News reporters, Mary Ellen Leary and Joe Sheridan (who masqueraded as Leary’s husband), wrote an undercover exposé headlined, “San Francisco Mill operates openly.” The problem was abortion and corruption, not cleanliness: A police report described a Burns room as “scrupulously clean and completely outfitted as a hospital.”

One big legal problem for Burns eventually became income tax evasion: 30 to 40 abortions a day at Fillmore at $75 to $350 each ($900 to $4,200 in today’s dollars), but Burns claimed a minimal income. Of course, her payoffs cost $20,000 per month, and she faced pressure to buy 10,000 tickets for the annual policeman’s ball at $1 each.

Riggin gives specific detail of a 1946 Burns trial for “conspiracy to commit abortion” that ended with a hung jury. Burns employee Madeline Rand explained Burns’ painstaking directions on cleaning the tables with antiseptic and rinsing the rubber surgical pads into buckets that contained “mucus, blood, and the eyes of the fetus.” A second trial also ended in jury division, but in a third trial anesthetist Levina Queen testified to seeing “the head and face, the arms and legs and genital organs.” Burns went to prison for two years.

In 1951 she was indicted for tax evasion and headed back to prison, even though her attorney pleaded for delay: “Next Sunday is Mother’s Day.” In 1955 she settled with the IRS by paying it $745,325 ($8 million in today’s dollars) and was able to live most of the rest of her life at a home on Guerrero Street decorated in its front by a statue of a little boy.

Some of us might say, “That’s just San Francisco,” but two books I wrote show that before Roe v. Wade doctors performed hundreds of thousands of abortions all over, with officials in major cities and some smaller ones as well winking at publicly decried but privately depended-on abortionists like Burns. The problem isn’t and wasn’t just a few unjust justices in black robes. Sin ground the dirt down deep into our souls.

BOOKMARKS

Both the history of abortion and current bestseller charts should push us to read Psalm 73, which describes those who “scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth.”

Latest example: Near the end of 2017 Reza Aslan’s God: A Human History (Random House) was Amazon’s No. 1 bestseller in world religious history, comparative religion, and agnosticism. It’s an extended drumbeat for pantheism, with italics: “God is everything that exists. … We are, every one of us, God. … The universe is God. … You are God.”

Such a belief is not only untrue, prideful, and strutting, but also not one that can comfort an aborting, mournful mom. Some, after personal traumas or when facing societal misery, turn against God. David Powlison’s God’s Grace in Your Suffering (Crossway, 2018) or Clay Jones’ Why Does God Allow Evil? (Harvest House, 2017) are good books to give them: They show how bad news helps us desire the Good News. —M.O.