Students Fight for Reproductive Health Care on Campus

The Women’s Caucus and a famous alum get it done

In the 1970s, the administration at Carleton was still framing contraception as a moral issue. In 1969 Dean Jean Phillips had been given a petition with 300 signatures requesting that the campus health center “include those services necessary to prevent Carleton women from becoming pregnant.” But Phillips told the Carletonian, “We have something even better than the pill, and that’s abstinence.” Meanwhile, after decades as a doctor working to improve the lives of women all over the world, Minnesota obstetrician Dr. Jane Hodgson ('34) had become persuaded that abortion should be “a humane medical service, not a felony.” In 1970 she risked everything, intentionally breaking Minnesota abortion law to bring attention to her point. Hodgson’s test case was that of a young married mother of three in St. Paul who had been exposed to rubella, which can cause serious birth defects. Hodgson was sentenced to 30 days in jail, becoming the only doctor ever to be prosecuted for performing an abortion in a hospital. She also received a year's probation and was prohibited from practicing medicine in Minnesota.“I was beginning to feel like a criminal anyway,” she told the New York Times. “I’ve performed very few of the so-called ‘legal’ abortions, but they aren’t the ones that bother me. It’s the ones I’ve refused to perform that haunt me.”Minnesota’s abortion laws, in place since 1873, were some of the most restrictive in the nation, leading an estimated 7,000 women to travel out of state to end pregnancies in 1971 alone. The Carletonian reported that one social service agency in Northfield that year referred 125 people for unwanted pregnancies and 100 for abortions, a rate it called “staggering” for a town that size.But Carleton was inching toward change. It offered co-ed housing for the first time in the winter of 1970, and the following year the school officially abandoned its regulation of “intervisitation” (a term for cross-gender dorm visits long understood by students as a euphemism for sex). Students fighting for gender equity turned toward the health service, where Dr. J. Willard Hanson had been serving for almost 30 years. In the fall of 1970 students put together a program of speakers from the Mayo Clinic and Planned Parenthood, meeting with PP’s community education director to discuss bringing a gynecologist to campus once a week. The proposal was rejected, according to the Carletonian, “because of the financial and political problems involved.” The following spring, students proposed launching a Mayo program on human sexuality that would bring birth control pills directly to them. That was kiboshed when the clinic refused to send the gynecologist required to distribute the medication.As school resumed in fall of 1971, students, now operating under the banner of the Women’s Caucus, surveyed the women students and two-thirds responded. Fully 90 percent were in favor of bringing a gynecologist to Carleton, 58 percent said they needed access to birth control, and 36 percent said they avoided addressing gynecological problems because they didn’t want to discuss them with Dr. Hanson.While appealing her conviction, Hodgson gave three talks at Carleton, between March 1971 and February 1972. She promised the Women's Caucus, according to the minutes of a meeting in October 1971, that she'd donate an examination table if the school would arrange for a gynecologist to practice on campus. A few weeks later, the Social Policy committee finally approved the caucus’s proposal for a part-time gynecologist, agreeing to a trial period from January to June 1972. Next up was the College Council. A graduate described the CC meeting to the Carletonian a few years later: “President Howard Swearer was extremely opposed to such an innovation. (He even sent a drunk but articulate gynecologist to collar me at a retreat to assert for an hour and a half that college-age women did not did not need such services.) At least six Caucus members presented him with a petition and spent 30 minutes giving him their arguments. It was scheduled for committee. The Caucus assigned a member to speak to every member of every committee which would discuss the issue. When the proposal finally came to the College Council, the gallery was filled with students. If the Caucus had merely dropped a proposal into the Governance system, it would have certainly been rejected.”The Women’s Caucus came to the meeting armed with careful responses to eight common objections to the proposal, from financial considerations to “condoning pre-marital sex.” As the Carletonian reported, “Again and again, [they] emphasized medicine and health as their chief concerns.” President Swearer worried the college would be taking on the outdated role of in loco parentis but was reminded that gynecological care encompassed much more than birth control and medical care was as important as food and shelter. The council approved the proposal on November 2, 1971, with “two low-pitched voices dissenting.” That winter, Carleton got its first part-time gynecologist: Dr. Elizabeth Mussey, a Carleton classmate of Hodgson’s, who brought her own supplies; Hodgson donated tables and lamps. Patients were billed $3 per exam, with additional charges for tests, which had to be sent to Rochester for analysis. Mussey was succeeded in the fall of 1973 by Dr. Elizabeth Jerome, a pioneer in adolescent health who had been an expert witness for the defense in Hodgson’s trial. After a month on the job, she announced that “Carleton women know no more about sex today than did their counterparts 20 years ago. They know the mechanics, the biology, but they have little real understanding of the emotions involved, of themselves.” Jerome stayed through the fall of 1974, but the students’ hard-won gynecology program didn’t last long after that. Services were provided briefly by a school nurse and medical school interns, but soon they were absorbed into the general health service. Then in the spring of 1975, doctor visits moved off campus, to a twice-weekly clinic held at a new joint Carleton-St. Olaf health service at Northfield Hospital. The Carleton’s Women Caucus continued to administer the Abortion Loan Fund and sponsor discussions as well as art festivals, speakers, and films. Both Dr. Jerome and Dr. Hodgson, whose conviction ended up being overturned by Roe v. Wade, received honorary degrees from Carleton. But not everyone appreciated what Hodgson had done for women. When she returned to Carleton to receive the honor at her 50th reunion, some of her classmates wouldn’t speak to her. “Some of these people I hadn’t seen since college, and I’d rush forward to greet them and they’d turn away.”

1973

Dr. Elizabeth Mussey

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