Chicago Abortion Deaths Continue to This Day

There is very little information available about the women whose deaths we commemorate today. They died in Chicago, 3 years apart. On April 22, 1920, 28-year-old homemaker Sophie Krawczyk died in her Chicago home from an abortion perpetrated on February 27 by Mary Simkus, whose profession is listed only as "abortion provider." Simka was indicted for Sophie's death, but the case never went to trial. On April 22, 1923, 30-year-old Daisy Singerland died at Chicago's Robert Burns Hospital from complications of a criminal abortion performed earlier that day. On June 1, Dr. J.W. Lipscomb was indicted for felony murder in Daisy's death.

Chicago seems to have been, and to remain, a hotbed of abortion activity, with maternal deaths continuing to this day, with the deaths of Nakia Jorden in 1998, Maria Leho in 1999, Maria Rodriguez in 2000, Tonya Reaves in 2012. Nakia and both Marias died after abortions at Albany Medical Surgical Center, a National Abortion Federation member whose premier physician, Steve Lichtenberg, had been chewed out at a NAF seminar for "playing Russian roulette with patients' lives." Tonya died after an abortion at Planned Parenthood.

As for the claims that prior to legalization, Chicago's hospitals had entire wards of women suffering from botched criminal abortions, in one point also claiming that half of those women died:

Surgery, gynecology & obstetrics, Volume 26 By Franklin H. Martin Memorial Foundation, American College of Surgeons, 1918 will give us a contemporary account.Dr. Julius E. Lackner: I reported 500 cases occurring in the service of Drs. Banga and Fninkenthal at the Michael Reese Hospital in the years 1900 to 1914. Of these 500 cases 4 died. Five hundred cases in 15 years. That's about 34 a year or one admission every 11 days. That hardly an entire ward full of septic abortion cases. And the mortality rate was less than 1%. And consider that this record predates blood transfusions and antibiotics. And, keep in mind, this case load is comprised of all women whose pregnancies ended before about six months, both naturally and due to criminal interference.

Looking over my own records, which are rich in Chicago deaths due to the extensive historical Chicago and Cook County records available online, I am can see that there simply were not enough investigations of abortion deaths at hospitals in all of Chicago, much less at the one hospital, to support the claim of entire septic abortion wards, even if you go back early in the 20th Century when, due to the state of health and medicine, abortion deaths were far more common than they would have been in the 1960s.

In fact, the entire Homicide in Chicago Interactive Database indicates only at most three abortion deaths at Cook County Hospital were investigated every year for the entire period (1870-1930) covered by the Database. Most years there were no deaths, or one death. Though of course the Database or its search spider may have missed some, surely they did not miss scores of cases annually, which would have to be the case if as many women were dying at Cook County Hospital as abortion proponents claim.