Somebody was looking for abortion 1940s

Here's what I have:

• On April 17, 1940, Mrs. Josephine Williams and her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Adele H. Sassen, were sentenced to prison for an illegal abortion resulting in the death of a Long Beach woman.
  
• According to the National Organization for Women web site, Pauline Roberson Shirley bled to death on August 22, 1940 from an illegal abortion.
  
• In late July of 1941, Mrs. Agnes Pearson of White Plains, New York died at Grasslands Hospital in New York of suspected complications from an abortion.
  
• Sarah Howe was charged with abortion and with manslaughter in the death of 23-year-old Helen Clark. Helen died September 16, 1941.
  
• On December 23, 1941, Dr. Samuel Roth was sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the illegal abortion death of a woman I identify as Jane Roe of 1937.
  
• On October 18, 1942, 23-year-old Harriet Lichtenberg of Brooklyn died in Royal Hospital, the Bronx, from suspected criminal abortion complications.
  
• Sometime between 1942 and 1949, Iva Rodeffer Davis Coffman performed an abortion on Kerneda C. Bennett, resulting in her death.
  
• On November 18, 1942, 26-year-old Madeline McGeehan died at Prospect Hospital in New York after an illegal abortion.
  
• On March 28, 1942, 19-year-old Cleo Florence Moore died at New Rochelle Hospital in New York from peritonitis from an illegal abortion.
  
• On February 14, 1942, Florence Nimick Schnoor, age 24, died at St. Joseph's Hospital in New York of what the coroner called a "brutal and inept" illegal abortion.
  
• On February 14, 1944, Amelia Cardito, 34-year-old mother of 4, underwent an illegal abortion at the office of Dr. Anthony Renda.
  
• On March 5, 1945, Beatrice Fern Fisher took her four-year-old daughter and $100 in cash and drove to Seattle to seek her former physician. She arranged an abortion that was ultimately fatal.
  
• At 11 AM on October 17, 1947, Dr. Paul Singer, a gynecologist, called police and reported that a woman had come to his office suffering from an incomplete abortion.
  
• On March 21, 1947, Ilene Eagen was brought to Mankato, Minnesota, to the dental office of W. A. Groebner for an abortion.
  
• On December 5, 1948, Dr. Cyril B. Babb pleaded guilty to performing a fatal abortion on Doris Becker the previous Wednesday in his office.
  
• On July 29, 1949, on the basis of a third-party referral, Dorothy Martin went to the home of P.D. Beigun for an abortion.

From 1940 to 1945, there was roughly a 50% drop in abortion deaths (from 1,407 in 1940 to 744 in 1945), thanks to the development of antibiotics. Then from 1945 to 1950 came a tremendous drop, with abortion mortality falling to roughly a third of the previous tally (down to 263).



For more abortion deaths, visit the Cemetery of Choice:





For more on pre-legalization abortion, see The Bad Old Days of Abortion

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