In Chapter 4 of
Lime 5, Mona summarized the death of a 32-year-old California woman I'll call "
Daisy." We learned of
Daisy's death by ordering a database run of all deaths in California
that met the ICD codes for abortion. Daisy was not a
poor, ignorant woman. To the contrary, she was a systems analyst for a
defense contractor. Daisy knew that abortion was legal and readily
available. She had an appointment to abort her second-trimester
pregnancy scheduled for April 30, 1990, at a local abortion clinic. However, for some
reason, Daisy didn't wait for her appointment. On April 28, she allowed
her boyfriend to insert a plastic tube into her uterus in a
home-abortion attempt. Daisy died of complications of that abortion.
Survivors of Julia L. Rogers, age 20, alleged that she underwent a
safe and legal abortion by
Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard (pictured) at
Friendship Medical Center in Chicago on April 21, 1973. Julia's death
certificate states that her death April 28 at Tabernacle Hospital was
due to "bronchopneumonia and generalized peritonitis complicating
extensive necrotizing endometritis and myometritis with sealed
perforation." In other words, she developed pneumonia on top of peritonitis. A hole had been poked in her uterus, causing an
infection that made the muscle tissue of her uterus start to rot inside her.
Evelyn Dudley and
Dorothy Brown also died after abortions at Friendship Medical Center.
Sophia Berghusen of Brooklyn died on April 28, 1880, under the care
of the mother-and-daughter midwife team of Mrs. Mary Kaufmann and Miss
Margaret Kaufmann. The coroner concluded that Sophia had died of
abortion complications. Both the Kaufmann women were arrested and tried
but acquitted, though the sources do not say what was lacking in the
case against them.
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