Two illegal deaths

On June 7, 1924, 27-year-old Anna Strazynski died at her Chicago home from an illegal abortion performed that day. The perpetrator was never identified. Often women injured or killed in safe, legal abortions are left wounded by somebody whose name they don't even know, ostensibly on the grounds that if his name leaks he might get on an antiabortion "hit list." But it's interesting that this also makes it difficult for the injured woman, or the dead woman's family, to know who to sue or report to the medical board.

On June 7, 1929, 20-year-old Viola Koepping died at the office of Dr. Albert West of Chicago, from an abortion evidently performed there that day. West was held by the coroner on June 21.
West was indicted by a grand jury for felony murder on April 21, 1930. It's interesting that in the supposedly bad old "woman hating" days, an abortionist who killed a woman was actually prosecuted. Now the self-appointed "defenders of women's lives" would rally around him and complain that he's being picked on for something so trivial and un-newsworthy as killing an abortion patient.




Keep in mind that things that things we take for granted, like antibiotics and blood banks, were still in the future. For more about abortion in this era, see Abortion in the 1920s.
For more on pre-legalization abortion, see The Bad Old Days of Abortion