A video circulating the socials is showcasing a history of Ashland Pennsylvania many have forgotten…
The organization has purchased the famed Spencer clinic.
This is the official website ..
In the year 2000, a controversial book was released titled THE ANGEL OF ASHLAND. Written by Vincent Genovese, the story followed the long history of the coal town’s brush with worldwide fame..
Dr. Robert Spencer charged moderate fees, had a light on late into the night, removed kids’ tonsils, and had a reputation of gold for many families who visited his offices during their most horrible moments. Robert Spencer received his M.D. in 1915 and then served in the army during the flu epidemic. Except for a few years as chief pathologist in a U.S. Miners Hospital, he spent his career as a general practitioner in Ashland..
He also offered something else, more discreet and secret.
We can allow the ANGELS OF ASHLAND description tell the story:
For over fifty years Dr. Robert Spencer (1889-1969) practiced medicine in the small coal-mining town of Ashland, PA. As the only town doctor, he was known by everyone as a dedicated medical professional who spent long hours at his clinic, charged a modest fee for his services, never turned anyone away who couldn’t pay, and was the person the townspeople turned to with their many ailments and injuries.
But he also gained another kind of notoriety as well, about which there was generally a discreet silence in the town: he would willingly perform safe and reliable abortions. Women “in trouble” could consult him without shame or fear, and he would perform the procedure quickly and efficiently with no questions asked. This was unique in the era before Roe v. Wade, especially in the 1920s when Dr. Spencer opened his practice. As a result he soon became a much-sought-after physician, to whom doctors throughout the country would refer women who wished to end their pregnancies.
Of course, many disapproved of his not-so-secret and illegal abortion practice. Despite the townspeople’s reliance on him for his medical expertise, over the years he was blackmailed, robbed, often shunned in public, censured by the American Medical Association, and arrested by the police.
There are some disagreements on the number of abortions he performed. He first performed an abortion in 1919. Some say the end of career was 40,000.. others say 100,000.. Spencer reportedly considered performing abortions to be a public service, both on behalf of the women seeking them and as a means of curbing population
The part of this whole thing is how his actions put Ashland on the map. Famous people.. Hollywood people.. political elites.. People from Europe. They all traveled to the little quaint coal town to keep their discreet secret. All the while Spencer was giving often discounted services for people in need, he was performing the action that would go on to become a Supreme Court issue decades later and still be debated today.
Spencer is a mixed bag for many–people in the town who lived then were often fully aware of what was going on in his clinic. There were countless stays at hotels by wealthy people who were not there to see coal mines or anthracite extraction, but instead partake in the pre-RoeVsWade reproductive underground. People welcomed the newfound fame and business! People enjoyed the riches that came from the richest!
Paul Krassner wrote this about Spencer way back in 2003:
In 1962, when abortion was still illegal, I published an anonymous interview with Dr. Robert Spencer, a humane abortionist who was known as “The Saint.” Patients came to his office in Ashland, PA, from around the country. He had been performing abortions for 40 years, started out charging $5, and never charged more than $100. Ashland was a small town, and Dr. Spencer’s work was not merely tolerated—the community depended on it. The hotel, the restaurant, the dress shop all thrived on the extra business that came from his out-of-town patients. He built facilities at his clinic for Negro patients who weren’t allowed to obtain overnight lodgings elsewhere in Ashland.
A few years later, state police raided Dr. Spencer’s clinic and arrested him. He remained out of jail only by the grace of political pressure from those he’d helped. He was finally forced to retire from his practice…
Spencer first used a method that involved packing the uterus so that it would expel the fetus along with the foreign material..
The VILLAGE VOICE wrote this in 1969:
Spencer, I knew, was back in business again, at the age of 79. The justifiedly famous doctor had reopned his clinic on Centre Street and was now charging the incredible sum of $200, a concession, as he later told us, to the higher cos of drugs and supplies. At $200, Spencer’s price was still hard to believe, well under the going rate for such things. He was still unique in American history.
AND MORE from the 1969 article:
As the years passed, Spencer’s name would come up from time to time. The price had gone from $50 to $100. Some people remembered when it had been $25, or even $10. There were long stretches when the doctor in Ashland would go into retirement, and there were stories of treks to Ashland only to find the clinic boarded up and silent. There were, we heard, a death on his operating table from a reaction to the anesthesia. There was a trial and there was, miraculously, an acquittal. We head misinformation, too. Spencer had become an abortionist, the rumor went, because his own daughter had died on the operating table of an abortionist-butcher. This story was untrue, unfortunately popularized in a bad novel based loosely on the life of Spencer by a lady novelist with one of those awkward three-name combinations. Maybe the lady meant it symbolically. Spencer’s real-life daughter, better information had it, was alive and well, and so was his son. Other information I absorbed about Spencer, I was later to learn, was quite accurate. He was a committed atheist and free-thinker who often pressed his literature into the hands of the girls along with the antibiotics and vitamin pills. He had gotten into abortion work during the 20’s through the supplication of the miners’ wives in the Pennsylvania coal country, and his work for the miners — he was a pioneer in the technique of bronchoscopy — won him a heavy workmen’s compensation caseload, and, some said, the protection of the United Mine Workers during the years when the protection of the mine workers was something that counted…
This article details what it was like to get an abortion from Dr. Spencer.. written in 2007,
Dr. Spencer’s office was weird – walls and ceilings brimming with souvenir plaques from the gift shops in places like Lake George. One was a drawing of a vase that became the silhouette of two people when you stared at it. We avoided eye contact with the others in the waiting room, all of us too scared, unwilling to swap how-I-got-here stories, seek or give solace, or make small talk. X and I whispered to each other.
Dr. Spencer was white-haired and kindly, but couldn’t ease our fear. He packed X’s vagina with something to dilate her cervix and told us to come back in the morning. I have no memory of the evening. In the morning, I was fearful when Dr. Spencer installed me in a tiny room to wait it out and took X with him. The room had a chair, cot, afghan, and a black paperback, Crimes of Passion. I fantasized telling X’s parents where we were, and why, and that she was dead. Eventually, Dr. Spencer came in with X over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, out cold. He gently unloaded her on the cot, her eyes rolled back so the whites showed. After she came to and had rested, he checked her and gave her post-op instructions and antibiotics. The entire charge was $50.
Dr. Spencer was the beloved town doctor, protected by the police, and a hero to women around the nation. He’s in all the books about illegal abortions, and is the subject of a new documentary, “Dear Dr. Spencer: Abortion in a Small Town.” His file of requests from desperate women and thanks from women he helped (some still put flowers on his grave) is an education in itself. We realized how lucky we were when we heard horror stories: the difficulties amassing the huge fees the butchers charged, being driven around blindfolded so as not to know where the deed was done, forced sex with the abortionist before he’d get to work, the tied hands and the mouth stuffed to muffle the cries of pain from abortions without anesthesia, the soiled equipment, the hemorrhaging, the lies to the hospital emergency room, and the newspaper reports of women who died trying not to become a mother.
The history of abortion is fraught with political and social chaos.. the debate rages on in court and political circles.
But in the 1900s, it put Ashland on the map….
A map of debate and consternation ever since.
In the year 2008, a tragic situation unfolded next door to the Spencer abortion clinic location.
After the fire awoke the parents, the father tried without success to get upstairs to save the children.
He was able to rescue the 11/2-year-old boy by climbing onto a small porch roof and smashing the window of one of the bedrooms.
The father reached into the room, grabbed the boy and dropped him to a neighbor. Firefighters then used ladders to rescue the father.
The fire spread to nearby homes and businesses.
