Helen Long19101919, 20s, chicago, illinois, illegaldoctorSUMMARY: Helen Long, age 25, died on February 23, 1916 after an abortion evidently perpetrated by her physician husband, Lester Long, in Cambridge, Illinois.

Twenty-six-year-old doctor Lester Lemuel Long married Helen Turner, daughter of Circuit Judge Chester M. Turner and his wife, Emma (Follette) Turner, of Cambridge, Illinois, in December of 1915.

By February of 1916, the young couple’s associates and neighbors began gossiping about a premature baby bump. Socially snubbed, the couple elected to get rid of the impending baby. Long made three surgical abortion attempts, and Helen grew successively more ill. Lester called in two other doctors, who refused to render aid until both husband and wife agreed to sign a document admitting to the abortion attempts. The aid of the other physicians came too late (not surprising, given sanitation and the state of medicine at the time), and Helen, 25 years old, died at home on February 23, 1916. The physicians contacted the police.

News coverage painted a pathetic picture of the young man, so distraught at his wife’s death that it took the police five minutes to calm him down enough to tell him he was under arrest. He reportedly was seen while in jail pacing his cell, weeping and crying out, “Can she live? Can she live?”

Lester was held by the Coroner and indicted by a Grand Jury on March 15, but the case never went to trial.

Helen’s parents evidently placed no blame on their son-in-law, since Census records show that he moved in with them after she died.

Note, please, that with overall public health 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.

In fact, due to improvements in addressing these problems, maternal mortality in general (and abortion mortality with it) fell dramatically in the 20th Century, decades before Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion across America.

For more information about early 20th Century abortion mortality, see Abortion Deaths 1910-1919.

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

• Homicide in Chicago Interactive Database
• “Illegal Operations Cause of Three Deaths,” //The Day Book// (Chicago, IL), Feb. 26, 1916.
• “Mrs. Lester Long Buried as Townspeople Mourn,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 28, 1916

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