Chapter One: San Francisco, California, 1966 One SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, 1966 At the stroke of 9 a.m. on Friday, July 29, 1966, Patricia Theresa Maginnis approached the Federal Building, a stately Renaissance Revival structure in San Francisco''s Civic Center, holding a box of leaflets. It was a cool and overcast morning and a gaggle of reporters had already amassed outside, waiting for the small figure with the big box to arrive. Described by The New York Times as a slender and intense spinster "with the eyes of a zealot," Maginnis was striking as she marched into the crowd with a mane of tousled hair that framed her angular face. Once inside the scrum, she began passing out yellow leaflets to the journalists and passersby that advertised "Classes in Abortion" and listed female anatomy, sterile technique, after-abortion care, methods of abortions, dangers involved, police questioning, and foreign abortion specialists as topics she would cover over the course of four Wednesday-evening sessions. The leaflets also included a list of addresses and prices for doctors who provided abortions in other countries and described in detail, complete with diagrams, two methods for self-inducing abortion. "I am attempting to show women an alternative to knitting needles, coat hangers, and household cleaning agents," Maginnis proclaimed to the bystanders, urging those around her to take the papers and pass them on.

At a time when abortion was swathed in taboo, stigma, and shame, Maginnis was making the argument that anyone who wanted one should be able to get one without having to navigate legal, political, or medical barriers, on demand, without apology or justification, for free. In distributing the leaflets, she wasn''t just doing something radical--she was doing something potentially illegal, and she knew it. Section 276 of the California Penal Code stated that helping a woman have an abortion, or soliciting her to have one, was punishable by up to five years in prison. The law had largely been unchanged in California since 1850, and Maginnis believed that changing it required a test case. But in order to do that, she needed to be charged and go to court. She planned to leaflet until the authorities got sick of her, arrested her, or gave in and repealed the law. She''d already been at it for six weeks, handing out leaflets to anyone who would take one on the streets of San Francisco and keeping the police abreast of her activities. Law enforcement, however, was wary of the attention that arresting her would bring and frustrated her ambitions by leaving her alone.

When they still had not arrived at the Federal Building by 10:30 a.m. on the twenty-ninth, Gary Bentley, a member of a Channel 7 camera crew that was filming a piece about Maginnis, grew impatient and took matters into his own hands. After ensuring the camera was trained on him, Bentley announced he was placing Maginnis under citizen''s arrest for violating Section 188 of the Municipal Police Code, a local ordinance that prohibited advertising abortion and lewd literature. "What do you think of that?" he asked Maginnis. "Excuse me, please," she said, dismissing him as she rushed after another woman to hand her a leaflet. At last, a policeman arrived on the scene to take Maginnis into custody (emphasizing while doing so that it was Bentley, not him, who was making the arrest) and drove away with her in his car. Soon thereafter, Section 188 was found unconstitutional, and the case was thrown out, but to Maginnis, the victory felt insufficient.

Her aims were higher--total repeal of the state''s abortion laws. "A decade before Roe , with her ungainly activism, her proclivity for wearing clothes she''d found on the street, and her righteous, unquenchable rage, Maginnis helped to fundamentally reshape the abortion debate into the terms we''re still using today," journalist Lili Loofbourow wrote in a profile years later. "She was the first to take a passionate, public stance arguing that the medical stranglehold over women''s reproductive lives was corrosive." At the time Maginnis took her stand, abortion had been illegal in the US for nearly a century. Every state in the country had criminal abortion laws with exceptions only offered for procedures necessary to save or preserve the life of the mother. These were known as "therapeutic abortions," although there was not a clear definition or universal agreement on what qualified as "necessary." What one hospital considered permissible under the law, another might not, and to get approval for the procedure, patients had to go before hospital committees composed entirely of men and plead their case. It was a terrifying, alienating, and humiliating hurdle to overcome, not to mention a high one, as women had to bare their most vulnerable, intimate selves in supplication to physicians who had the power to determine their fates.

In practice, few women qualified for therapeutic abortions, and those who didn''t had to resort to other measures. Women with the most resources could travel to places where abortion was legal, while the rest had to seek out underground providers or figure out a way to end the pregnancy themselves. In the best-case scenario, and only for those who could afford it, there were physicians who would quietly and capably perform the procedure as a clandestine part of their medical practice. Until a surge in prosecutions of abortion providers during the 1940s and ''50s, many physicians had operated for decades in what was essentially open secrecy, and although their numbers dwindled after the crackdowns, there was still a cluster of such doctors in every state by the mid-1960s. Many had gotten into the work after treating people who became grievously ill from botched abortions, feeling they couldn''t stand by and do nothing. There were also skilled midwives, like the so-called Mrs. Vineyards, who practiced in the St. Louis area for some thirty years, providing proficient, albeit expensive, abortion care.

On the other end of the spectrum were inept and callous providers who took advantage of a desperate and vulnerable clientele, practicing in unsanitary conditions, treating clients badly, and inflicting serious, sometimes permanent damage. For women who couldn''t afford a provider of any stripe, didn''t know where to find one, or were too afraid or unable to visit one, there was a long and seemingly ever-growing list of methods they tried to induce an abortion themselves: Lysol douche, glycerin douche, powdered kitchen mustard douche, hydrogen peroxide douche, potassium permanganate corrosive tablets, intrauterine installation of kerosene and vinegar, paintbrushes, curtain rods, slippery elm sticks, garden hoses, glass cocktail stirrers, ear syringes, telephone wire, copper wire, coat hangers, nut picks, pencils, cotton swabs, clothespins, knitting needles, rubber catheters, chopsticks, bicycle pumps, gramophone needles, castor oil by mouth, and turpentine. During this period, there were so many women suffering from abortion complications that hospitals had dedicated wards called Infected OB to treat them. The consequences of unsafe abortions were ghastly, ubiquitous, and becoming impossible to ignore, and in 1961, after hearing the story of a woman forced to carry a child conceived in an assault, a freshman California assemblyman named John Knox introduced a bill that would broaden exceptions to California''s abortion law. At the time, around 30 percent of the state''s population identified as Catholic, and politicians, afraid of backlash from a powerful voting constituency, kept the proposal from even reaching the floor of either chamber. When a young Patricia Maginnis, still five years away from her leafletting campaign, read a newspaper article about the bill and its failure, she decided to draw up a petition of her own. She wasn''t just going to let the issue, a matter of life and death, a matter of freedom, wither on the vine. Maginnis had developed a taste for rebellion and righteous outrage over gender inequality from a young age.

She was born on June 9, 1928, in Ithaca, New York, while her father, Ernest, was studying to be a veterinarian at Cornell University. After his graduation, the family moved to Okarche, Oklahoma, where Maginnis was raised during the Great Depression. Her parents were Catholic and did not believe in using birth control, and her mother, a schoolteacher, gave birth to seven children, despite warnings from doctors about the harmful effects that so many pregnancies had on her health. Maginnis grew up watching her plagued by constant pain. During World War II, processions of soldiers traveled by the family''s house, which was near a highway, and when she was fourteen, Maginnis turned a pink satin bedspread into a halter top and dashed outside to wave at a passing convoy. She didn''t have time to change back into normal clothes before she got caught, and in response, her parents promptly dispatched her to a convent school forty miles away. After high school, Maginnis ventured off into the world on her own, moving around and trying out various professional pursuits, including a stint as a nude artist''s model and a job in a lab at the Bureau of Mines in the northern part of Oklahoma. After traveling to the Netherlands to visit a boyfriend she''d been writing to for years, she joined the Women''s Army Corps and trained as a surgical technician.

She was posted to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where she got in trouble for taking a walk with a Black soldier and was sent off to Panama. At her new post, Maginnis had hoped for an assignment with a surgical team, but since she was a woman, she was placed on a pediatrics and maternity ward in the army hospital. Every day, she was su.