Anniversary: A Thanksgiving tragedy

Eighteen year old Michelle Madden, a coed, sought an abortion from O.B. Evans at Family Planning Medical Center of Mobile, Alabama in November of 1986. Michelle had been taking medication for epilepsy, and a doctor had told her that her baby would have birth defects.

When Michelle's parents arrived at the college to take her home for Thanksgiving, the house mother had sad news for them. Three days after the abortion, Michelle had collapsed. She had been taken to the hospital, where doctors found a leg bone, two pieces of skull, and some placenta still in her uterus. The surgery to save her life was too late. Sepsis had already set in, and Michelle died three days after she was admitted.

Her parents sued Evans and the facility, and in 1991 a jury awarded them $10 million in damages.

Other young women who lost their lives in abortions intended to keep a child with a disability from being born include:

Twenty-five-year-old Margaret Louise Smith, who traveled from Michigan to New York for an abortion because she had been exposed to rubella. Her abortionist, Jesse Ketchum, had run a criminal abortion practice in Michigan, before carpetbagging to Buffalo when New York legalized abortion on demand.

Marla Cardamone was browbeaten into an unwanted abortion by a social worker at Magee Women's Hospital, who lied to her and told her that her baby would be severely disabled; Marla ended up dying with her baby in a botched abortion.

Linda Boom, age 35, died after a resident at Sinai Samaritan Medical Center in Milwaukee used a dangerous, antiquated method to perform an abortion on September 21, 1995. Linda had elected abortion because the baby had been diagnosed with Down Syndrome, which Linda believed meant "no life."

For more abortion deaths, visit the Cemetery of Choice:



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