Dr. Robert D. Spencer of Ashland, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, was one of the most famous abortion doctors in the United States in the fifty year period prior to Roe v. Wade (1973). It is believed by some that he performed up to 100,000 “illegal operations” as they were referred to in the press of the day. Although there were a few attempts to prosecute him, he never was convicted. When he died in 1969, his obituary didn’t mention the abortions, but did note his other specialty — removing foreign objects from the bronchial tubes of children and adults. Also important to his practice of medicine was his research and treatment of black lung disease, a “plague” afflicting many miners of the coal regions. In all, he was one of the most respected and revered medical practitioners in a fifty mile radius of Ashland, which included most of the Lykens Valley area.
Previously on this blog, a book about Spencer, The Angel of Ashland, was reviewed.
On May 6, 2022, in the wake of the leak of the draft opinion for the overturn of Roe, the Philadelphia Inquirer profiled Dr. Spencer. Portions of that article appear below.
The obituary of Dr. Robert D. Spencer appeared in the Pottsville Republican on January 22, 1969:
Dr. R. D. Spencer Dies at Ashland
Dr. Robert Douglas Spencer, 79, of 31 S. Ninth Street, Ashland, for over 50 years, died at 5 p. m. Tuesday in Ashland Hospital where he was admitted January 14 [1969].
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, March 16, 1889, he was a son of the late William Spencer and Emily [Butler] Spencer. When he was two years old, his family moved to Williamsport where his father was district attorney of Lycoming County.
A resident of Ashland for the past 50 years, Dr. Spencer was a 1911 graduate of Penn State College and a 1916 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Chief resident physician at Pottstown Hospital from 1916-1917, he served as First Lieutenant in the Medical Corps during World War I from 1917 to 1918.
Pathologist for Ashland Hospital from 1918 to 1925, Dr. Spencer opened his private practice in 1925, maintaining it until his death.
He was the first physician in Schuylkill County to use bronchoscopy, dealing with an instrument which may be passed through the trachea into the large bronchi and is used for removal of foreign bodies and diagnosis.
Dr. Spencer was a member of Ashland Rotary, Association for the Advancement of Science, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and the National Geographical Society.
Surviving are his wife, the former Eleanor Becker, a former teacher in the Mt. Carmel Schools; two children, Louise Enterline, wife of Dr. Theodore Enterline, Philadelphia; William Spencer, La Jolia, California; also three grandchildren.
Funeral services Friday at the convenience of the family from Frederick T. Kull Funeral Home, N. Ninth Street, Ashland. The Rev. Robert G. Hughes of the Good Shepherd Chapel, will officiate; interment in the Mt. Carmel Cemetery.
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An article by Jason Nark appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, May 6, 2022. Excerpts are provided below.
PENNSYLVANIA TOWN WAS ONCE ABORTION CENTER
Before “Roe,” both rich and poor would flock to see the doctor called the “angel of Ashland”
ASHLAND, Pennsylvania — Women once came to this hilly, hard coal town from far and wide to make a choice. It was long before the nation’s highest court protected that choice, a time when access to abortion in America was scarce and dangerous.
They came to see Dr. Robert D. Spencer, a Penn Medicine graduate described as the ‘angel of Ashland.” The repeated his address — 531 Centre Street — as they drove through the mountains and coal heaps to get to this sleepy Schuylkill County town, about 110 miles northwest of Philadelphia. For a small fee or no fee for those who couldn’t afford it, Spencer offered safe, clean abortions.
“I am in trouble,” a single 20-year-old pregnant mother once wrote to him. “I have been almost out of my mind for several weeks because I have had no where to turn and no one to turn to.”
Spencer, according to various reports, performed anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 abortions in his three-story stone building in the heart of town. Women came from nearly every state, even Europe, to see him. Some were poor and young, others described as celebrities and “political elites.”
The first was a coal miner’s wife. It was in 1923, and the woman told Spencer the couple could barely feed the four children they already had. It changed him, and the course of his career.
“Once I realized that a woman should be the dictator of what went on in her own body, I just set out to help, and I never gave it another thought,” he told writer Michael Kaufman, a longtime journalist for the New York Times.
Kaufman, who went on to profile Spencer for Lear’s Magazine, described the doctor as a man of “risk and courage.” He was arrested several times, including after a woman died while under anesthesia. He was never convicted. Spencer died in 1969, before abortion became legal in the United States in 1973. Many obituaries [of him] never mention the word abortion.
Richard Fritz, a longtime funeral director in Ashland who met Spencer once when Fritz was a teen, said the doctor was beloved by locals for treating all the maladies miners suffered, including arthritis and the dubious “black lung” that cut men down young. Most locals, Fritz said, likely looked the other way when it came to the abortions.
“He was too good to too many people,” Fritz said….
Fritz was among a group of men sitting outside the Ashland VFW on Tuesday afternoon….
“We used to see ladies come here in limos from New York City to see him,” Mayor Daniel Weikel, 75, said.
In the 1960s, when Susan Brownmiller, a feminist author and former journalist with the Village Voice, needed and abortion, Spencer was her first call. He was unavailable, she said, so she traveled to Puerto Rico instead. “I still remember his phone number, ‘Ashland 404,’ we all knew it,” Brownmiller told the Inquirer on Wednesday.
Spencer, according to the magazine profile, was a man of science, an atheist who counted Thomas Paine and Clarence Darrow as his own heroes. Spencer shared thousands of letters with Kaufman, all of them from women seeking help. Many were afraid to use the words pregnant or abortion in the letters.
“I have been sick for six weeks now,” one woman wrote.
Today in the coal region, there’s still strong “don’t tell-me-what-to-do-with-my-body” ethos, and residents scoffed at the Supreme Court draft. “I don’t want the government telling me what I should do with my body,” said… a patron at the Pottsville Pub. “It’s a woman’s right to choose….”
Brownmiller said the book should never be closed on Dr. Spencer. She visited him, just before his death in 1969, for a Village Voice piece. He was still performing abortions at 79.
“The public image of an abortionist, through books, pays, movies, articles, or whatever, was of an evil, leering, drunken, perverted butcher at worst, and a cold, mysterious, money-hungry Park Avenue price-gouger at best,” she wrote in that piece. “And then there was Spencer with his clinic on the main street of a small American town, who charged $50, who believed in abortions, and who was kind.”
Brownmiller said that visit to Ashland was more a “pilgrimage” than a mere visit. “He was a real hero,” she told the Inquirer. “He’s someone who shouldn’t be forgotten.”
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See:
Dr. Robert Spencer – “The Angel of Ashland”
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Obituary from Newspapers.com.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.
Future blog posts will look at some of the failed attempts to prosecute Dr. Spencer as well as the abortion practices of other doctors in the Lykens Valley area. Posts will also include famous court cases involving doctors and patients from Gratz, Millersburg, Elizabethville, Williamstown and Tower City as well as regional cases that were reported in the local newspapers.