hbenthow
Familiar Face
- Messages
- 66
- Location
- Columbia, Ms.
True. However, I've heard speculation that certain groups of the era exaggerated the incidence of abortion in order to further their causes. Birth control activists often used the claim that there was an epidemic of abortions to convince those who had religious or moral objections to birth control to ease up (reasoning that these people would consider birth control the lesser of two evils and tolerate it if they believed that it would lower the abortion rate), and eugenicists often used claims that there was a high abortion rate among the "mentally unfit" as further reason why they should be sterilized. So it may be that the abortion rate was actually lower than many people were led to believe at the time.Many reputable family doctors would perform abortions on the QT and report them as "miscarriages" or "appendicitis," especially for school-age young women who would disappear without explanation from school for a couple of months, and return just as mysteriously.
Interestingly, abortion wasn't the only surgery that was written off as "appendicitis". In the deep south, there once existed the phenomenon of so-called "Mississippi appendectomies". Impoverished women (especially if they were non-white) were falsely told by doctors that they needed their appendix out, and while they were under anesthesia, the surgeons sterilized them. Because of this, the number of eugenic sterilizations in Mississippi and some other southern states was actually higher than is officially recorded.
It's also possible that some wealthier women paid for sterilization procedures that violated the "rule of 120" (an arbitrary medical rule that a healthy woman could not be voluntarily sterilized unless her age multiplied by her number of children equaled 120 or higher) and had them written off in the medical records as appendectomies or some other surgery.
And hysterectomies, surgeries for ovarian cysts, and other surgeries of a private nature were sometimes reported to the public as appendectomies in order to avoid embarrassment to the patient (especially if the patient was famous). There is at least one documented instance of this occurring; a girl named Ilene Marjorie Barton died in 1942 from complications after surgery for a burst ovarian cyst and a bowel obstruction, but the newspapers stated that the surgery had been for appendicitis.
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=27102471
In short, "appendicitis" was often the cover story for almost anything that would be embarrassing to the patient or the patient's family, even if it was something that wouldn't be scandalous, per se.
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