Illegal Abortion Myths: “Septic Abortion Wards”
Another illegal abortion myth, debunked by Christina Dunigan at Real Choice:
Dr. Doug Laube of Wisconsin is one of the many abortion practitioners who repeats hoary old tales of septic abortion wards. In an interview with Feministe’s Clarisse Thorn, he in fact made a rather outrageous claim that before legalization, not only were there entire wards in inner city hospitals devoted totally to treating illegal abortion complications, but also claiming that half of the women admitted for botched abortions died.
Ms. Thorn swallowed that claim without even pausing to chew on it. I did a search to get a bit more of a realistic idea, and found Surgery, gynecology & obstetrics, Volume 26 By Franklin H. Martin Memorial Foundation, American College of Surgeons, 1918.
In other words, I found an account not merely from pre-Roe days, but from the days before there were even blood transfusions and antibiotics. Dr. Julius E. Lackner reviewed admissions for abortions at a large charity hospital in Chicago. He wrote:
“I reported 500 cases occurring in the service of Drs. Banga and Fninkenthal at the Michael Reese Hospital in the years 1900 to 1914. Of these 500 cases 4 died.”
Let’s do the math. Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago admitted five hundred abortion cases of any kind in 15 years. “Abortion cases” included not just illegal abortions but also miscarriages. That’s about 34 admissions a year or one admission every 11 days for both miscarriages and induced abortions. That hardly an entire ward full of septic abortion cases, even if every single one of those women was indeed suffering from a criminal abortion and not a single one of them was just having a miscarriage.
What’s more, the mortality rate was less than 1 percent. And remember that this record predates blood transfusions and antibiotics. And, keep in mind, this case load is comprised of all women whose pregnancies ended before about six months, both naturally and due to criminal interference.
The number of maternal abortion deaths dropped dramatically long before abortion was legalized, as a result of improvements in medicine. Indeed, the legalization of abortion has failed to prevent women from being exploited, abused, traumatized, maimed, injured and killed before, during and after abortion.
Women and girls still die from abortion, but their deaths are no longer automatically investigated by police or even always counted in the official statistics because they are no longer the result of criminal activity.
Learn more:
Two Deaths from “Safe and Legal” Abortions: Would More Women Die If Not for Legalization?
5 Myths About Back-Alley Abortions
From “Back Alley” to Main Street: Illegal Abortionists Who Became Legal Abortionists
Kermit Gosnell, the Back Alley and the Front Door
Exception or Rule? Gosnell’s “House of Horrors” Not So Rare
Abortionists Are Not Held Accountable for Mistakes
11 thoughts on “Illegal Abortion Myths: “Septic Abortion Wards””
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Your article is not only not well researched, it’s trash. The one “study” you cite is 105 years old, from a time when people went to the hospital to die, and that was about it. No one went to a hospital for an infection, because…why? They couldn’t do anything there you couldn’t do at home. Throw in the lack of transportation in those days for people living as little as ten miles away, and the fact that medical records back then were notoriously unreliable. It would be nothing for a physician to leave out “abortion” on a death certificate if the patient was from “a good family” to spare them the embarrassment. Septic abortion wards not only existed, they are well documented, and I remain convinced you not only know that, you deliberately lied about it. Cook County hospital used to admit an average of 2000 women a year to theirs, in NYC Belelvue admitted a like number from 1940 to 1954. You have exactly ZERO credibility.
First, it’s not our study. It is a comment on another researcher’s comments regarding a third party’s claims.
Second, the use of a 105 year old study is appropriate given that we are talking about the prevelance of abortions a hundred years ago, prior to antibiotics.
Third, you make a valid point that many people couldn’t get to hospitals, but you also ignore the valid point that the admission rate at an inner city hospital where people did have easy access to it was still far lower than Dr. Laube was asserting.
Fourth, you ignore the FACT that “septic abortion wards” included both miscarriages and induced abortions. Pro-aborts pretend that all of these were induced abortions, but clearly that is untrue.
Fifth, your own claim that Cook County treated 2000 cases of septic abortion per year (including both miscarriages and induced abortions) breaks down to 38 cases per week. How many were for illegal abortions versus miscarriages. Did 50% die?
Before you accuse others of poor research, provide citations to well documented medical literature that actually supports your point. The fact that septic abortions occurred tells us nothing about induced abortion rates and the mortality rates associated with them even in 1930, or 1960, much less in 2023 in states where abortion is illegal. Pointing to a past where the data is mixed with miscarriages, plus when there were no antibiotics, to project mortality rates for abotions today is simply ludicrous.
I am having a hard time finding the interview mentioned at the beginning of the article. Most of the links here are not active. Would love to be able to verify the premises offered here.
I’ve updated the article and added a link to an archived copy of the original article.
I am undertaking as thorough a search as possible about backyard abortions and their consequences to document a neglected part of the history of a hospital where I was a trainee in Microbiology in the 60s in Australia. This is how I came across this site. Two things stand out in my memory. Clostridium perfringens, the gas gangrene organism was a common isolate from infections from the so-called “dirty abortions”, something not really seen any more since terminations are performed safely and legally upon the say-so of a qualified medical practitioner if the physical or mental health of the mother was at risk. The other stand-out was that the women who were hospitalised were segregated. The hospital itself was an award-winning, architecturally, and famous inner city obs/gynae hospital, but out the back, across the road, stood the “Seg Huts”.
“Seg” for segregation. Little wooden buildings keeping these patients out of sight. Reminds me of
“menstrual huts” and the stigma and sorrow that attaches to those in less developed societies.
I was a young single mother, only 19 and living on my own, I was manipulated by a 36 year old man who quickly turned into an abusive monster. I stupidly “gave in” when he insisted he’d had a vasectomy. After I found out I was pregnant, I did consider adoption, but he chased after me and threatened to do horrible things to my daughter. I made a mistake being in the brief relationship I was in, but my daughter shouldn’t have to endure him for a lifetime because of my choices. He made it clear that he would pursue me legally until he had access to “his” child. My daughter is 19 and doesn’t remember a moment of those few months out of her 1 yr old life. I’m grateful I had my abortion, I’m not telling you my story to do anything but give an experience on the other side of abortion. Be careful not to create an echo chamber, lest you isolate a tremendous group of women.
They were not specifically marked septic abortion wards. They were wards for pregnancy complications, just like we have today for women with eclampsia or placenta previa or placental abruption. But at that time, a tremendous proportion of the beds were in use by women who were injured from attempting to self induce abortion.
A single statistic from one hospital does not represent the statistics of the entire country. There are countless reports by doctors, nurses, and patients about these wards from multiple states and multiple years pre-RvW. Ignoring their presence and ignoring their truth does not make you right.
All you need to do is listen to the stories told by women our grandmother’s age to realize that it was a much bigger problem than you claim.
I’m sorry you have such little compassion for women that you’d rather see them seek a creepy, dirty, back ally abortion and risk their lives then have access to safe abortion care and infection control…..
Ellen, before legalization, 90 percent of induced abortions were in fact performed by physicians. “Back alley” referred to the fact that women arrived and left by the back door in order to avoid being seen.
Further, legalization did not actually lead to a decline in women’s deaths from abortion. In fact, women’s deaths from abortion plummeted well before Roe, due to availability of antibiotics and blood transfusions.
I would really urge you to look more closely at the links at the end of the article, as well as the Real Choice site, which documents the deaths of women both before and after legalization.
Every woman’s death from abortion is a tragedy. Unfortunately, legalization did not stop those deaths from happening. In fact, large-scale record linkage studies in the U.S., Finland and Denmark have shown that women who abort have higher death rates in the years following than women who do not abort.
Abortion is bad medicine and we care about all women who are killed or injured by abortion — regardless of the legal status. “Safe abortion care” is simply not safe, as we’ve documented repeatedly.
I had an abortion after a violent rape and I DO NOT regret it.
I am glad you are doing well. Please consider the evidence that many sexual assault victims do report that their abortions caused problems. Not everyone has your experience, and it is at least reasonable that they should want the public to know about their experiences also. If you do ever experience problems, like others have, I’m sure you want there to be people there who understand and can help because they have been through the same experiences.
This is from your own link, you left out the part about this small study of 192 women being PRESSURED to do so…
“Many of the women in our sample aborted only because they were pressured to do so, and most reported that the abortion only increased their experience of grief and trauma,”