Medicine: Sin No More!

Up the steps of an old brownstone house in lower Manhattan marched a businesslike group of ten men. One of them rang the bell. From inside the house, Dr. Nathaniel Collins took one look, leaped through a window, climbed over a fence, and scrambled into a neighbor’s cellar. At the doctor’s alarm, three women in nightgowns ran screaming into the hall, trying to find the fire escape. It was obvious to everybody that the house was raided.

The dapper doctor was found crouching behind a furnace, the women were led back to bed. With his secretary, maid and receptionist, the doctor was carted off to jail. So ended a raid on one of Manhattan’s biggest abortion mills.

In a sitting room crammed with overstuffed furniture, about five women a day would wait for operations. The windowless, white-tiled operating room and hall contained 20 sets of abortion instruments —as many as in the best-equipped hospitals in the city. In the drab ward were three beds, where patients, after the operation, would rest for an hour before stumbling home. For five years Abortionist Collins had run this illegal hospital. For each abortion he got a sum ranging from $60 to $500. Patients were recommended by any one of over 100 physicians and druggists, to whom Dr. Collins kicked back about half his fee.

Dr. Collins was held on bail of $10,000; if convicted, his sentence will be up to four years. Although New York State prohibits abortions except to save mothers’ lives, in 14 years only four abortionists have been convicted. Reason: patients and witnesses won’t testify in court.

Dr. Collins’ establishment was one of the most elaborate in the city since the notorious parlor of Mme. Restell, almost 100 years ago. A florid midwife bedecked with velvet and plumes, Mme. Restell amassed a fortune from abortions. She used to kiss her young clients good-by with the words: “Go, and sin no more.” In 1878 she was finally hunted down by Reformer Anthony Comstock, committed suicide in her bathtub.

Today abortion of a healthy mother is illegal in every civilized country in the world except Sweden, where it is permitted for humanitarian reasons. Soviet Russia legalized abortion in 1920, banned it in 1936. In the U.S. every year, there are an estimated 400,000 illegal operations, most of them performed on married women who already have children. Annual deaths: over 5,000.