Alarmed, Mrs. Karchner sought out a policeman on his rounds, who went to the apartment and found a young woman there, ailing and alone.

The girl gave her name as Mrs. Emily Scott.

“What is your husband’s name?” the officer asked.

“Ollie Scott. He is a fireman on a Fulton ferry boat.”

“Do your parents know you are married?

“No; it is a secret.”

“Are you his common law wife or were you married by a minister?”

“Ollie is my husband, and is a true, good husband to me. I believe in him.”

“Who is your doctor?”

Emily named Dr. Cardwell of Halsey Street

The policeman considered all these goings-on to be fishy, so he reported the situation to the precinct captain, who began an investigation to identify and round up everybody involved in the young woman’s suspicious illness.

Around 5:30 on Tuesday afternoon, April 7, the young woman said that she was going to die soon, told the police that her real name was Emily L. Binney and gave them her address on Rutledge Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Emily’s turn for the worse sent the police rushing for the coroner, leaving the ailing girl in the care of Minnie Meyer. The coroner arrived to find that Miss Meyer had abandoned Emily, leaving her to die alone in the intervening half hour.

Arthur Robbins then admitted that he had gone with Emily and Minnie to arrange for Mrs. Schott to perform an abortion, paying her $50 that he’d gotten from Emily. Police learned that Emily had gotten the money from her cousin George May, who had taken $100 out of the bank for her the day before the abortion. May admitted that he’d gotten the money for Emily, but insisted that he’d given it to her so she could go away while he and Robbins tried to get her baby’s father, Mr. Fox of Port Oram, New Jersey, to marry her.

The mysterious Mr. Fox never seems to materialize in coverage of Emily’s death. One news item blames the pregnancy on Emily’s cousin George, who worked so hard to arrange the abortion, though Robbins, whom Emily had, albeit with a false name, identified as her husband, remains a strong possibility.

Emily’s older sister, Beatrice, seemed to have a bit more knowledge, for she had known where her sister had been during the final days of her life, though she insisted to police that she’d previously not even known Emily to have a romantic attachment, Beatrice had learned of her sister’s death when she went to the Meyers home to check on her.

Emily’s father seemed to bear no ill will against Robbins. He actually went to the station house to speak to him, asking “How are you, Robbie?” Robbins, it is reported, “turned his face to the wall and wept.”

I have no information on overall maternal mortality, or abortion mortality, in the 19th century. I imagine it can’t be too much different from maternal and abortion mortality at the very beginning of the 20th Century.
Note, please, that with issues such as doctors not using proper aseptic techniques, lack of access to blood transfusions and antibiotics, and overall poor health to begin with, there was likely little difference between the performance of a legal abortion and illegal practice, and the aftercare for either type of abortion was probably equally unlikely to do the woman much, if any, good.