The patient was in a private room. I even remember the room number, 724. That was one of the gold coast rooms. The woman, in her early or mid-thirties, was married to someone really important, with a lot of connections. She came in with severe…
Dr. Don, a physician in Colorado in the 1960s: As for the attitudes of the medical community toward these women who got coat hanger abortions, it's not that the doctors were judgmental or hostile as much as they were kind of contemptuous. The attitude was…
Dr Harvey Lothringer is a doctor who served four years in prison for performing an illegal abortion on a 19-year-old woman who died during the procedure. He dismembered her body and flushed it down the toilet. Imagine being 18, pregnant scared to death-it was very…
Thanks to Marilyn Cole-Greene for sending the article "Immigrant Women and Family Planning: Historical Perspectives for Genealogical Research" by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, DBRS, from which this excerpt was taken. It appeared in the June 1996 "National Genealogical Society Quarterly. " Women uneducated in modern scientific…
"Like her urban sisters. the frontier woman (from 1880 to 1920) frequently used folk remedies to bring about a delayed menstrual period, regardless of the cause. Due to laws against distributing contraceptive products and information, menstrual "regulators" were advertised in rural newspapers like the "Nebraska…
Once anonymous, this woman found dead from an illegal abortion on a motel room floor in June, 1964, has been identified by her sister. She was Gerri Santoro of Connecticut, a mother of two facing her third pregnancy. Santoro and her two daughters had been…
By Anna Quindlen Newsweek Jan. 24 issue - There is now only a single abortion clinic in Mississippi. Once there were seven. There are nearly 3 million people living in the state. No other state with only one abortion clinic has as many residents. Mississippi…
April 25, 2002 By MICHAEL S. GAZZANIGA HANOVER, N.H. When President Bush convened his advisory panel on bioethics in January, he told those of us serving on it to engage in that age-old technique of intellectual exploration called debate. "That's what I want," he said.…
by Elizabeth Benton Summer 2001 As temperatures in Washington rose, so did the debate over pre-marital sex and abstinence-until-marriage education. On June 28, Surgeon General David Satcher issued his, "Call to Action to Promote Sexual Health and Responsible Sexual Behavior." The comprehensive report urges a…
Anti-choice advocates have been irresponsibly touting a link between abortion and breast cancer for years. Careless scientists have published questionable studies which anti-choice politicians have used as excuses to pass hostile legislation. Currently Louisiana, Kansas, and Mississippi have bills mandating doctors to warn patients of…
