From the 19th to the 21st Centuries, Quackery Remains Lethal

On March 25, 2000, 22-year-old Maria Rodriguez went to Steve Lichtenberg's Albany Medical Surgical Center for a late second trimester abortion. At about 9:00 a.m., Maria was showing signs of shock from hemorrhage. Lichtenberg had failed to notice that he had ruptured Maria's uterus. Rather than transport her to a properly equipped hospital, Lichtenberg tried to treat his patient's deteriorating condition in his clinic, without determining the cause of the problem.  It wasn't until an hour and a half after Maria suffered her life-threatening injury that it occurred to somebody to call 911 and have Maria taken to a properly equipped hospital. By then, Maria had lost so much blood that there was nothing that doctors could do to save her. N.B. At a National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar in the 1990s, Michael Burnhill of the Alan Guttmacher Institute scolded Lichtenberg for "playing Russian roulette" with patients' lives by performing risky abortions in an outpatient setting and treating serious complications on site in his procedure room rather than transporting them to a hospital. Evidently Lichtenberg chose not to listen to Burnhill's warning. Other women to die from abortions at FPA facilities include Denise Holmes, Patricia Chacon, Mary Pena, Josefina Garcia,  Lanice Dorsey,  Joyce Ortenzio,  Tami Suematsu,  Deanna Bell,  Susan Levy,  Christina Mora,  Ta Tanisha Wesson,  Nakia Jorden,  Maria Leho,  Kimberly Neil, and Chanelle Bryant. Clearly, trusting to abortion practitioners and their organizations, such as the National Abortion Federation, will not keep women safe from quackery.

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Hardcore supporters of legalized abortion sing the praises of Dr. William Jennings Bryan Henrie. He earned their praise, of course, for his willingness to perpetrate abortions, evidently out of the goodness of his heart. But they're forgetting someone. There's one name you won't find in these hagiographic articles: Jolene Griffith. On March 3, 1962, kindly Dr. Henrie performed an abortion on Jolene at his clinic in Grove, Oklahoma. Jolene developed an infection, and, according to her survivors, Griffith abandoned her and provided no care to treat the infection. On March 10, Jolene was admitted to a hospital in Tulsa. She died there on March 25, leaving behind a husband and three minor children. Henire was convinced, and served 25 months of a 4-year sentence. Upon his release, he went right back to doing abortions, much to the applause of people to whom Jolene's life isn't even worth a paragraph beyond mentioning the trouble it caused Henrie. So much for the focus on women's lives.

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On March 25, 1916, Angela Raia of Paynter Avenue, Astoria, died, evidently from the results of an abortion. Her husband Ignazio sued two doctors, Harlan E. Linehan and Dennis McAuliffe, for $400, asserting that their negligence had caused Angela's death.

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In the spring of 1933, Edward Dettman's 21-year-old girlfriend, Mary Colbert, told him that she'd missed her period and asked him, "What can be done?" Later, during the inquest over her death, he said that he'd responded, "I don't know, that was up to her." He had, he said, offered to marry her, but she'd refused, saying she didn't want to marry "in disgrace." Her aunt, on the other hand, said that Mary told her that she didn't want to marry anybody at all at that point in her life.Once Mary elected to seek an abortion, Edward took her to Dr. Emil Gleitsman. Afterward, Mary took ill and confided in her aunts. One recalled having asked her, "Mamie, why did you not tell me, and I would get a good doctor." Mary died on March 25. Gleitsman was also implicated in the 1928 abortion death of 22-year-old Lucille van Iderstine and in the fatal abortion on Jeanette Reder in 1930.

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The Weekly Age Herald of Birmingham, Alabama, tells the sad tale of the 1889 death of the young Delia Mae Bell:

"At 1 o'clock yesterday afternoon a hearse and a carriage drove up to the main stairway of the Jackson block.... A few men and boys gathered to see what it was there for. Some of the rented rooms on the third floor brought down a casket and placed it in the hearse, and some weeping women got into one of the carriages. Then the simple procession moved slowly toward Oak Hill. There was something peculiarly pathetic about it all. Yet those who gave it a hasty glance did not appreciate the painful story that lay behind it all -- did not know how in that unostentatious casket lay the frail figure of a mere child, whose wrecked life was brought to a close in the throes of maternity, and in all probability the victim of the most heinous of murders.


When Delia had violently ill on a Sunday morning, the neighbors were suspicious. Three different doctors were called in to attend to her. "All the aids known to medical science were tried without avail, and about 3 o'clock in the afternoon it was decided to resort to an operation." Morris believed, based on his observations during his time there, that Delia's mother knew that she was pregnant, but her grandmother didn't. "There were hurrying feet in the hallways, and then came a hush over the place. The girl was dead." This was Monday, March 25. The doctors notified the coroner and turned over a bottle to him that had contained an abortifacient traced to a saloon keeper named George A. Foule of East Birmingham.

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In January of 1848, 20-year-old Ann Gallager of Boston approached a married friend, Catherine Beath, with the news that she was pregnant. Ann asked Catherine to go with her to Dr. John Stevens to arrange an abortion. "The doctor refused, saying that he was an old man and did not do such things." Ann offered him $50, Catherine said, but Stevens insisted that "he would not do it for all the world." Ann was angry, and went home to try to abort the baby herself. She tried pouring boiling water over tobacco leaves and breathing the steam. She tried drinking some rum in which she had soaked rusty nails. Finally, she tried a knitting needle, which Catherine took away from her. Eventually, as these attempts were not working, she went to another doctor, asking for some abortifacient pills, who told her that she was going to kill herself with her attempts to abort. As March wore on, Ann took ill. She gave a sworn statement that on March 15, Stevens had done the abortion on her with instruments, though whether she was telling the truth or was just getting revenge on the doctor for refusing to do an abortion will never be known. Two days later she expelled the dead baby, a boy. Ann's condition continued to deteriorate until her death on March 25. It's a shame that neither of the doctors that Ann consulted with were able to dissuade her from killing her baby, and in the end taking her own life as well.