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Monday, November 21, 2016

An Unidentified Perpetrator's Fatal Work, 1924

On November 21, 1924, 24-year-old homemaker Mildred Bleschke died at Chicago's Grant Hospital from complications of an abortion performed earlier that day. The perpetrator was never identified.

Keep in mind that things that things we take for granted, like antibiotics and blood banks, were still in the future. For more about abortion in this era, see Abortion in the 1920s.

During the first two thirds of the 20th Century, while abortion was still illegal, there was a massive drop in maternal mortality, including mortality from abortion. Most researches attribute this plunge to improvements in public health and hygiene, the development of blood transfusion techniques, and the introduction of antibiotics. Learn more here.


A graph showing maternal mortality starting at roughly 8,500 per 100,000 live births, preciptously falling to roughly 50 in the early 1960s, and trickling off tto nearly zero to the end of the graph.

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