A study on second-trimester D&E abortions (done by dismembering the unborn baby inside the uterus and forcibly extracting each piece) reported many maternal deaths, including three 16-year-old girls killed between 1972 and 1978. Their exact dates of death are not given, and all were at higher risk of death for factors outside of their control.
The first of the three (Case 4) is a match for the death of Rita McDowell, whose abortion was intentionally incomplete because the abortionist was planning to charge her family more for follow-up surgeries.
“Carly” (or Case 8, as the study impersonally called her) was pregnant for the first time and underwent the D&E abortion at 20 weeks pregnant. She developed endometritis and amnionitis, which worsened into sepsis, ARDS and septic shock. Although she had been perfectly healthy before the abortion, she was still at a disproportionate risk of death. Carly and Rita were both Black, and according to the study that documented the three deaths, Black abortion clients had over three times the risk of death from a D&E abortion as a white client.
The remaining 16-year-old (Case 7) was “Bree Roe” and underwent her 17-week abortion in a hospital. The abortion caused a bacterial infection that rapidly progressed to acute endocarditis of her aortic valve and ventricular septum. Only two weeks after the abortion, she went into congestive heart failure and died.
Bree was not Black like Rita and Carly, but her autopsy found a different risk factor that she had never been aware of. If there had been any pre-op examination before the abortion, it had not detected that she had a heart defect. The ventricular septal defect, meaning a hole or other structural abnormality in the wall between the chambers of her heart, had been missed entirely. It is unknown how much this condition might have been a factor in her death from heart failure, but it should still be noted that endocarditis after abortion can kill someone as perfectly healthy as Bree was thought to be.
See Cases 4, 7 and 8. (Note: “Carly” is “Carla Roe” on the Blackmun Wall.”)
