Is NOW pulling another fast one? Or is this just a grim coincidence?

I started going through my copy of The Worst of Times, by Patricia G. Miller.





The first death story was in the chapter called "Marilyn". Marilyn describes the death of her mother, who died in March of 1929 in Pittsburgh, leaving behind five children, aged infant through 12.

I checked my site and found that I have a March, 1929 Pittsburgh abortion death: Clara Bell Duvall.

I'm going to have to do more research.

Marilyn gives her mother's name as Claudia, and her age as 34. The difference in ages may be attributed to people taking the years of the woman's birth and death and calculating her age without taking the months into account. Marilyn also said that her mother sang with the Pittsburgh light opera company, so it is possible that Claudia had a stage name that NOW used when telling her story. Or Marilyn might be using a false name for her mother to preserve the family's privacy.

Clara/Claudia's association with the opera company may also explain the elegant portrait on NOW's site -- a portrait that a poverty-stricken and desperate woman would have been unlikely to afford.

The following facts match:

• Five children, from an infant to a 12-year-old
  
• Living in Pittsburgh
  
• Died in March of 1929
  
• Death originally attributed to pneumonia
  
• The woman used a knitting needle
  
• Was at home for several days before being hospitalized
  
• Died in a hospital
  
• Cared for until her death by her usual doctor who seemed at a loss as to how to care for is moribund patient

NOW's story differs from Marilyn's in many aspects, however. Aside from the different age and name, the following aspects do not match:

• NOW has the family living with the woman's parents; Marilyn said that they were living in a large house owned by the woman's parents.
  
• NOW indicates that the family were too poor to afford a home of their own. Marilyn said that they lived in a large house, and that her father was an editor of one of Pittsburgh's daily newspapers, and that he did freelance public relations for sports events. Marilyn also said that one of her mother's friends was the wife of a well-known Pittsburgh industrialist. This is not a likely friendship for a destitute woman forced to move her family of seven into her parents' home. Marilyn also said that her mother was laid to rest in a magnificent mahogany casket with a satin lining, hardly the sort of burial a poverty-crushed widower could afford for his dead wife. Marilyn also said that the casket lay in the parlor, not a room that poor people were likely to have. In fact, Marilyn describes how shocking it was, after her mother's death, to go live with poor relatives. Poverty was a new experience for the child. In fact, Marilyn describes an riverboat outing the family took before her mother's death. She described how the girls were dressed in matching navy blue coats with red satin linings, and her brother had a jacket and tie.

So there are two possibilities:

1. Clara Bell Duvall and Claudia are two different women, both with five children, both of whom lived in homes owned by their parents, who both performed knitting-needle abortions in the same city in the same month, and who both died in hospitals and both had their deaths wrongly attributed to pneumonia.
   
2. Clara and Claudia are the same woman, and but NOW turned her from a prosperous matron and opera singer into a wretched slum mother in order to make her situation seem more desperate.

I will be going to the library at my next opportunity to research the Pittsburgh newspaper and see what I can learn.