Deadly Abortions: 1891, 1971, and 1979

At around 9:10 p.m. On December 15, 1891, Dr. J. M. Ryall was called to the Pittsburgh home of 32-year-old Nancy Arabella Hildinger. He found her dead. Her family told Ryall that Nancy had been sick and bleeding from her period. He performed an autopsy. Nancy was a large, muscular woman weighing about 160 lbs. and found her uterus enlarged to about three months size, flabby, inflamed, and marked by an injury caused by some sort of instrument. She had already expelled the fetus. Her lungs were also congested. The coroner's jury found that Nancy had died at the hands of an unknown abortionist.

Twenty-year-old LaSandra Russ, from Berkley, California, went to Los Angeles to have an abortion on December 13, 1971. She was six weeks pregnant. At the time, abortions were legal in California as long as they were performed in a hospital. The abortion was performed at Memorial Hospital of Hawthorne the next day, December 14. LaSandra went into cardiac arrest almost immediately after the abortion. Attempts were made to revive her, but she was finally pronounced dead on December 15, 1971.

Abortionist Andre Nehorayoff was disciplined over the abortion death of "Faye." She was 19 years old when she went to Nehorayoff's office for a safe and legal abortion on December 15, 1979. Nehorayoff failed to record an adequate history or medical exam for Faye. Nehorayoff left Faye in a recovery room at 2:25 p.m., without any monitoring. When somebody finally checked on her an hour later, she was cyanotic (blue) and had no pulse. She was pronounced dead at a hospital. Nehorayoff was also disciplined regarding Patient E, an 18-year-old patient who bled to death after Nehorayoff sent her home in 1983 with a fetal leg still in her uterus.