Helen Clarkillegaluntrained, newyork, 20s, 1940sSUMMARY: Helen Clark, age 23, died September 16, 1941 after an abortion perpetrated in New York by Sarah Howe, whose profession I’ve been unable to determine.

One of the few cases I’ve found in which a criminal abortionist wasn’t a doctor is also one of the strangest cases I’ve found. The abortionist, Sarah Howe, age 57, had been blind since she was three years old.

Authorities had been aware that Howe was an abortionist, and had struggled for 25 years to get enough evidence to actually win a conviction once 23-year-old Helen Clark took ill.

Helen had undergone the abortion at Howe’s hands on September 6, 1941. Helen took ill. On September 14, Helen identified Howe as the person who had perpetrated her abortion. Two days later, September 16, Helen died.

Howe was charged with abortion and with manslaughter in Helen’s death. The jury deliberated for seven hours before finding Howe guilty of abortion but not of manslaughter. She could have saved everybody, including a lot of trouble, had she just gone with the plea bargain initially offered to her: guilty on the abortion with the manslaughter charge dropped.

“Now I have a chance to go right and to make myself right in the eyes of God,” Howe said after hearing the verdict. “I will never again return to that practice.”

She was sentenced to two to four years in prison.

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.

For more on pre-legalization abortion, see The Bad Old Days of Abortion

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Source: “Jury Convicts Blind Woman,” Poughkeepsie (NY) Eagle-News, March 6, 1942

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