This billboard along with things published in Alaska Right to Life’s newsletter – like calling Brown “baby-killer Brown” – were part of a libel lawsuit that would go on to reach the Alaska Supreme Court. She would lose the lawsuit, which touched on principles central to debates over free speech.
However, Brown herself has questions. As she reflects on her past as an abortion provider, she struggles with how to define the beginning of personhood. And she’s relieved she no longer has to decide when it’s OK to perform an abortion. But despite this uncertainty, she continues to support a right to an abortion.
A long interest in medicine
Brown was born in 1937 and raised in Hereford, Texas, about 50 miles southwest of Amarillo. Her parents divorced when she was around 9 and her mom left, so Brown and her brother went to live with their grandmother. She knew when she was 10 she wanted to be a doctor.
“I was working in a cotton patch and there were a whole bunch of other people working in that cotton patch and here I am this little kid with a 6-foot cotton sack that I’m pulling behind me and I decided I don’t think I want to do this all my life,” Brown said, adding that she isn’t sure why she chose to be a doctor at that time. “Maybe I’ve been to a movie. I didn’t have any books to read. My growing up and background was a little bit challenging, I will say. But I decided at that point that I really was interested in becoming a doctor.” (...)
She took all the science classes that were possible for her to take in middle and high school, and went to college at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, where she majored in chemistry and biology, and graduated magna cum laude.
When it came to deciding what medical school to go to, Brown was sure of only one thing: “Whatever I have to do, I had to get out of Texas,” she said.
She didn’t want a big medical school and she didn’t want to go too far north, “Because I was too much of a hick. And I knew that. And I was poor as Job’s turkey,” Brown said.
Growing up, Brown did not think highly of herself.
But she got into all the medical schools in Texas at the time. Still, she decided to go outside the state – to Bowman Grey School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Brown met her husband George Brown there, and the two doctors came to Alaska in 1965. They worked as public health doctors with the U.S. Public Health Service. They were based out of Anchorage, but traveled all over the state. The two then went to Hawaii where Brown did her first residency in public health and preventive medicine at the University of Hawaii. Afterward, they returned to Alaska.
Brown had a long list of jobs during that time, including working at the Anchorage Municipal Health Department. Brown was inundated with women who had a lot of health questions about women’s issues – questions Brown couldn’t always answer. So, she decided to go back to the University of Hawaii to do a second residency.
One of the boys
Throughout this whole time, Brown didn’t have any strong feelings about abortion. In fact, she didn’t really think about it at all during college, medical school, or her first residency. It wouldn’t come up until her second residency in obstetrics and gynecology.
It was 1975. The U.S. Supreme Court had decided on Roe v. Wade two years prior, ruling that the constitutional right to privacy includes the right to access an abortion.
The University of Hawaii wanted to teach all OB-GYN residents how to perform abortions.
“When I got there, I had a choice,” she said. “You were offered it. They suggested it. And if you didn’t want to do it, and there were some who, based on religious background, chose not to do it, then they were given other kinds of work. Grunt work, we call it.”
Brown said it was an excellent teaching program – but, as one of the first women to go through that program, she said it was also extremely misogynist. So Brown had to make a choice – was she going to be one of the boys and perform abortions, or would she go do grunt work?
She decided to be one of the boys. Even then, she still didn’t have an opinion about abortion.
“I didn’t have a decision about – What did I really think about it? I said, ‘OK,’ because I hadn’t really processed what that really meant,” Brown said.
Brown knew that she wouldn’t have an abortion. She had to ask herself: What am I doing? It weighed on her, but she didn’t have much time to dwell on it.
“Except once in a while I did think about it and I went to church. And I did all of those things that I sort of grew up doing way back in the day. But I had to come to some peace with myself,” Brown said. “But I never could decide for myself that an egg and a sperm was a person because a person is a philosophical definition. A sperm and an egg when they come together, that’s tissue up to a certain point. And then you got the whole philosophical thing is when does the soul enter the sperm and the egg? I didn’t know and I still don’t know. But I’ve struggled with that for all of these many, many years.”
During Brown’s days at the clinic, she did 10 to 14 abortions a day.
Setting up a practice in Palmer
When she was done with her residency in Hawaii, she, her husband George Brown and their two kids returned to Alaska in 1978. The couple started Women and Children’s Health Associates, a nonprofit that operated an obstetric-gynecologic and pediatric practice in the Mat-Su Valley. Brown’s office was based in Palmer and her husband’s pediatric office in Wasilla.
Brown had a very active OB-GYN practice. She eventually moved her office to its own building, just outside the hospital’s parking lot. She said she would work 100-hour weeks and she didn’t make payment a barrier.
“In those days, I gave stuff free. I did free C-sections, I took bear meat, I took salmon. You know, it was the old-fashioned way of doing whatever it is you had to do,” she said.
She also provided abortions. Brown saw all kinds of patients, including Medicaid recipients, and people from all over the state – like Fairbanks, the Aleutians, Kotzebue, Juneau, Utqiagvik – were referred to her.
“Literally every quadrant of the state and people would call the office or they would call whatever practitioner they knew, or from way out in the villages, they would contact the public health nurse,” Brown said. (...)
She estimates she did three to five abortions a week in the Valley Hospital, though there were peaks and dips. And she said she had a good safety record.
“I wasn’t having any bad events, any failures, any disasters. I was very, very, very conservative about what I did,” Brown said.
‘There goes the baby killer’
Brown and her family were part of the community. They went to the Presbyterian church. The two kids attended middle and high school in Palmer. It wasn’t a secret that Brown performed abortions. She said the board of her and George’s nonprofit was very supportive, but not everyone in the community was.
“When I would come to work, go in to make rounds, they would hiss and boo. That was still at a time when I had the little office in the hospital there. So they would come in and sit around and say whatever it is they had to say. And line up just like a march as it were,” Brown said.
She heard comments like, “There goes the baby killer. Is that the baby killer?” (...)
“Of course I had to be in charge in the operating room. I had to be in charge when a person was in labor, screaming their heads off or whatever. I got to the place where I could almost talk a woman through her delivery, just my soft voice and sitting there. And I knew that was happening and she knew that was happening. And I knew I was very good at that. But nobody knew what was going on inside. The fear of God Almighty, what if this woman dies? What if this baby dies? Oh, my God. All the horrible things that you could possibly think of, I went through them all a great deal of the time,” Brown said.
At the same time Brown was performing abortions and being called a baby killer, she was also delivering lots and lots of babies. And she was really good at it. “We never lost one,” she said.
by Lisa Phu, Alaska Beacon | Read more:
Images: Sally Mead; Lisa Phu
[ed. What a coincidence. I was at the Alaska State Fair last week and remembered those awful Right to Life exhibits. Dr. Brown was well known and a greatly respected doctor (by most) back then, as was my father-in-law, who helped found Anchorage Hospital in the 50s, and later the Alaska Clinic, which eventually became Humana Hospital (also chief surgeon and head of the medical staff). He performed abortions, too. They were just good doctors trying to help desperate women. Glad to see this retrospective.]
[ed. What a coincidence. I was at the Alaska State Fair last week and remembered those awful Right to Life exhibits. Dr. Brown was well known and a greatly respected doctor (by most) back then, as was my father-in-law, who helped found Anchorage Hospital in the 50s, and later the Alaska Clinic, which eventually became Humana Hospital (also chief surgeon and head of the medical staff). He performed abortions, too. They were just good doctors trying to help desperate women. Glad to see this retrospective.]
