Dr. Vutch, Good and Bad
Illegal abortionists came in all shapes and sizes, from
those with no medical training to fully trained medical personnel. Some qualified doctors
were willing to risk their
licenses to give women
safe abortions prior to Roe v. Wade.
Some believed
in a woman’s right to decide what she did with her body. Others
saw women wanting abortions
as cash cows.
Few of those who provided illegal abortions are still alive today. At best they would
be in their 70s and up. Some
received notoriety; others have taken their participation to the grave.
From Serbia to the United
States
One doctor, Milan Vuitch,
seems to have been a little bit of everything. He claimed to have done
thousands of abortions within walking distance of the White House while the
procedure was illegal.
That he became a licensed physician in the United States at all is a bit of fairy tale. He was
born 15 January 1915 in Serbia, the
child of peasants. After his father died, his mother supported the family as a
vegetable farmer.
Obviously
intelligent, Vuitch graduated from the University of Budapest on full
scholarship. Semmelweis University, founded in 1769, is the medical school
he was most likely to have attended. The university could
not confirm or deny this. He allegedly graduated in 1939.
He was
drafted into the Hungarian Army during WWII and practiced gynecology and
surgery after the war. He taught at a medical school in Skopje.
I could
find no mention of how he met and married his wife, an American, Florence
Robinson. He migrated to the Washington, D.C. area in 1955 and eventually became
a naturalized
U.S. citizen.
Dr. Vuitch’s
first abortion was on a Hungarian woman who had fled the 1956 Hungarian
revolution. He was said to have charged
between $100 ($826 in 2018 dollars) and $200 ($1,652
in 2018 dollars).
Arrested at Least 16 Times
By 1964 Vuitch was performing
between 10 and 20 abortions weekly, although he had lacked hospital privileges since the year before.
Unlike many doctors,
who did illegal
abortions and kept quiet, he was outspoken. He was
arrested at least 16 times, not just in Washington, but also in Maryland and Virginia. However,
except for one conviction in Montgomery County,
he was found innocent.
In Lawrence
Lader’s book, Abortion Two: Making the
Revolution, Vuitch is quoted as saying, “Women cry for help and doctors
just chase them away…I'm getting rid of medical absurdities. If you think that
abortion is a medical service, you can't ignore it.”
He challenged the constitutionality of D.C.’s 1901 anti-abortion law. There were gray areas between a life-saving exception and
overall giving an abortion for health reasons. His lawyers claimed “health” was
vaguely defined.
Vuitch was
indicted for violation of a D.C. Code. Federal Court Judge Gerhard A. Gesell
(he later presided over the Washington Seven and Oliver North cases) wrote that
there was “no clear standard to guide either the doctor, the jury or the court” in describing the word health. The health of the mother was
often used as a guideline for a legal abortion.
Gesell also
wrote, “A physician would not know if he was committing a crime when he
performed an abortion, because a jury might
later disagree with his opinion
that the mother's
health required it. [Thus]
the doctors' problem
was particularly acute
because the burden
was on them to prove that
the abortion was justified.”
Vuitch said,
“This is a big step forward. Now the government lawyer will be in the position
of challenging my medical decision. What are the jury members going to decide
when a lawyer tries to tell them that the doctor is wrong about a medical
matter?”
D.C. was
left without any law concerning abortion. Hospitals, public and private, stopped giving abortions. Two organizations, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and the American
Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU), sued D.C. General Hospital
twice. The hospital
was forced, under court order, to perform abortions.
The Justice Department
stepped in and the issue went
to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court Speaks… or Whispers
The case was heard in United States v. Vuitch on 12 January
1971. The decision was announced on 21 April 1971 with a 5-4 split. They held that the Supreme
Court had jurisdiction to determine if the District of Columbia’s abortion
statute is unconstitutionally vague because, although
the law only applies to the
District of Columbia, the law was enacted by both Houses of Congress and signed
into law by the President.
It was a step, albeit a weak one.
The
different justices weighed in, and the variation of opinion shows that the
Supreme Court held as many contrary opinions on the subject as the rest of the
country.
Justice Hugo L. Black
ruled that “health”
refers to both the body and mind and therefore is not unconstitutionally vague. His wording made the
prosecution for abortions more difficult.
William O. Douglas said that it gave the doctor too much discretion while Justice John M.
Harlan felt that the court did not have jurisdiction because the case only
applied to Washington D.C.
Justice
Potter Stewart said that they did have jurisdiction but felt that that doctors
who performed abortions should be immune from criminal prosecution if they were
preserving the mother’s life and health.
Roe v. Wade, two years later,
made abortion legal, but Vuitch
continued to have problems.
If his
fight for a woman’s right to a safe,
legal abortion was commendable, his practice
of giving abortions was not. Just as some illegal abortionists went out of their way to try and provide a sterile and safe environment to the women,
some legal abortionists such as Vuitch
did not always use best practices.
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