It was called the Mother's Day Massacre. A young Philadelphia doctor
"offered to perform abortions on 15 poor women who were bused to his
clinic from Chicago on Mother's Day 1972, in their second trimester of
pregnancy." The women didn't know that the doctor "planned to use an
experimental device called a 'super coil' developed by a California man
named Harvey Karman.
A colleague of Karman's Philadelphia collaborator described the
contraption as "basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball.
. . . They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed.
These would be inserted into the woman's uterus. And after several hours
of body temperature, . . . the gel would melt and these . . . things
would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus."
Nine of the 15 Chicago women suffered serious complications. One of
them needed a hysterectomy. The following year, the Supreme Court
decided Roe v. Wade. It would be 37 more years before the
Philadelphia doctor who carried out the Mother's Day Massacre would go
out of business. His name is Kermit Gosnell.
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