Two anniversaries

Rosa Device was taken to Chambers Street Hospital in New York on Friday night, May 3, 1878. She was "in a hopeless condition" when she arrived. "She told the physicians in the hospital that she had been leading an evil life for three months, and had procured and taken drugs to produce an abortion. She died just after midnight on Saturday night, which would have been the early morning hours of Sunday, May 5.

It was spring of 1939. Martha Wilma Rhodes Anderson was only sixteen years old, but already she was married, and already she was unhappy in her marriage. She was sexually involved with a 26-year-old sailor named William P. Bouldin. She became pregnant with Bouldin's baby. He arranged an abortion for her at the office of a chiropractor -- whose trainee brother, it appears, actually performed the fatal crime. Martha took ill and began to hemorrhage. The licensed chiropractor brother tried to save her, but to no avail. She died between 5:00 and 5:30 the evening of May 5. The men were able to slip Martha's body to her home state of Texas for burial, but eventually the story started to slip out. Martha's body was exhumed and the truth came to light. Both brothers were convicted of murder and abortion and were sentenced to five years to life at San Quentin. Read the whole sordid story here.


Keep in mind that things that things we take for granted, like antibiotics and blood banks, were still in the future. For more about abortion in this era, The Bad Old Days of Abortion.