Mary Moorehead20s, 1920s, chicago, illinois, illegaldoctorOn November 29, 1926, 25-year-old stenographer Mary Baxter Moorehead died from a criminal abortion in the Chicago office of Dr. Lucy Hagenow.

Hagenow was arrested November 13. She was sentenced to 14 years at Joliet Penitentiary, but was able to get her conviction overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court, which ordered a new trial in 1929.

The judge, noting that there was no new evidence, dismissed the case, telling Hagenow, “You had better make your peace with God, Lucy Hagenow. I do not think your months on earth are many.”

Hagenow, who also went by the name of Louise or Louisa Hagenow, had a long and unsavory history of being involved in women’s abortion deaths. The first were in San Francisco before Hagenow relocated to Chicago around 1890.

The abortion deaths Hagenow was linked to include:

• 1886: Louise Derchow
• 1888: Annie Dories, Abbie Richards., and Emma Dep
• 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, Jean Cohen, Bridget Masterson, and Elizabeth Welter
• 1926: Mary Moorehead

Hagenow nearly always managed to avoid trial, and even when her cases did go to trial she was rarely convicted.

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, see The Bad Old Days of Abortion

Sources:

• “Woman Charged With Murder,” The Canton (OH) Repository, Nov. 20, 1927
• Homicide in Chicago Interactive
• “Woman, 82, to Prison,” Associated Press, Jan. 14, 1928

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