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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