1988: Failed to Call Ambulance, Woman Dies

Dawn Mendoza underwent a safe, legal abortion at the hands of Edward Rubin at Women's Medical Pavilion in Dobbs Ferry, New York, on June 29, 1988.

Dawn was 22 weeks pregnant. Her brother, who accompanied her, was instructed to wait in a grassy park across the street, and to come back for her at 4 p.m. He returned, as instructed, and was told that Dawn wasn't ready to leave yet, to return in half an hour. When he came back at 5:30, staff told him that his sister was dead.

Rubin had done a D&C abortion on Dawn, a 28-year-old mother of two. Afterward Dawn started screaming and gasping for breath. Her blood pressure fell and she stopped breathing. Staff tried unsuccessfully to revive her, but did not call an ambulance. Dawn died without ever being transferred to a hospital.

The medical examiner determined that she had died from amniotic fluid embolism, as evidenced by particles of placenta and amniotic fluid in her lungs. This foreign matter in her bloodstream also caused disseminated intravacsular coaglopathy, a blood clotting problem. The autopsy found "about 1/2 liter of a yellowish fluid ... present in the abdominal cavity" and "about 10cc of an amber colored fluid" in heart sac.

Decieved or lying?

Abortion advocates argue that although legal abortion deaths like Dawn's are indeed sad, they're only a pale shadow of the carnage that would ensue were legal protection restored to unborn children. They use these claims to garner support among those otherwise reluctant to support legal abortion as well as to slander life advocates.

There are two approaches Big Abortion takes when trying to scare people into supporting legal abortion as a means of protecting women's lives:

Outright lying. They will trot out the long-disproven claim that 5,000 to 10,000 women were dying every year from abortion before legalization.

Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL,* admitted that he and his associates knew that the claims of 5,000 to 10,000 criminal abortion deaths were false. They bandied them about anyway, Nathanson confessed, because they were useful. This, too, is old news -- Nathanson came clean in 1979 when he published //Aborting America//.

Lying by omission. They will use numbers that are accurate, but will totally remove them from context in order to draw a conclusion that is demonstrably false. which typically involves taking fairly reliable abortion mortality numbers from before and after legalization then crediting legalization for the drop. No less prestigious organization than the Alan Guttmacher Institute uses this statistical legerdemain: "As the availability of legally induced abortion increased, mortality due to abortion dropped sharply: The number of abortion-related deaths per million live births fell from nearly 40 in 1970 to eight in 1976."

The truth is that you can take virtually any time period from when public health officials first started collecting the data and you'll find that abortion mortality fell.The only exception is a strange leveling-off in the 1950s that I've been unable to account for:

Milan Vuitch

What caused abortion mortality to fall precipitously wasn't legalization. Legalization didn't even make a blip in the trends, likely because for every non-physician whose business fell away, a physician abortionist became sloppy once the risk of a prison sentence for botching an abortion was gone. I know of three erstwhile criminal abortionists -- Jesse Ketchum, Milan Vuitch, and Benjamin Munson -- who kept their noses clean prior to legalization but each went on to practice appallingly sloppy abortions that killed two patients after legalization.