Legal and Illegal Abortion Deaths

The deaths on this date from the Cemetery of Choice:

St. Louis, 1878
A St. Louis grand jury indicted Charles P. Emerich in the 1878 abortion death of 19-year-old Maggie Gibbons.  Maggie was living at Emerich's home. He owned the laundry where Maggie worked and was the father of her baby. When she told him she was pregnant in December of 1877, Emerich went to Dr. Thomas F. Smith, who provided abortifacient powders which failed to produce the desired effect.  It is unclear whether Smith perpetrated the fatal abortion on Maggie or if he just provided the instruments. The abortion in question was performed on December 30.

Maggie took sick afterward and was relocated to her mother's house. Dr. W. D. Hinckley was called in to care for her. It was then that Maggie's mother learned about the abortion, though Maggie refused to name the father. Dr. Hinckley called in Dr. J. O'Reilly for a second opinion. Both doctors agreed that she was suffering from a severe case of peritonitis and that there was no hope for her.

Maggie languished, finally dying on January 2 of 1878. Emerich was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter in Maggie's death, and was sentenced to five years in prison.

New York, 1970
"Amy" is one of the women Life Dynamics identifies on their "Blackmun Wall" as having been killed by a safe and legal abortion. Amy was 35 years old when she had a legal abortion somewhere in the state of New York on December 24, 1970. She was 14 weeks pregnant. During the abortion, Amy suffered from a massive pulmonary embolism. Efforts to save her life finally failed, and she died on January 2, 1971, leaving behind two children.

Chicago, 1978

Sherry Emry

On December 28, 1977, 26-year-old Sherry Emry went to Water Tower Reproductive Center in Chicago for a safe and legal abortion. Arnold Bickham, who owned the facility, did not have his staff do pathology exams on abortion tissues; instead they threw them away.

After her abortion, Sherry returned to her home in Hammond, Indiana. She was in pain on New Years Eve. She consulted with the clinic instruction sheet and concluded that her pain was normal. By January 1, Sherry was quite ill and unable to arise from her bed. Her worried friends urged her to seek medical care, but Sherry thought that she just had the flu, so she kept to her bed. She slept fitfully, with chills and sweating. She was pale. When her friends came to check on her the morning of January 2, they found her dead in her bed and called the police.

Arnold Bickham

Sherry's fetus had been implanted in her fallopian tube, which ruptured. She bled to death. Even though, in theory, women who choose abortion should be less likely to die of ectopic pregnancy complications, experiences shows that they're actually //more// likely to die, due to sloppy practices by abortion practitioners like Bickham. 

Sherry wasn't the only woman to die after abortion in a Bickham facility. Sylvia Moore, age 18, died after he shoved her out the door of his clinic New Years Eve of 1986.