Two Verified, One Claimed

On March 15, 1917, 24-year-old waitress Celia Steele died at Chicago's Jefferson Park Hospital from septicemia and purulent peritonitis caused by a criminal abortion. The coroner was unable to identify the guilty party.

On March 27, 1929,34-year-old Clara Duvall died at Pittsburgh's Mercy Hospital. Abortion-rights organizations assert that though the death certificate listed Clara's cause of death as pneumonia, she actually died from a self-induced knitting-needle abortion which Clara told her 10-year-old daughter about from her deathbed. I've been unable to verify that there is any evidence that Clara died from any sort of abortion.

On March 27, 1940, 20-year-old homemaker Mary Ann Page of Alton, Illinois, died from a botched criminal abortion. The Coroner's jury identified the perpetrator as 69-year-old Dr. C.E. Trovillion, also of Alton, former managing officer of Illinois state hospitals.