On February 1, 1943, 26-year-old Anna Woznica Roche, wife of Marine Sgt. William Roche, died om Suracise. New York, of peritonitis caused by an abortion. Several people were questioned the next day but no perpetrator identified.
During the 1940s,
while abortion was still illegal, there was a massive drop in maternal
mortality from abortion. The death toll fell from 1,407 in 1940, to 744
in 1945, to 263 in 1950. Most researches attribute this plunge to the
development of blood transfusion techniques and the introduction of
antibiotics. Learn more here.