The only information I have is from her death certificate, which indicates that she had undergone an abortion at 15 weeks into her pregnancy. No autopsy was performed, and she had the same doctor attending her from March 15 until her death.
The date and the location of the abortion are not noted, but there is a timeline of her final illness.
Marjel developed hyponatremia, which is pathologically low sodium levels in the blood, some time on March 17. This caused swelling of the brain, noticed about 18 hours after she was diagnosed with hyponatremia. From this, she suffered a hemorrhage under the membrane surrounding her brain, resulting in her death at shortly after 9 pm on March 19.
According to the Montgomery Advertiser, abortion in Alabama had been reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor in September of 1951, with fines ranging from $100 to $1,000 and a maximum prison sentence of one year. By 1971, The University of Alabama Medical Center was performing abortions on unmarried teenagers, divorcees, widows with other children, and women who had contracted rubella, and evidently doing so openly. No additional health issues were noted on her death certificate, so Marjel likely had not suffered any health problem that would have justified a "therapeutic" abortion on medical grounds.
I have been unable to find any abortion technique known to cause hyponatremia as a complication. Saline abortions, popular in the late second and into the third trimester, are associated with too much sodium, rather than too little, in the blood. According to Grok, a prostaglandin instillation abortion could cause this complication, as id did in a 1973 case. Prostaglandin instillation abortions were common in hospitals in the United States at that time.
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