To this day, abortion advocates and other left-leaning sources claim that Rebecca Suzanne "Becky" Bell died from an illegal abortion on September 16, 1988. Abortion advocates schlepped her distraught parents all over the country, using their family tragedy to fight against parental involvement laws and thus to endanger other teens, purportedly in the name of protecting them.
Becky was a pretty girl -- blonde hair, blue eyes, looking every inch a cheerleader. After a pregnancy scare, her parents told her that if she ever did that to them again, they'd throw her out of the house. So when 17-year-old Becky learned that she really was pregnant in 1988, she told the baby's father and he abandoned her, breaking off all contact in mid-July.
No doubt feeling utterly lost and alone, Becky turned to her best friend Heather Clark for help. Together they explored her options. If Becky were to get an abortion in Indiana, she would have to tell her parents. After being threatened with being thrown out of the family home, Becky rejected that option. Perhaps Becky could drive to Kentucky for an abortion. Perhaps she could go to a home for unwed mothers in California. Becky seemed undecided.
Perhaps it was the stress of the pregnancy that knocked Becky off the wagon. She had been through hospitalization from mid-February through April of 1988 for substance abuse struggles. The treatment was clearly unsuccessful. Becky went to a party the weekend of September 10 and 11, to forget her troubles, and to be with the people she thought were her friends. Becky couldn't even remember what drugs she did at the party. She passed out in her own vomit.
That can't have done her immune system any favors -- an immune system that could well have been damaged by the previous substance abuse.
On September 13 she was feverish and ill and stayed home from school. She seemed to improve, but when her father came home at around noon on September 16 he found her gravely ill. Her parents rushed her to St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis. After the doctor had been working on Becky for a while, he told her mother he wasn't sure if he could save the baby. Karen, Becky's mother, recalled that she told the doctor, "Never mind that baby! Save my baby!"
Becky was pronounced dead at 11:29 pm. Her body was sent for an autopsy, performed by Jesse C. Giles with the Forensic Division of the Indiana University School of Medicine.
I have abstracted thousands of abortion malpractice cases and over a hundred autopsy reports on women and girls who have died from abortion complications. Becky's autopsy report, which I have also read, clearly shows no signs whatsoever of post-abortion infection. There was no evidence of inflammation or infection in any of her reproductive organs. There were no signs of instrumentation of her uterus or cervix. There was on evidence of infected or septic pregnancy tissue.
So what does Becky's autopsy show? What it shows is pneumonia, the same strain that killed Muppets creator Jim Henson.
For some obscure reason, someone in the coroner's office put "septic abortion" on the cover sheet of Becky's autopsy report instead of the pneumonia that actually killed her.
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| Bill and Karen Bell unwittingly endangering other teens |
Desperate to find some meaning in their daughter's death, the parents latched onto the term, "septic abortion." Perhaps, like most laymen, they didn't realize that a miscarriage is a form of abortion -- what's called a "spontaneous abortion." That still leaves the mystery of where the word "septic" came from, since Becky's reproductive tract was healthy and free of injury or infection. But however the idea arose, Becky's family decided that Becky must have sought an illegal abortion. Abortion advocates caught wind of the story and recruited the parents as spokesmen against parental involvement laws.
Over the years, the story has become more and more sanitized. Becky's drug use, her previous pregnancy scare, the fact that her parents had threatened her, fell aside. In the pro-choice version, Becky was the carefree, happy child who never gave her parents any worries. Becky sought an abortion to avoid disappointing her parents, but was stymied by parental involvement laws. Becky procured any one of a variety of amateur abortions. (Here the story gets fuzzy, and different organizations tell different tales -- attempts to cause a miscarriage with drugs, a criminal abortionist, Becky's own hand wielding a coat hanger -- none of which had any evidence to support them.) The abortion, they claim, started an infection in her uterus. The infection traveled to Becky's lungs and killed her -- while mysteriously vacating her uterus entirely and leaving it healthy and infection-free.
"She died because of a law," pro-choicers chant. But Becky's death wasn't an abortion death. Her death was an exploited for an utterly unrelated cause. Simply because of two words on the cover of a coroner report, and the desperation of an abortion industry that was losing the lucrative teen market, her death has been used to promote unsafe abortions for underage girls.
The cheerleaders for abortion continue to ignore teens who died of secret abortions. Dawn Ravenelle was 13 years old when her mother got a call to come to St. Luke's hospital, where Dawn was "fighting for her life." Dawn lost that fight. Erica Richardson's aunt arranged a secret abortion that left the girl dead from an embolism. Jammie Garcia probably would have survived the complications of her abortion had she not kept it a secret, thus delaying medical care until it was too late. Sandra Kaiser went into a terrible depression after her clandestine abortion and ended up committing suicide by throwing herself off an overpass into traffic. Tamiia Russell was brought for a secret abortion by the sister of the 24-year-old man who had been sexually abusing her. Why are these girls' deaths not newsworthy? Because they do not further the narrative that legal abortion is inherently safe and that anything that delays an abortion by even a day is inherently dangerous.
Watch The Abortion Death That Wasn't on YouTube.
It's very difficult to find accurate information about Becky Bell from mainstream sources because the accurate information doesn't fit the narrative. But that doesn't mean that there is no information:- Pro-Choice “Facts”: The Story of Becky Bell
- The Truth About Becky Bell
- "Abortion Debate Shifting," Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 9, 1990
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