One Illegal, Two Legal, and an Unusual Prosecution

On July 9, 1916, 27-year-old homemaker Mina Malletti died at Chicago's Washington Park Hospital from complications of a abortion performed that day by an unknown perpetrator.

Luz Rodriguez was 40 years old when she went to Moshe Hachamovitch's abortion clinic in the Bronx for a first-trimester abortion on July 5, 1986. She bled heavily after the abortion. Just before she was to be discharged, she stopped breathing. Staff summoned an ambulance, which took Luz to a hospital. Efforts to resuscitate her were successful, but she remained hospitalized. Four days later, July 9, she died. The autopsy found that she had bled to death from an incomplete abortion.Hachamovitch was also either direction responsible for the deaths of Jammie Garcia , Lisa Bardsley, Christina Goesswein, Tanya Williamson, and Lou Ann Herron., or he owned and was supposed to properly supervised the facilities where they were fatally injured.

Guadalupe Negron, age 33, went for a safe, legal abortion at Metro Women's Center in Queens, New York, on July 9, 1993.  After Dr. David Benjamin had performed Guadalupe's abortion, she was moved to the recovery room  and left unattended for over an hour. When paramedics arrived, they found Guadalupe naked and bloody, with a nurse screaming and trying to revive her in a small, unventilated room with an inadequate oxygen tank and no necessary equipment such as a blood pressure cuff. They also noted that Benjamin had inserted a breathing tube into Guadalupe's stomach instead of her trachea, causing stomach fluids to travel up the tube, into her mouth, and down into her lungs. The autopsy report found that in trying to extract a 20-week fetus, Benjamin had lacerated Guadalupe's cervix and punctured her uterus, leaving a tear over 3 inches long. She hemorrhaged and went into shock and cardiac arrest. Authorities determined that Benjamin had initiated the risky procedure without having first examined the patient. One of the paramedics told a reporter, "I wouldn't take my dog there (Benjamin's clinic)." New York newspapers covering Benjamin's murder trial discovered that the Iranian immigrant had a long history of malpractice and had changed his name from Elias Bonrouhi to David Benjamin in order to cover up his record. The told reporters that they were appalled by Benjamin's arrogance, lack of remorse, and lack of appreciation of how badly he had bungled the case. because of the egregiousness of Benjamin's behavior, he was charged with manslaughter. The jury forewoman said, "It was quite a quick decision. The pictures of his clinic were disgusting. The inside was very unsanitary." She and the other jurors also noted that, "Throughout the trial, his lawyer said Dr. Benjamin didn't know the woman had died. But when we listened to the tape, we clearly heard his wife say, 'She's dead! She's dead!'"  Abortion activist Bill Baird attended the trial with Benjamin's wife and her mother, and denounced the sentence as "a public stoning, and said that the judge who sentenced his fellow abortionist was incapable of compassion or mercy.