Robert Spencer

Dr. Robert Douglas Spencer (1889–1969) was a general practitioner in Ashland, Pennsylvania, best known for his work as an illegal abortion provider in the decades before Roe v. Wade. He operated his practice from the 1920s until his death and is believed to have performed some 40,000 abortions. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, graduating in 1915. He served in the U.S. Army and worked for a few years as a chief pathologist in a miners' hospital. or 1925, for the wife of a coal miner.

The local residents were aware of his illegal practice but either tolerated or welcomed 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."

One day he received an advertisement for Leunbach's Paste, consisting of "potassium hydroxide, sodium hydroxide, iodine and potassium iodide in an olive oil and cacao butter base" and inserted into the uterus with a syringe. When the paste was taken off the market as dangerous, Spencer "began manufacturing his own product in his laboratory, a mild soft-soap solution, which he used to dilate the cervix and loosen the concepts in the first stage of his procedure. The following day he would complete the curettage. Spencer refined his own technique and he stuck with it for 40 years. The newer methods didn't interest him."

Spencer's records Spencer's records were burned by his second wife, preventing researchers from accurately documenting his practice. Thus, neither his technique nor the number and type of patients treated can be verified.

After the trial

Spencer briefly ceased doing abortions after the trial, "for a month or so," his widow said. But he resumed his business and eventually got entangled with Harry Mace, who ran a referral business bringing women to Spencer for abortions. Eleanor Spencer lamented that Mace flooded her husband with patients, pressuring him to rush through abortions. Spencer's health began to fail. He was arrested again, due to the attention from Mace's activities, but died before the case went to trial.