September 6, 1974: Abortion Survivor's Death Brings Victory to Abortion Advocates

Louise Seeks an Abortion

Louise A. was 20 years old when in 1974. She lived in Hopkins, South Carolina, and worked at a commissary on a military base. She planned to enroll in technical school.

When her periods stopped, she went to her hometown doctor's office, where a nurse told her that she wasn't pregnant. The nurse was mistaken. This mistake delayed confirmation that Louise was indeed pregnant. She went to Dr. Jesse Floyd's South Carolina office in July of 1974.

Believing that she was 12 weeks pregnant, Louise checked in and paid the $175 fee for the abortion. A nurse checked Louise's vitals and administered pre-op medication. Then an employee identified as an "instrument technician" brought Louise to the procedure room, where for the first time Floyd examined her. He concluded that she was 20 weeks into her pregnancy, not 12, and informed Louise that the abortion method used in an outpatient clinic was not appropriate at 20 weeks. She would have to pay him a $450 fee for the abortion, which included hospital costs since at that time abortions that late in the pregnancy had to be done in a hospital setting for the woman's safety. Louise didn't have the money, so Floyd refunded her $150 of the $175 she had paid.

A week and a half later, Louise called the clinic to say she had the $450. She was admitted to Richland Memorial Hospital on September 3. If Floyd had been accurate in assessing the pregnancy at 20 weeks when he first saw Louise, she would have been 25 weeks pregnant

On September 4, Floyd injected Louise with prostaglandin to cause an abortion.

A Seven-Months Baby is Born Alive

In a deposition, Louise said that on September 6, "I started having real bad labor pains again and finally my baby was born. I called the nurse. Then about four or five of them came in the room at the time. The head nurse came in the same time the other nurses came in and she told me did I know that the baby was a seven-month baby. I told her no." 

"One of the nurses said that the baby was alive. They took the baby out of the room. He never did cry, he just made some kind of a noise."

The baby weighed 2 pounds 5 ounces.

A Doctor Provides Care

The first doctor summoned to the abortion ward was a young resident, who had been paged from the cafeteria. As the Inquirer said, "She did not hesitate. On detecting a heartbeat of 100, she clamped and severed the umbilical cord and had the baby sent to the hospital's intensive care unit."

"It was a shock, a totally unique emergency situation, very upsetting to all of us," said the woman, by the time of the Inquirer interview a practicing physician in California. "Some people have disagreed with me [about ordering intensive care for an abortion live birth] but that seems to me the only way you can go."

"It's like watching a drowning. You act. You don't have the luxury of calling around and consulting. You institute life-preserving measures first and decide about viability later on."

The Baby Loses His Fight for Survival

At first the baby's condition seemed to be improving. By the time he was ten days old he was prognosed as having a 50% chance of survival.

Louise, who never saw the baby, checked out of the hospital on September 8. "I kept calling this nurse," she said in a deposition. "I would call ... and get information from them about the baby, and they told me he was doing fine. They told me he had picked up two or three pounds. I started going to school, and one afternoon I called them and they told me the baby had died, but no one told me the cause of his death."

The baby had developed a tear in his small intestine and died of that and other complications on September 26, just 20 days old.

Floyd Turns Criminal Charges into Major Abortion Victory

Prosecutors were faced with a difficult case. Floyd himself never had any contact with the baby, nor was he involved in making decisions about the child's care. However, it struck the prosecutors as obvious that by proceeding with an abortion was illegal in that it was done outside a hospital after the first trimester, Floyd had taken action leading to the baby's death. 

Floyd was charged with both murder and criminal abortion, but eventually the abortion-rights arguments won out. The baby's mother wasn't eager to testify against the Floyd, and Floyd could claim not knowing that the baby had been past viability, and could even assert that under Roe and Doe, the state had no business meddling in his decision to perform an abortion even after viability, since it was the abortionist's judgment whether the baby was viable or not. The charges were dropped.

Floyd's appeal led to the state's abortion law being declared unconstitutional. Thus, abortion advocates managed to turn the death of an abortion survivor into permission to abort babies at any gestational age in South Carolina merely by the doctor asserting that he doesn't believe that the baby is viable.

Watch Baby's Death Leads to Abortion Advocacy Victory on YouTube.

Sources:

• Floyd v. Anders, 440 F. Supp. 535
• "The Dreaded Complication," Philadelphia Inquirer, August 2, 1981
• "Judges overturn S.C. abortion law," (Rock Hills, SC) The Herald, November 5, 1977