Today's anniversaries

The evening of Sunday, May 4, 1865, Mrs. Mary Cressin went to the Eleventh Precinct station hous and reported a suspicious death an hour earlier, in the neighboring apartment of Mrs. Harriet Ellars. The victim was a young girl, Emma Wolfer. Investigation revealed that she had died of peritonitis from a criminal abortion. Read more

here.

"Robin" is one of the women Life Dynamics identifies on their "Blackmun Wall" as having been killed by a safe and legal abortion. In February of 1972, 21-year-old Robin traveled from Massachusetts to New York for a first trimester abortion. She underwent the procedure and returned home. Three months after her abortion, on May 4, 1972, Robin died, leaving two children motherless.

Shortly after noon on May 4, 1976, 29-year-old Maria Gomez underwent a safe and legal vacuum abortion at Altantic Family Medical Clinic in Los Angeles County. Within an hour and a half she had bled to death. The coroner report indicates that Dr. John Blodgett claimed that Maria must have bled to death from an "old" cervical cut. The autopsy found otherwise. Maria's lacerated and gashed uterus still contaned the severed head of her unborn baby, and more than a quart of blood was pooled in her abdomen. Maria's lacerations had not been sutured, but her vagina had been packed with gauze.

Twenty-four-year-old Patricia King went to Dean H. Diment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a safe and legal abortion on May 4, 1987. Patricia went into cardiac arrest after being injected with anesthetic. Paramedics arrived at Diment's Statewide Clinic and found the place so unclean that they could have written their names in the dust. Diment told them that he had injected Neo-Synephrine and sodium bicarbonate into Patricia's heart but no one had performed CPR or made any other attempt to revive her. She had been in arrest for 20 minutes. Paramedics could not revive her. Statewide Clinic advertised that it was "licensed by the state," but at the time of Patricia's death, abortion clinics were not regulated by the state of Oklahoma. Statewide had not been inspected since the attorney general had declared state oversight unconstitutional in 1984. Read more here.