Wednesday, May 18, 2011

More Deaths Gigan Found that I Missed (1913-14)

I'm continuing to make my way through a page gigan had created for her research. It turns out that somehow I missed a lot of abortions on the Homicide in Chicago Interactive Database during the years from 1910-1919. I'm slogging along. Thanks, gigan, for the heads-up on these. Like I've said before, please drop in.

1913: I've missed Lizzie Orenstein, Margaret Wagner, Elizabeth Spalding, Mary Brubaker, Freda Englehardt, Mary Goldstein, Catherine Sartelopoulos, Anna Turnovan, Emma Witte, Anna Adler, Frances Odochowski, Mary Tureck, Catherine Seabrooke, and Hulda Tubbin.

1914: Helen Kicke, Martha Kowasek, Stella Augustinyn, Hannah Olson, Elizabeth O'Donnell, Irene Ridgeway, Mary Stefen, Hazel Johnson, Ester Reid, Bridget Murphy, Genevive Tatar, Ida Kaufman, and Mrs. E. Fertig.

Going over all these cases, I was struck by a new and serious flaw about the claims of whole wards of dying abortion victims at Cook County Hospital in the years prior to legalization: There simply were not enough investigations of abortion deaths at hospitals in all of Chicago, much less at the one hospital, to support the claim, even if you go back early in the 20th Century when, due to the state of health and medicine, abortion deaths were far more common than they would have been in the 1960s.

In fact, the entire Homicide in Chicago Interactive Database indicates only at most three abortion deaths at Cook County Hospital were investigated every year for the entire period (1870-1930) covered by the Database. Most years there were no deaths, or one death. Though of course the Database or its search spider may have missed some, surely they did not miss scores of cases annually, which would have to be the case if as many women were dying at Cook County Hospital as abortion proponents claim.

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