In one “Dragnet” (late 60s version) episode, a (pregnant) woman commits suicide when she finds out that her boyfriend is married. While the police are investigating the suicide (which they thought at first was a murder), the boyfriend shows up–with a ticket to Tijuana.
When that was announced, it was done with some dramatic effect. I’m assuming that since this was pre-“Roe v Wade” that abortion was illegal in California, and the ticket to Tijuana was because they were legal South of the Border. Anyone have any verification of this, or if not, what the relevance to Tijuana was?
He could have been going to Tijuana for a “quickie” Mexican divorce, so he could marry the pregnant girlfriend. It used to be tougher to obtain a divorce in the US.
I’m not sure a show like Dragnet would’ve acknowledged abortions even existed. Such things weren’t mentioned on prime time network TV.
Abortion was illegal in California during the “Dragnet” era for the most part.
I think the Mexican divorce would have been more likely.
What I can’t figure out is why someone needs a ticket of some kind to go to Tijuana. You can take a bus there, but it’s just as easy to drive. It’s not particularly far. In the 1960s with lower traffic loads, you could make it from L.A. to Tijuana in less than 2.5 hours. Less than 2 hours if you didn’t heed local speed laws and ran into little traffic at the border.
At that time abortion was illegal in the US but available in Mexico. This was one of the reasons used to justify legalization: only the wealthy could afford the trip to Mexico, Japan, Sweden, etc., to obtain one.
Women from everywhere traveled to San Diego and caught the buses to Tijuana. Procurers on the other side of the border found it easy to spot the nervous looking women and were there offering their services as quickly as the trinket sellers did.
There was actually an element of safety using the doctors in Mexico - here ir was a back-alley operation, in Mexico it could be perfomed under sterile conditions.
Am sure these women could have rented a car, hitched, whatever, but it wasn’t necessarily brains that got them there in the first place.
As far as the Dragnet episode goes: reminds me of the Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown episode. It’s only TV!
Somehow this suggests to me that the boyfriend was trying to run out, get out of the reach of the authorities in California…suppose the boyfriend were extradited? Don’t we have an extradition treaty with Mexico?
It also seemsd to allude to Dreiser’s novel American Tragedy, in which a young man has gotten a poor working girl pregnant. This stands in the way of his marriage into an upscale family, so he drowns her. Maybe abortion should have been retroactive for his mother…I don’t know offhand how Dreiser finished this story.