Friday, December 02, 2005

Two tragic anniversaries

In 1948, Dr. Cyril B. Babb pleaded guilty to performing a fatal abortion on Doris Becker in his office. Doris died 20 hours later, December 2, at the apartment of a friend, Anne Martin. Anne and a bartender, George Kutrones, were held as material witnesses. Babb also admitted to performing 30 other abortions.

Rudy Alston, stage name Floss, got the page as he sat in the waiting room of Brooklyn Women's Medical Pavilion on December 1, 1998. Tommy Boy Records had just signed the young rapper to a contract. Alston never got to share the news with his fiance, 22-year-old Tamika Dowdy. She was dying from complications of her abortion.

Staff at the clinic summoned emergency care for a woman with difficulty breathing. Police arrived first, followed by paramedics at 6 P.M. The medics worked to save Tamika, performing CPR, as Altson waited. Alston told the New York Post that a doctor had kept walking in and out of the waiting room, "sweating real fierce and pacing. He did that several times, and then he finally came up to me and said that her heart had stopped." Alston rode by her side to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead the following day.

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