Jean Cohenteens, 1920s, chicago, illinois, illegaldoctorOn January 22, 1925, 17-year-old homemaker Jean Cohen, a Connecticut native, died at Chicago’s Montrose Hospital from an abortion performed earlier that day. On January 31, Louise Hagenow was arrested in Jean’s death.
However, Hagenow, though a known abortionist, was for some reason cleared in Jean’s death.
Hagenow alternatively used the names Lucy and Louise. Some writers believed that Ida Von Schultz was an alias of Hagenow, but since the two of them were once arrested together, they are clearly different women, though Hagenow might have sometimes impersonated von Schultz or vice versa..

Hagenow, who had already been implicated of the abortion deaths of Louise Derchow, Annie Dorris, Abbia Richards, and Emma Dep in San Francisco, relocated to Chicago, which as Hagenow later noted was more corrupt and thus a more genial environment for criminal abortionists. There she was connected to over a dozen abortion deaths, including:
- 1891: Minnie Deering
- 1892: Sophia Kuhn and Emily Anderson
- 1896: Hannah Carlson
- 1899: Marie Hecht
- 1905: May Putnam
- 1906: Lola Madison
- 1907: Annie Horvatich
- 1925: Lottie Lowy, Nina H. Pierce, Bridget Masterson, and Elizabeth Welter
- 1926: Mary Moorehead
Hagenow was typical of criminal abortionists in that she was a physician.
Keep in mind that things that things we take for granted, like antibiotics and blood banks, were still in the future. For more about abortion in this era, see Abortion in the 1920s.
For more on pre-legalization abortion, seeThe Bad Old Days of Abortion Source:
Sources:
- “Aged Woman Held to Grand Jury as Slayer,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 19, 1925
- Homicide in Chicago Interactive
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