Dr. carolyn Brown was a gynecologist and obstetrician in Palmer. She delivered thousands of babies, which she was known and praised for. She also performed abortions, which she was known and praised — and vilified for. (via AlaskaBeacon)
Dr. carolyn Brown sits outside her obstetric-gynecologic practice in Palmer with the Valley Hospital in the background. This photo was taken sometime in the mid-1980s.
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.Brown was born in 1937 and raised in Hereford, Texas, about 50 miles southwest of Amarillo.
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. 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.“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.
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.
“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. By this time, Brown said performing abortions was as normal as any other OB-GYN medical procedure. Though she performed abortions up to 21 and a half weeks, Brown said more than 90% of the abortions she did were done in the first trimester – the first 13 weeks.
“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.“It was awful. It was really awful, but you have to carry on,” Brown said. “I’d come to work and get ready to go down to the other end of the hospital to do a C-section or to do whatever it was I was going to do.
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.Brown recalls a person who worked in the lab and refused to draw blood for abortion patients due to his religious objections. There were also nurses who wouldn’t work with Brown when she was providing abortions. “A few of the nurses, religious or otherwise, just simply could not help,” she said.
In September 1981, Brown filed a lawsuit against Bill Moffatt, the primary author of the newsletter article, and Alaska Right to Life, alleging they had libeled her. In the lawsuit, Brown said that the defendants intimidated the governor and caused him to withdraw her appointment, resulting in damage to her professional reputation and career. Brown was joined by other doctors in the lawsuit.
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