One of the first US abortionists to set up shop – despite lacking a medical license – has died

According to The Washington Post, Horace Hale Harvey III, one of the first individuals to open a legal abortion business in the United States, died on February 14 at age 93 following a fall. Harvey, who was influential in the structuring of American abortion facilities, died in Dorchester, England, where he relocated after authorities learned he did not have a medical license.

New York’s first and largest abortion facility

On July 1, 1970, Harvey founded the Women’s Medical Group (later Women’s Services), considered the first and largest ‘non-profit’ abortion facility in New York City, located in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The business opened on the same day abortion was legalized in the state. He funded the facility with his own money and opened it in partnership with abortion advocate and “noted environmentalist” Barbara Pyle and Reverend Howard Moody. It was also reportedly known as the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health (CRASH).

However, Harvey himself was not licensed to practice medicine in any state at that time.

“When abortion became legal here,” Pyle told The New York Times in 1971, “I wrote to Hale and said, ‘Why don’t we start a clinic?’ I knew all about it from the research I’d done in England. He sent me $30,000 and that’s what it took—two months’ supplies and everything, drugs, medications, pumps and everything. I figured we would make Hale’s money back in six weeks and we did.”

The facility charged $200 per abortion, which was dropped to $125 shortly after opening. Women who were considered poor were charged either $25 or nothing at all. Although such a move has been celebrated by pro-abortion advocates as generous or “equitable,” offering free abortions to poor women serves as additional pressure to have abortions they may not want.

Ninety percent (90%) of the 700 women who came to Harvey’s abortion facility each week were referred by the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a group of Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis who had been referring women to doctors for illegal abortions — as many as 450,000 before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion.

Harvey’s upbringing

According to The Washington Post, Harvey had grown up in a Christian family and “held leadership roles in religious student groups at Louisiana State University.” However, while in college, he attended a Christian summer school where he reportedly “encountered liberal Christianity for the first time in his life.”

This, said his daughter Kate, sent him on a seven-year reexamination of his beliefs, ultimately determining that he was an atheist. He would never return to Christianity, though he felt his thoughts on abortion aligned with those of the Clergy Consultation Service.

Harvey had also grown up poor and after receiving a master of public health degree and a PhD in philosophy, he perceived a need for accessible sexual health information and access to abortion. Along with Pyle, he founded the Community Sex Information and Education Service, which handed out leaflets and ran an anonymous telephone service for the New Orleans community members who were seeking sexual advice — not unlike the modern Planned Parenthood app Ask Roo. Harvey decided that access to abortion was the key to pulling people out of poverty; he was wrong, but it became part of the fuel behind his desire to give free abortions to women. In his facility, his assistants dressed in street clothes during patients’ pre-abortion counseling sessions to convey a woman-to-woman rather than a medical professional-to-patient vibe. Most of the assistants had undergone abortions themselves.

The advent of the abortion business

The New York Times reported on the facility’s daily operations in 1971 (emphases added):

After interviewing the patient and discussing the abortion with her [to] allay any fear or guilt she may feel, the counselor calls in the doctor. Each doctor is required to go through a little ritual: he shakes the patient’s hand and says, “I’m glad to meet you.” The counselor then explains why the woman has chosen to have the abortion. The doctor then must say, “You’re doing the right thing; I’m glad to help you.”

Affirming the woman’s choice to abort, even in non-dire situations, was a key part of getting her to go through with the abortion, regardless of her doubts. “We try to reassure her she is a fine girl who has made a mistake, and now has a chance to get her life on the right track,” Harvey told the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News in 1970.

His facility committed abortions seven days a week with nearly 24 abortionists rotating shifts. It was considered “the most important abortion clinic in the United States prior to Roe v. Wade, and it really set the standard of practice in extraordinary ways,” said Felicia Kornbluh, University of Vermont professor and author of “A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life.”

According to Science Direct, “The first struggle after the repeal of the New York law in 1970 was to prove that first trimester abortions could be safely performed in outpatient clinics.” At the time, pro-abortion leaders argued that abortions should only be committed in hospitals for safety reasons, but men like Harvey set out to prove abortion was safe — at the expense of women, children, and families.

Abortion Doctors Share How The Most Common Abortion Procedures Take Place

From July 1, 1970, to April 1971 (nine months), an estimated 100,000 to 125,000 legal abortions were committed in New York City, with 14 known maternal deaths resulting. In addition, adoption agencies reported a 50% decline in the number of “white babies” placed for adoption from January through April 1971. But even then, reporting on abortion was lacking. Only three of the 17 facilities submitted reports on a regular basis, and the municipal hospitals were failing to file termination of pregnancy certificates that would have included information on the gestational age of the child and the race, residency, and age of the mother.

The New York Times reported that year:

[T]here are still enough horror stories, enough unsolved problems, to make any report on the city’s legal abortion scene sound like a report on the old illegal one. Investigating abortion procedures in New York today is like peeling an onion and finding that pristine, pearl‐like layers alternate with rotten ones. It is a world of continual contradictions, a juxtaposition of good medicine with bad, of altruism with exploitation, of efficiency with incompetence, of humanity with cruelty.

Forced out of his facility

In 1972, after it was discovered that Harvey was operating without a medical license, he and the Clergy Consultation Service reached a “private agreement” for him to leave the facility, and he moved to England. He had surrendered his license in 1969 to the Louisiana State Medical Board after authorities discovered he was committing illegal abortions in violation of state laws.

When he opened and ran Women’s Services in New York City, he was not licensed to practice medicine in any state. New York recommended that the attorney general take action against Women’s Services for not being licensed, compelling Harvey to flee the country.

He was replaced by Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the medical consultant to NARAL — then the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws — who applied for a license for the facility. Nathanson ultimately became a pro-life Catholic and advocated against abortion before his own death in 2011. The Washington Post notes that “In his 1996 book “The Hand of God,” [Nathanson] described the physicians at Dr. Harvey’s clinic as a deplorable’ group of ‘medical losers.'”

However, Mary Ziegler, law professor at the University of California at Davis and the author of “Roe: The History of a National Obsession,” said that to his supporters, Harvey was a doctor willing to take personal risks to provide women with abortions that other doctors would have denied.