The Carnage Carries On

Before her death on February 17, 1917, 20-year-old stenographer Edna May Lamb reported that Dr. Charles Klinetop had packed her cervix with gauze in order to cause an abortion. Klinetop was held by the Coroner and indicted on March 15 by a Grand Jury, but the case never went to trial. A likely factor in the decision not to prosecute was the lack of a dying declaration.

On February 17, 1929, 25-year-old Violet Diancalana died in the home of Katherine Bajda, of complications of a criminal abortion performed on her there that day. Mrs. Bajda, identified as a homemaker, was held by the coroner and indicted for felony murder by a grand jury.

Elsewhere in Chicago on that very same day, 23-year-old Gladys Schaffer died after from a criminal abortion was performed. She died on the spot, in the home of midwife Emma Schulz, where the abortion had been performed. Though evidently Schulz had indeed performed an abortion on Gladys, the coroner determined that Gladys had actually died from an ectopic pregnancy, thus indicating that Shulz had not caused the death. Nevertheless, on April 15, she was indicted for felony murder by a grand jury. Schulz had managed to remain free to ply her abortion trade despite having been arrested the previous year for the death of 23-year-old Lucille Smith.

On February 17, 1949, the battered body of Roberta Shirley Danks, a 28-year-old war widow from Chicago, was found crumpled on a rural road near Chesterton, Indiana. She had bruises over her body and a deep gash on her head, but an autopsy revealed that these injuries had been sustained after her death, evidently to try to make Roberta appear to be the victim of a hit-and-run driver. She had actually died of peritonitis from a criminal abortion performed several days earlier by a physician in the basement of the Chicago home of 40-year-old housewife Olive Janes.

Lisa Bardsley was 26 years old and at least 20 weeks pregnant when she had a safe and legal abortion done by Dr. John Biskind (pictured) at A to Z Women's Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona on February 16, 1995. On the way home to northern Arizona, she took ill, so she and the friend who had accompanied her stopped at a motel and called for medical help. Lisa was taken to a hospital in Cottonwood, where she died of blood loss from a uterine laceration on February 17. Biskind went on to get into further trouble for delivering a live, nearly term infant during an abortion performed on a teenager, and for the abortion death of Lou Ann Herron., for which he was convicted of manslaughter. The clinic where Lisa was fatally injured was owned by abortionist Moshe Hachamovitch, who was implicated in the abortion deaths of Christina Goesswein, Tanya Williamson, Luz Rodriguez, and Jammie Garcia.