H. Hale Harvey III, a physician who established in New York in 1970 one of the first major abortion clinics in the United States, an organization that served thousands of women and expanded reproductive rights by demonstrating that abortions could be safely, humanely and affordably provided outside a hospital, died Feb. 14 in Dorchester, England. He was 93.
He had complications from a fall, said his daughter, Kate Harvey.
Dr. Harvey, who was trained in philosophy as well as medicine and public health, helped transform the practice of abortion in the United States during a brief and at points controversial medical career. His most significant work straddled the 1960s, when abortion in most circumstances was illegal across the country, and the early 1970s, when states including New York began to liberalize their laws.
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Dr. Harvey’s Manhattan clinic carried him to national prominence. But he neither sought nor received wide attention after he left in 1972 and moved to England following the revelation that he had been operating without a medical license.
According to numerous scholars who closely examined his record, Dr. Harvey provided stellar care to his patients, often serving indigent women for a token fee or at no charge. He had surrendered his license in 1969 in Louisiana, his home state, after authorities discovered that he was providing abortions in defiance of state laws.
For Dr. Harvey, the loss of his credential was not a mark of shame but rather a simple fact of the life he had chosen as a medical conscientious objector in the years before the U.S. Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion with its 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. The Roe decision remained in effect until 2022, when the court overturned it in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Dr. Harvey saw abortion, for women, as a matter of self-determination. He was acting “out of a moral principle,” said Janet Allured, a professor at the University of Arkansas who addressed Dr. Harvey’s work in her book “Remapping Second-Wave Feminism” (2016), about the women’s movement in Louisiana.
Dr. Harvey had grown up poor and moved frequently with his family to escape debts, an experience that seared into him an understanding of the difficulties that accompany poverty. One of them, he learned as he began to study public health, was reduced access to abortion.
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Before Roe, in states with general bans on the procedure, women with the resources to navigate hospital review committees could sometimes obtain exceptions for “therapeutic” reasons. Poor women were far less likely to succeed. If they did, the cost of the procedure, which could run into the hundreds of dollars, was often beyond their reach.
Many underground abortionists exploited women’s distress by charging extortionate rates or demanding sexual favors in exchange for their services. Shoddy medical practices often put the patients at risk of infection or death. Surveying the options available to women who wished to end their pregnancies, Dr. Harvey found their choices unacceptable.
Years before “preferred provider” became a term of art in managed health care, Dr. Harvey, then working in New Orleans, became a preferred provider of the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a network of ministers and rabbis who confidentially referred women to medical professionals known to provide safe terminations.
Dr. Harvey “had a unique style and used his imagination to provide extras that no other ‘illegal’ abortionist would have even considered,” Arlene Carmen and the Rev. Howard Moody, key figures in the Clergy Consultation Service, wrote in their 1973 book “Abortion Counseling and Social Change.”
He cushioned operating room stirrups with brightly colored pot holders. He invited women to bring knitting or magazines to the waiting room, to make the abortion clinic seem like any other doctor’s office, and provided soda and cookies when the procedure was over and the patient was no longer required to fast.
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“This combination of extras, plus excellent medical skill,” Carmen and Moody continued, “made women feel good about the doctor, themselves, and the experience.”
In 1970, New York became the second state, just on the heels of Hawaii, to enact a broad legalization of abortion. The Hawaii law applied only to state residents. The New York law, which allowed abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy, carried no residency requirement - a crucial difference that soon made New York City the “abortion capital of the country,” in the description of a 1971 report in the New York Times.
Dr. Harvey made and kept a pledge to open an abortion clinic the day the law took effect. In cooperation with the Clergy Consultation Service, he spent $30,000 of his own money to set up an office on the Upper West Side that was known variously as the Women’s Medical Group, Women’s Medical Services, Women’s Services, and the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health. His chief collaborator in the effort was Barbara Pyle, a fellow abortion advocate who later became a noted environmentalist.
Dr. Harvey brought with him to New York the practices he had used in New Orleans to make his patients comfortable. He assigned female assistants to spend at least one hour with each woman who came in for an abortion, counseling her, helping her through the procedure and providing information on contraceptive methods. Many of the assistants, who sought to make themselves approachable by dressing in street clothes instead of medical garb, had themselves undergone abortions.
After being assured that the patient had decided on her own, without outside influence, to end her pregnancy, the physician performing the procedure assured her that she was “doing the right thing” and said that he - almost all physicians were male - was “glad to help.”
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“We try to reassure her she is a fine girl who has made a mistake, and now has a chance to get her life on the right track,” Dr. Harvey told the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News in 1970.
His office became “the most important abortion clinic in the United States prior to Roe v. Wade, and it really set the standard of practice in extraordinary ways,” said Felicia Kornbluh, a professor at the University of Vermont and author of the book “A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life” (2023).
Dr. Harvey’s clinic operated seven days a week, with nearly two dozen physicians providing a total of approximately 100 abortions per day - a figure that reportedly exceeded the number at all New York hospitals combined. The clinic charged $200 per procedure at the outset but soon dropped the price to $125. Women with limited means paid $25, or nothing. After Roe, the clinic served as a blueprint for clinics across the country.
Dr. Harvey had moved to England by the time the Roe decision was announced. Amid the discovery that he lacked a medical license, he and the Clergy Consultation Service reached a “private agreement” for him to leave the clinic, according to Ron Hammerle, who worked as an administrator with the network.
Dr. Harvey was succeeded as medical director at the clinic by Bernard Nathanson, a founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now Reproductive Freedom for All). Nathanson soon underwent a conversion on the question of abortion and became one of the most prominent abortion rights opponents in the United States.
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In his 1996 book “The Hand of God,” he described the physicians at Dr. Harvey’s clinic as a “deplorable” group of “medical losers.” That characterization is contradicted by a 1971 report in the Times that described the office as “the outstanding example of … safe, efficient and inexpensive clinics.”
“There was never any evidence to suggest that he was anything less than sterile, professional and compassionate,” said Gillian Frank, a professor at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and the author of the forthcoming book “A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Reproductive Freedom.”
For Nathanson and like-minded abortion opponents, Dr. Harvey was a symbol of abortionists who were “skirting the law” to commit immoral acts, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California at Davis and the author of books about abortion including “Roe: The History of a National Obsession” (2023).
But for his admirers, she added, Dr. Harvey stood out among the physicians who, at significant personal risk, provided desperate women with an essential component of health care that they otherwise would have been denied.
Horace Hale Harvey III - known among relatives as Herkie and to colleagues as Hale - was born in New Orleans on Dec. 7, 1931. He and his two sisters were the offspring of a prosperous New Orleans clan whose wealth did not extend to their branch of the family tree.
Dr. Harvey’s father worked in a range of professions, at one point running a loan company, and his mother was a secretary. The family lived in Texas before returning to Louisiana and opening a cafe, where Dr. Harvey served soda, popcorn and ice cream to their teenage clientele.
Dr. Harvey was raised in the Christian faith and held leadership roles in religious student groups at Louisiana State University. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1955 and a medical degree in 1966. As an undergraduate, he hitchhiked to a Christian summer school in New York and encountered liberal Christianity for the first time in his life.
According to his daughter, Dr. Harvey embarked on a seven-year reexamination of his beliefs during which he forswore nearly all other pursuits, including dating. He reached the conclusion that he was an atheist and never wavered from that decision, she said, although he found his principles in line with those of the Clergy Consultation Service. He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War - on ethical grounds, he emphasized, not on religious ones.
Dr. Harvey continued his studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, receiving a master of public health degree and a PhD in philosophy, both in 1969.
By then, Dr. Harvey had become concerned about not only the need for abortion but also the general lack of information about sexual health. With Pyle, whom he at met at Tulane, he established the Community Sex Information and Education Service, a New Orleans-based operation that distributed leaflets and ran an anonymous telephone service for people seeking guidance.
Dr. Harvey moved to England because he admired the country’s National Health Service, his daughter said - and also because he enjoyed the BBC. Upon his arrival, he resumed his philosophy studies, showing up for classes at the University of Cambridge despite the fact that he was not enrolled as a student. He settled on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England, where he and his wife, the former Helen Cox, raised two children.
Dr. Harvey’s marriage ended in divorce. Besides his daughter, survivors include a son, Russell Harvey, and three grandchildren.
During his years on the Isle of Wight, Dr. Harvey worked on public health matters including cervical cancer awareness for women. He purchased an old mansion, called Puckaster Close, and converted the property into a boardinghouse where he welcomed tenants even when they could not afford market-rate rent. He invited them to join, among other activities, discussions of philosophy.
Eleven years ago, a catastrophic fire destroyed the home. No one was injured, but all of Mr. Harvey’s belongings were lost. Among them, his daughter said, were letters from women who thanked him for helping them shape the course of their lives by providing the abortions they might not have received except for him.