In 1921, a young woman named Eunice left her northeast Texas hometown of Bonham for Dallas. She didn’t get to stay long. Police found her and brought her back. A grand jury was investigating whether the 19-year-old’s recent miscarriage was actually an abortion.
The grand jury indicted Eunice as an accomplice of the doctor who allegedly performed an illegal abortion on her. She was jailed for two weeks and not allowed to see her family. Then, officials took her from jail to a public courtroom in Fannin County to testify against the local doctor who had performed the procedure that led to her miscarriage. Abortion had been a felony crime in Texas since 1856, and this was the way it was traditionally prosecuted: Put the woman on the stand and make her give evidence against others involved.
From the stand, Eunice was pressed repeatedly to divulge invasive and intimate details about her life and her desperate efforts to end her pregnancy, according to case records from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that are held by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
WOMEN AT THE TIME WERE TYPICALLY FRAMED AS THE “SECOND VICTIM” OF ABORTIONS AND PROSECUTORS PORTRAYED ABORTION BANS, IN PART, AS PROTECTING PREGNANT WOMEN FROM BEING EXPLOITED.
Prosecutors asked for the precise words she used when she asked the doctor for the procedure. They pushed further for details about the instruments used—one was silver, she said, another copperlike. She was asked whether she knew where the womb was and where the vagina was. They asked where the instruments were inserted.
“These instruments were placed in my womb, I guess is what you would call it, by [the doctor], and this water passed right after that,” Eunice said.
Her trial provides a harrowing glimpse of a time when abortion was a crime in Texas and hints at what may be in store once again, a century later, for women in the state.
Fifty years after Eunice’s indictment, a federal court in Dallas struck down the state’s expansive abortion ban, prompting the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm the ruling and establish a constitutional right to abortion, based in the right to privacy. Now, the court appears to be on the verge of reversing that 1973 landmark decision.
