Mary Ann's abortion, perpetrated by a physician, was typical of criminal abortions. Mary Claderone (then Medical Director of Planned Parenthood) and Nancy Howell Lee (a pro choice researcher) both investigated the practice of criminal abortion in the pre-legalization era. Calderone estimated that 90% of all abortions were being done by physicians, 8% were self-induced and 2% were induced by someone else. Lee estimated that 89% of illegal abortions were done by physicians, an additional 5% by nurses or others with some medical training, and 6% by non-medical persons or the woman herself.
However, "A woman went to a doctor for an abortion, then died from complications" isn't going to rally the troops. Something more dramatic is called for. And in the days before penicillin and blood transfusions, there were enough deaths that sooner or later some woman's tragedy would produce a useful and comely corpse for public display.
Whoever Clara Jane Bell Duvall was in life -- elegant society matron or desperate slum mother -- in death she has become a sort of patron saint of the abortion lobby.
The tale of Clara Duvall's abortion death, one that nobody can do anything to verify, is a useful one to the abortion lobby, and thus it's her death, and not the far more common deaths of women like Mary Ann Page, that will be put forth to the public as typical criminal abortion deaths. It's narrative, not facts, that matters.
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