Saturday, August 06, 2011

Today's two anniversaries

On August 6, 1920, 35-year-old Christina Anderson died at Chicago's County Hospital from a criminal abortion. Midwife Emelia Schaffer was arrested for murder, and a woman named Pearl Freese as an accessory. Schaffer was indicted on August 14, but the case never went to trial.

Keep in mind that things that things we take for granted, like antibiotics and blood banks, were still in the future. For more about abortion in this era, see Abortion in the 1920s.

In late July of 1988, 30-year-old Laura Sorrels underwent an abortion at a facility in Lancaster, California. Two weeks later, on August 6th, she was found dead in a motel room. Her one-year-old daughter was found in the room with her. Whoever had performed Laura's abortion had failed to notice that the embryo was not in her uterus, but was in her fallopian tube. The tube ruptured, and Laura died of blood loss and shock, her baby daughter by her side.

Even though, in theory, women who choose abortion should be less likely to die of ectopic pregnancy complications, experiences shows that they're actually //more// likely to die, due to sloppy practices by abortion practitioners.

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