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Monday, July 18, 2022

July 18, 1979: Sent Home to Bleed to Death

Making the Fatal Decision

Geneva Colton, age 21,was trying to make a better life for herself and her two children in the summer of 1979. She worked two jobs -- as a full-time meter maid and school-crossing guard for the Cochran Police Department and a part-time job at a restaurant. 

When she discovered that she was pregnant, she spoke to her friend Joy Fisher. Joy said, "She was a unique individual in that she was a young black woman with two children who could have had a relatively carefree life on welfare. But she elected to fight it, and she was pulling herself up by herself with no help really from anybody much except the friends around her who loved her."

Joy noted that Geneva had almost completed her GED, a vital step towards her dream of becoming a police officer.

1979 ad for Northside Family Planning
Geneva spoke to a physician in Cochran in addition to her friends, and decided that she would seek out an abortion at Northside Family Planning Service, 5575 Peachtree-Dunwoody Road N.E. in Atlanta. Joy, wanting to be a supportive friend, offered to help pay for the abortion and drove Geneva to the facility, leaving Cochran at 6:10 a.m. on July 18, 1979.

"She was in extremely good mental condition as we were going up," Joy told the Atlanta Constitution. "She was confident she had made the right decision, and she was cheerful." She spoke a lot about her two young sons.

The Facility and the Aftermath

Geneva and Joy arrived 10 minutes late for the 9:00 appointment. Coverage of the story seems to indicate that this wasn't really important and that Geneva's abortion wasn't performed right away. Geneva and Joy left the clinic at around 4:00 that afternoon.

"She was obviously in pain coming back," Joy told the Atlanta Constitution. "I stopped once to buy a pillow to make her more comfortable. She appeared to be having abdominal cramping, which they had told her she would experience."

It was about 7:30 that evening when Joy dropped Geneva off at a friend's home to convalesce. About an hour later Joy got a call that Geneva had been taken to the emergency room at Bleckley County Hospital. She had no vital signs on admission. Doctors attempted to resuscitate her, to no avail. She was pronounced dead.

The autopsy found that Geneva's uterus had been perforated. She had bled to death.

To their credit, Northside did report Geneva's death to the Centers for Disease Control. Though epidemiologist Dr. George Rubin admitted that the five deaths in Georgia up to that point after the Roe decision did constitute a "rash" of abortion deaths, he quickly went into damage control mode, assuring the readers of the Atlanta Constitution that legal abortion is perfectly safe before they even completed a preventability study of Geneva's death -- if they even did one. 

Insurance Company Finds Fault

Northside was eventually sued by their malpractice insurer because they'd allowed one of their abortionists to continue to perform surgery even though his manual dexterity had deteriorated due to multiple sclerosis. The suit by the insurer also alleged failure to meet state health standards, failure to have enough nurses on duty, failure to have proper on-call procedures, and lack of a professional director of medical services.

Democrats Push for Abortion Safety

Rep. Billy McKinney
After Geneva's death, a George House subcommittee looked into conditions in Georgia abortion facilities, which were not regulated at the time. Representative Billy McKinney, an Atlanta Democrat, told the Atlanta Constitution, "I had a concern last week that maybe there ought to be a holding period to see if there are any complications. I wouldn't consider [such a regulation] too stringent. Maybe we have to look at how much time that the patient should be under care and not treat it like an abortion mill. I was concerned to learn that they keep them about an hour."  McKinney stressed that the committee was not trying to have any impact on the decision whether or not to proceed with an abortion, but merely to ensure that "the facility in which the abortion is performed is safe enough to protect the woman's life."

Another Democrat, Representative Betty Clark from DeKalb, agreed. "It makes a lot of sense to me. There should be some period of time for observation." 

Repeat Offenders?

The clinic where Geneva's fatal abortion was performed seems to be the same clinic where Catherine Pierce underwent her fatal abortion in 1989.

The Racial Question

As a Black woman, Geneva was nearly four times more likely to end up on the abortion table than a white woman. Once she entered that abortion clinic, her risk of death was higher than that of a white woman, for reasons that have never, to my knowledge, ever been explored. If you scroll down just through the abortion deaths noted on the Operation Rescue website, the women are disproportionately Black.

In the wake of the Dobbs decision allowing states to ban or regulate abortion, the media are repeating claims from the abortion lobby that this will disproportionately cost Black women their lives because of their higher overall maternal mortality rate without noting that this higher death risk applies to abortion as well, and the abortion lobby has never had a problem with that. In fact, the entire cluster of Atlanta abortion deaths (Geneva, Angela, and Delores) were of young Black women.

If we look at just the abortion deaths I, personally, know of at Planned Parenthood, for example, half of them -- the most recent ones, in fact -- are Black women.



Downplay by the Media and Abortion-Rights Activists

Geneva's death was one of a cluster of deaths in the Atlanta area. Teenagers Angela Scott and Delores Smith had been fatally injured within an hour of each other on June 2, 1979. Interestingly enough, news coverage of this cluster of deaths tended to mention the low abortion mortality rates claimed by the Centers for Disease Control. Imagine if after a drunk driver plowed into another care and killed three people, news coverage reassured readers and viewers that driving is very safe and there are "only" 1.34 deaths per 100 million miles driven. We'd be a bit taken aback that they were minimizing the dangers of drunk driving. Funny how the same minimizing is considered normal when it's the response to abortion deaths.

As for the feminists, Feminist Women's Health Center issued a statement:

The first issue is that a legal abortion is safe. Out of about 150,000 abortions performed since the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortions, this is the first death to occur in Atlanta related to the abortion procedure itself.

I would think that the first issue would be the dead woman. But that's not how the abortion lobby thinks. They shrug off Geneva's death, dismiss Angela's death as not "related to the abortion procedure itself," and don't even glance at the comatose form of Delores Smith. They merely fall back on "If it's legal, it's safe. Don't worry your pretty little head."

Watch "Abortion in Atlanta, 1979" on YouTube.

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