A Criminal Doctor and Her Modern Counterpart

On December 1, 1928, 23-year-old Esther V. Wahlstrom died in Chicago from complications of a criminal abortion. Dr. Lou E. Davis was held by the coroner for murder by abortion on December 12. She was indicted for felony murder on December 15.

Dr. Lou E. Davis

Davis was also implicated in five other abortion deaths: Anna Adler , Mary Whitney, Anna Borndal, Irene Kirschner, and Gertrude Gaesswitz.

I don't have enough information about Esther's death to make a judgment about the quality of care she received. I don't know if she died because Dr. Davis (pictured, right) did something appalling (assuming, of course, that killing Esther's unborn baby wasn't appalling enough on its own), or if Esther was simply a victim of the quality of medical care in the age before antibiotics and blood transfusions.

The same can't be said about the 1992 death of Susanne Logan. What passed for "care" at the deplorable Maryland abortion mill was so appalling that even 60 Minutes stopped and paid attention.

Susanne Logan in the nursing home

Susanne (pictured, left), a waitress originally from Visalia, California, had gone to Hillview for an abortion on September 9, 1989. There was no record of how much intravenous Brevital was administered to Susanne, or who administered the drug. Susanne was already unconscious on the table when abortionist Gideon Kioko (pictured, below) and his unlicensed nurse entered the procedure room. During the abortion, the nurse noted that Susanne's lips were turning blue. She told Kioko, who continued with the abortion. There is no record that anybody monitored her vital signs or administered oxygen.

Eventually somebody summoned emergency medical services (EMS). The EMS personnel reported that the Hillview employees seemed "very confused and did not seem to know what they were doing." EMS staff also noted that Hillview staff had put an oxygen mask on Susanne upside-down, so that she wasn't getting any oxygen.

Susanne was blue from lack of oxygen, limp, had no pulse and was not breathing. EMS workers managed to perform CPR and get Susanne's heart and lungs working again, and transported her to a hospital. Susanne remained comatose and was transferred to a nursing home. Four months after the abortion, she regained consciousness, but was paralyzed and unable to speak. She had no memory of the abortion, but was able to eventually recall having gone to the clinic.

Local prolifers visited Susanne, and bought her a device that allowed her to communicate. She was interviewed by 60 Minutes, and asked what she wanted. She replied, "To go home."

Dr. Gideon Kioko

Susanne filed suit against Kioko and the clinic. In November of 1992, she finally won her suit, and was awarded $2.6 million and $10,000 a month for life, to cover her expenses. Sadly, Susanne died on December 1. She went home to California only to be buried there.

When 60 Minutes interviewed Barbara Radford in 1991, then-president of the National Abortion Federation, she defended the head-in-the-sand attitude the organization took toward safety issues by saying, "We want to make sure that women have choices when it comes to abortion services, and if you regulate it too strictly, you then deny women access to the service." When they asked pro-choice Maryland State Senator Mary Boergers why nothing was being done to address dangerous abortion clinics. Boergers said, "There's only so much of a willingness to try to push a group like the pro-choice movement to do what I think is the responsible thing to do because they then treat you as if you're the enemy."

That attitude toward the deplorable conditions at Hillview cost Susanne, as well as abortion patient Debra Gray their lives. This obsession with "access" at the cost of women's lives is something I've dubbed "The Compton-Carr Effect" after its most eloquent proponent, Janis Compton-Carr of the Florida Abortion Council. In 1989, an investigation by the Miami Herald revealed that Dadeland Family Planning was reusing disposable instruments, that the doctors were leaving the facility while patients were still in recovery, that there were no nurses on staff, and that "Patient recovery was monitored by employees with no formal health-care training." The stirrups on the procedure tables were covered with blood. The oxygen mask had lipstick on it from the previous patient. Abortions were being sold to women who weren't actually pregnant.

Richard Litt, who performed abortions at Dadeland until 1981, told the Miami Herald that he quit because the owners wanted him to do too many abortions in a single work day, and wanted him to do abortions too late into the pregnancy. He also complained that somebody in the clinic stole his prescription forms and forged his signature in order to get narcotics in bulk. Litt said that Dadeland "is a scum hole. I wouldn't send a dog there. They should be put in jail."

But that wasn't the worst. A dying woman was given little more than tea and sympathy. They scraped her out, handed her some oral antibiotics, and sent her home to die of raging peritonitis.

Ms. Compton-Carr led the fight to halt any state oversight of abortion facilities in the wake of the Dadeland scandal. She summed it all up to the Miami Herald:

"In my gut, I am completely aghast at what goes on at that place. But I staunchly oppose anything that would correct this situation in law."

And that "see no evil" mentality persists, as evidenced by the results we saw when prochoicers decided to turn a blind eye to Kermit Gosnell's Philadelphia "house of horrors" where two abortion patients were fatally injured and uncounted numbers of viable, live-born infants killed with a "snip" to the spinal cord. 

Abortion was legalized ostensibly to prevent the deaths of women like Esther Wahlstrom. But legalization proponents did nothing to protect Susanne Logan, Debra Gray, and other women who have lost their lives to abortion quackery.