A Beneficiary of New York's Pre-Roe Abortion Legalization

"Annie" is one of the women Life Dynamics identifies on their "Blackmun Wall" as having been killed by a safe and legal abortion.

Annie traveled from New Jersey to New York to avail herself of the new law, for a first-trimester abortion on June 24, 1971.

Shortly after she was given anesthesia, Annie went into cardiac arrest, and attempts to revive her failed. She left behind three children.

There is such a dearth of information about Annie's death that it's impossible to determine if it was due to quackery or was just an ordinary complication of surgery or anesthesia, which was riskier at the time than it is now. Still, her children would have been better off with a new sibling than with a dead mother.

We can see that starting in the 1940s, while abortion was still illegal, there was a massive drop in maternal mortality from abortion. The death toll fell from 1,407 in 1940, to 744 in 1945, to 263 in 1950. Most researches attribute this plunge to the development of blood transfusion techniques and the introduction of antibiotics. And as you can see from the graph below, the fall in abortion deaths was in place long before legalization. Legalization did nothing to change the number of deaths each year; the trend had been in place for decades. Learn more here.