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Tuesday, November 04, 2008

1977: Wrong blood, wrong ambulance, dead mother

Louchrisser Jackson, a 23-year-old mother of five, was 12 weeks pregnant when she went to Dr. Robert L. Gardner for a safe and legal abortion at Reproductive Services in Dallas on November 4, 1977. Louchrisser began hemorrhaging. Gardner said that he ordered blood for a transfusion, but it didn't arrive so about an hour before her death he attempted to give her a transfusion with his own blood -- which turned out to be an incompatable type.

A private ambulance was called but was not informed of the nature of the transport. In that jurisdiction, private ambulances are only permitted to transport stable patients; they are prohibited from responding to emergency calls. Because the ambulance service had no reason to expect an emergency, they did not respond promptly, nor did they refer the transport to the fire deparment's ambulance service.

When the ambulance crew arrived, Louchrisser had gone into cardiac arrest. The crew, upon discovering that they'd been called for an emergency transport, rushed Louchrisser to the hospital immediately rather than calling for a fire department ambulance.

Louchrisser died that day. Gardner requested that the body be released without an inquiry. Another physician at the hospital learned of the case and requested an inquiry.

The autopsy found massive hemmorage of at least two liters of blood, and a "1.8 x 2 cm. ragged perforation in the right lateral wall just above the internal os of the cervical canal. This perforation commonicates freely with the retroperitoneal space on the right side. The endometrial surface of the uterus is ragged and hemorrhagic." Death was attributed to "massive retroperitoneal hemorrhage due to perforation of the uterus during a therapeutic abortion."

For more abortion deaths, visit the Cemetery of Choice:



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4 comments:

  1. Christina,

    I'd like to subscribe to all comments on this blog. Since I'm a SAHM and check my Google Reader frequently, I usually don't see any comments (I might even be the first reader of some of these posts), but would like to know if other comments come in. Is there a "widget" or something you can put on the home-page so that I can subscribe to the comments feed? I've seen that on other blogger blogs.

    Thanks!

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  2. Not sure, Kathy. And I'm away from home at a training so I don't have much computer time.

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  3. Christina -- I checked it out, and it's easy on Blogger to do this -- just go to "layout" from your dashboard and choose "add a gadget" (or something like that), and it's one of the top ones -- I think the 4th one down. (So much easier than the way I had to do something similar in WordPress!)

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