"She died in my arms. 
Her blood splattered my white, starched uniform, seeping deeper than the uniform, permeating my body, my soul, my memory. She wouldn't, couldn't answer with what instrument she had inserted, mutilated. Perhaps the proverbial coat hanger? The only history obtainable was that she had been 'dumped' just outside the ER at the Los Angeles County Hospital, much too late for any medical help. Chunks of paper-thin bone, macerated tissue protruded from her vagina amidst profuse hemorrhage. Barely audible, her last words were, 'Someone's gotta pick up my little girl at school...' The racing pulse became slower...and stopped."

From "Roe v. Wade," Journal of the American Medical Association, September 15, 1989 (vol. 262, no. 11), page 1519



Legalizing abortion has been one of the great public health benefits of this century. The year 
after legalization in New York (1971), maternal mortality dropped by 45% in that state alone.


 
"The dead women we saw had either bled to death or had died from overwhelming infections. Some had tears  along the vaginal tract where they had used coat hangers to get up into the uterus and break things up -- like rupture the amniotic sac . . . Most of the dead women I saw were in their teens or twenties . . . The deaths stopped overnight in 1973, and I never saw another abortion death in all the eighteen years after that until I retired."

Pennsylvanian coroner The Worst of Times by P. Miller, p.12,13,327 (1993, HarperCollins, New York NY)

 
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