I lived in San Francisco 60 years ago, the so-called ‘bad old days’ of abortion by coat hangers.
I knew three women who aborted in that early period. The first went to Tijuana where a Mexican doctor did the procedure; whatever it was, she didn’t know. Cost was $50 plus travel.
By the late 1960s abortion by a doctor was legal in California with two letters signed by a psychiatrist that mental health issues justified an abortion. Two friends of my girlfriend at the time chose to abort this way. The psychiatrists each charged $100 and the performing doctor who did a dilation-and-curettage charged $50. The doctor who was young then is my wife’s doctor today, a prominent female physician.
By 1971 I was on the board of the Point Foundation and made a grant to Dr. Harvey Karman’s two female allies who came to San Francisco to train a dozen doctors and nurses to do a vacuum aspiration form of early-term abortion with the Karman Cannula. They set up a clinic across the street from the University of California San Francisco Hospital and Med School and charged $25 for an abortion procedure that used a seaweed cylinder to open the muscles at the entrance to the uterus and then used the Karman Cannula for extraction.
Roughly a year later four nurses from Oakland came to my house and proposed a similar clinic in Oakland that would charge $50 and add a pre-and post-op discussion with the patient. I made the grant.The four nurses lied to me. They used the money to organize picketing of a porn theater in Oakland. A key learning experience for me about the Puritan future of the abortion issue!
A few months later, in January, the Roe v Wade decision became national law.
The most interesting subsequent information came from a book, Freakonomics in 2005 that showed the connection between the Roe decision in 1973 and the decline in crime starting in 1993 due to the decline in black babies born subsequently. Black women being the disproportionately heavy users of legal abortion.