In 1976, the Hyde Amendment went into effect, banning the use of
Federal funds to pay for abortions except to save the mother from an
immediate threat to her life. The measure was named for its author,
Congressman Henry Hyde. Abortion advocates had been keening from the
moment the Hyde Amendment was up for vote. They painted a ghastly
picture of coathanger-impaled women littering the streets as poor women
were driven to desperation by lack of "access",
When
the Hyde Amendment went into effect, abortion advocates ramped up the
hysteria and waited for a death, any death, they could hang around Henry
Hyde's neck.On October 3, 1977, the abortion advocacy
vultures got what they'd been waiting for: a dead woman they could use
as leverage in the fight to once again force taxpayers to fund elective
abortions.
On September 26, 1977, 27-year-old
Rosie Jiminez
had shown up at the emergency room of McAllen General Hospital in the
Texas border town of McAllen, with septic shock. She was put in
intensive care, but died on October 3 from renal and cardiac failure
caused by disseminated intravascular coagulopathy (failure of the blood
to clot properly) triggered by gas gangrene from a criminal abortion.
She left behind one child.
The initial response of the
abortion lobby to news of Rosie's death was little short of euphoric.
They had their trophy, their dead woman whose story they could leverage,
they hoped, into the restoration of tax money flowing into abortion
clinics.
A Voice in the Wilderness
One voice stood out from the crowd: Ellen Frankfort, author of
Rosie: the investigation of a wrongful death.
Frankfort was disgusted with the bulk of the prochoice movement, who
seemed content to make note of the death and then milk it for political
gain. She began an investigation into what had led Rosie to her death,
and she found a lot that neither the Centers for Disease Control nor
abortion advocacy organizations had been willing to look for, since all
they'd wanted was political leverage. They weren't looking for the real
culprit behind Rosie's death: they'd had a bogeyman in mind even before
she'd died, in the form of Henry Hyde.
Off to McAllen Frankfort went, to learn all she could.
The Whole Story
Rosie
had already undergone two abortions at taxpayer expense, one performed by her private ob/gyn, the second at a facility
Rosie had been referred to by a local Planned Parenthood. In September of
1977, she suspected that she was again pregnant, and consulted with a
cousin and a friend, who told her that Medicaid would no longer pay for
elective abortions.
Rosie had also gone to her family
physician, Dr. Homer, in McAllen for treatment of pain in her sternum.
She mentioned that she might be pregnant. He did not arrange
for a pregnancy test or discuss her options with her in any way, but
simply informed her that Medicaid would no longer pay for abortions, and
let it rest at that. A referral seemed to have been in order, either to a
prolife center that would help her with the expenses of continuing the
pregnancy, or to the local Planned Parenthood, that could arrange an
abortion on a sliding scale and could possibly help her tap into private
funds for elective abortions. Dr. Homer effectively abandoned his patient.
The
week of September 19, Rosie went to Mexico for some sort of injection
to cause an abortion. She had the shots at a pharmacy, at $5 each. On
September 25, she consulted with her cousin, saying that she wanted to
find a cheap abortionist quickly. Rosie's cousin brought her to a lay
midwife in McAllen, who charged $120 to insert a catheter into Rosie's
uterus. Fifteen minutes later, she sent Rosie home.
Rosie
had pain and cramping upon returning home. Over the next 12 hours, she
developed an increasing fever, and had nausea, vomiting, chills,
dizziness, and increasing vaginal bleeding. The next afternoon, Rosie
was unable to get out of bed. She asked a friend to take her to the
hospital where in spite of heroic efforts, doctors were unable to save her life.
The Reaction
The
doctors reported the death to the CDC, the CDC notified their allies in
the abortion lobby, and Rosie's death was quickly trumpeted nationwide
as proof that Henry Hyde was a murderer and taxpayers should immediately
resume funding elective abortions to prevent another such death.
What
is particularly telling in Rosie's death is that prochoice groups had
been very successful in spreading the word that public funding for
abortion had been cut -- Rosie's friend and cousin, as well as her
physician, were well aware of this fact -- but they had pointedly failed
to also pass out the word that Planned Parenthood still referred for
abortions on a sliding scale, and that private funds were available.
It's almost as if the public-relations departments of Planned Parenthood
and other abortion-advocacy groups had deliberately increased the odds
of a tragedy like Rosie's death in order to provide the corpses needed
in order to prop up a drive to restore tax monies to abortion
facilities.
Frankfort was particularly disgusted with
the response of public health officials, who likewise simply announced
Rosie's death and began a call to restore abortion funding, but made no
effort to close down the illegal abortion practice where Rosie had
undergone her fatal abortion.
Frankfort took it upon
herself to orchestrate a sting, with local law enforcement. She
coordinated a dramatic raid that put the lay abortionist out of
business.
"The FIRST!" Of how many?
And
what of the hysteria? Had it been justified? Was Rosie's death the
first of a new trend of women dead from being "forced" to resort to
criminal abortionists?
There was indeed a small spike
in reported illegal abortion deaths after the Hyde Amendment (from 2 in
1976 to 4 in 1977 to 7 in 1978). But there was likewise a spike in
reported
legal abortion deaths as well -- a far larger spike,
from 11 in 1976 to 17 in 1977. (I don't believe that the
CDC's reported death numbers are accurate, but they're all we have to work with, and
more to the point, abortion supporters place great faith in them.)
Lest
abortion rights activists attribute this jump to women having later abortions because
they need time to get funds, we'll note that the trend toward earlier abortions continued unabated, as this chart based on
one by the Alan Guttmacher Institute shows:
Despite predictions of a surge in carnage from criminal abortions, a study by the Centers for Disease Control, "
The Effect of Restricting Public Funds for Legal Abortion," found "no evidence of a
statistically significant increase in the number of complications from
illegal abortions." In fact, they found that while there was no change
in the illegal abortion complications, there was a significant
decrease in publicly funded hospitalizations for
legal
abortion complications in cities where funding was restricted, compared
to cities in areas where state or local government picked up the tab
for elective abortions.
In other words, cutting funds
for elective abortions actually had a measurable positive impact: Fewer women
were ending up hospitalized for complications of elective abortions.
Which strikes me as a good thing, personally.
The Verdict
So
was Rosie's death a fluke? Probably not. The heavy publicity put out by
the prochoice movement about how poor women would be "forced" to resort
to dangerous criminal abortions probably left Rosie, and some others
like her, with the mistaken impression that criminal abortion (rather
than birth or even sliding-scale legal abortion) was their only option.
I agree with abortion advocates that the death of
Rosie Jiminez was avoidable. But I disagree with them that lack of
public funding was to blame. Prochoice organizations had ample
opportunity to tout other resources. Prochoice people all around Rosie
had opportunities to steer her toward a "safe and legal" abortion, had
they chosen to do so. Not a one of them did. And the bigger problem was
that nobody ever seemed to entertain the notion that abortion might not
be the answer in the first place.
What's additionally puzzling
about this whole turn of events is that the facility to which Planned
Parenthood referred abortion patients charged only $130 for an abortion
for poor women, just $10 more than Rosie paid for the amateur abortion
that took her life. It's difficult to believe that a $10 price
difference put the legal abortion out of Rosies's reach, especially if we consider that the day before her abortion she'd spent $8 on a cake for a
friend's baby shower, and when she died she had a $800 scholarship check
in her purse.
Rosie Jimenez remains a poster child of the abortion
lobby. Their own role in her death is never acknowledged. Henry Hyde is
blamed instead -- in spite of his key role in passing a law that
reduced
abortion injuries among women like Rosie, and in reducing
complications, surely also reduced abortion deaths -- in spite of the
abortion lobby's best efforts.
For more abortion deaths, visit the
Cemetery of Choice.
On September 26, 1977, 27-year-old Rosie Jiminez
had shown up at the emergency room of McAllen General Hospital in the
Texas border town of McAllen, with septic shock. She was put in
intensive care, but died on October 3 from renal and cardiac failure
caused by disseminated intravascular coagulopathy (failure of the blood
to clot properly) triggered by gas gangrene from a criminal abortion.
She left behind one child.
