40 Years, 40 Faces of Choice (1973-1982)

1973: Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard

TR Mason Howard had impressive credentials as a civil rights activist.. He had opened Friendship Medical Center in Chicago in order to provide medical care to poor and minority patients. However, once Roe vs. Wade was handed down, Howard allowed it to devolve into an abortion mill and he himself devolved into a quack abortionist. In its first year of operation, Friendship killed two abortion patients: Evelyn Dudley in March and Julia Rogers in April. The deaths didn't end in 1973. The quackery at Friendship killed Dorothy Brown in 1974.

1974: Milan Vuitch

Vuitch was lauded as a hero to the prochoice cause. A criminal abortionist in the Washington, DC area, he had deliberately gotten arrested to challenge the District of Columbia abortion law. Though he did not get the law overturned, he did get it rendered toothless due to a ruling that it was incumbent upon the state to prove that the abortion had not been necessary to preserve the mother's life or health. What his enthusiasts cheerfully overlook is how emboldened Vuitch became after legalization. they turn a blind eye to the quackery. In 1984, WDVM-TV, Washington, D.C. won the Peabody Award for its investigation of Vuitch's practice, which was so shoddy that the clinic license was revoked so Vuitch continued to operate without one. His slovenly practices killed Wilma Harris in 1974 and Georgianna English in 1980.

1975: Kenneth Yellin

"[Kenneth Yellen] put his business acumen and money into concerns that were characterized by their increasing sordidness and which have known links to organized crime. He ran a marriage counseling service which a former prosecuting attorney said was a front for prostitution, and was then believed to have operated or invested in X-rated movie theaters. The abortion business seemed a natural progression." The abortion business in question, originally called "Women's Medical Facility," had been closed by the state for licensing violations, but Yellin reopened it as Biogenetics. Deaths at this seedy facility began with "Susanna Chisolm," who bled to death from a punctured uterus in 1975. The quackery outlived its founder, though. Yellin was shot in the head five times in an apparent gangland execution in 1979. The stories didn't follow the pattern we're accustomed to: that of lamenting the assassination (presumably by prolifers) of a hapless abortion provider. Instead, coverage featured such headlines as "'Creepy Kenny' died in the gutter where he belonged."

1976: Georgette Forney

Georgette Forney, co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, was only 16 years old and frightened when she submitted to an abortion on October 4, 1976. She had kept the pregnancy a secret from her parents, and afterward tried to pretend that the abortion had simply never happened. For 19 years, she maintained the insistence that her abortion had been "no big deal" until a trigger event left her reeling wiht the reality of what she'd done. She now fights to spare other women from making the same terrible choice she had made.

1977: Frances Kissling

Though best known as the founder and face of the organization mis-named "Catholics for Free Choice," Kissling was also the founder, back in 1977, of the National Abortion Federation. Though purportedly formed to ensure that abortions would be performed safely, the organization launched itself with the death of teenage newlywed Barbaralee Davis, who was sent home with the face and spinal column of her 16-week fetus embedded in a tear in her uterus. NAF is no stranger to quackery. Hanen Roetm, who killed Gloria Aponte, was caught allowing an untrained receptionist to administer anesthesia. George Tiller kept his supposedly deathly ill third-trimester abortion patients in nearby motels overnight, resulting in the death of Christin Gilbert, a mentally disabled teen from Texas. Abraham Alberto Hodari told Medical Students for Choice that abortion doctors have a "license to lie;" his patient deaths include Regina Johnson, Tamiia Russell and Chivon Williams. NAF member facility Eastern Women's Center is responsible for the deaths of Dawn Mack, Dawn Ravenelle and Venus Ortiz. Abu Hayat is best known for having ripped the arm off a 32-week-fetus, Ana Rosa Rodriguez, who was then born maimed; he also killed teen abortion patient Sophie McCoy. Erstwhile criminal abortionist Benjamin Munson was welcomed into NAF although he was responsible for the death of 28-year-old Linda Padfield; he went on to kill Yvonne Mesteth. Atlanta Women's Pavilion managed to fatally injure Angela Scott and Delores Smith in the same hour. And, of course, there is NAF flagship Family Planning Associates Medical Group, where over a dozen abortion patients are known to have lost their lives to quackery.

1978: Sherry Emry

A leather shop owner, Sherry Emry was found dead in her bed by her friends early in the morning of January 2, 1978. She had gone to Water Tower Reproductive Center in Chicago for a safe, legal abortion, but their sloppy practices sent her home with an undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy, which ruptured and killed her. The seedy abortion mill, run by Arnold Bickham, was one of those featured in the Chicago Sun-Times "The Abortion Profiteers" expose. Bickham later shoved a hemorrhaging teenage abortion patient out the door to bleed to death.

1979: Joshua Vandervelden

Dr. Benjamin Victoria attempted to perform an abortion on Linda Moie on January 12, 1979, at Fox Valley Reproductive Health Care Center in Wisconsin. The abortion injured but did not kill the fetus, who was born September 18, 1979 and named Joshua Vandervelden. Though he spent two weeks on a respirator, Joshua survived, a real-life "October Baby." Others walking among us despite having been born during abortions include Gianna Jessen, Ana Rosa Rodriguez, Melissa Ohden, Carrie Holland Fischer, and Ximenia Renearts. Based on studies of failed abortion rates, I estimate that there are over 100,000 people in the US alone alive today because of failed attempts to kill them in-utero.

1980: Edward Campbell Allred

In a 1980 interview with the San Diego Union, Allred said, “Population control is too important to be stopped by some right-wing pro-life types. Take the new influx of Hispanic immigrants. Their lack of respect of democracy and social order is frightening. I hope I can do something to stem that tide; I’d set up a clinic in Mexico for free if I could. Maybe one in Calexico would help." Allred also founded the Family Planning Associates Medical Group chain of abortion clinics, one that seems to be trying to achieve population control not only by aborting minority babies but by rendering their mothers unable to procreate, or sometimes even killing them. Deaths that I have learned about at Allred's facilities include Denise Holmes,Mary Pena, Josefina Garcia, Lanice Dorsey, Joyce Ortenzio, Tami Suematsu, Christina Mora, Susan Levy, Nakia Jorden, Maria Leho, Maria Rodriguez, Patricia Chacon, Kimberly Neil, Chanelle Bryant, and Deanna Bell.

1981: Robert Dale Crist

It was in 1981 that Crist, a Planned Parenthood abortionist and popular hero of the National Abortion Federation, killed his first abortion patient that I know of: a 19-year-old mentally-disabled rape victim named Diane Boyd. . In prepping her for her abortion, Crist gave Diane drugs that reacted with her usual medications, killing her. He went on to send 17-year-old Latatchie Veal to bled to death The death of his patient Nichole Williams was blamed on amniotic fluid embolism.

1982: Carol Everett

Carol ran a chain of for-profit abortion facilities in the Dallas area. As she became more and more focused on making more and more money, selling more and later abortions, her doctors began injuring more women. In her book, alternatively titled Blood Money and The Scarlet Lady, Carol told of the death of a woman she referred to as Sheryl Mason, who was sent home to bleed to death from an easily treatable cervical laceration. Her clinics deliberately provided low-dose birth control pills to teenagers and lied to women about being pregnant in order to sell more abortions. After being reached out to by a pastor who took a job counseling her infighting staff, Carol became a prolife activist and speaker exposing the practices she once espoused. She now runs The Heidi Group, an organization dedicated to meeting the needs of pregnant women so that the don't feel as if they need to entrust themselves to the kinds of abortion profiteers Carol herself once was.