On June 16, 1993, Jane Doe of Newark, N.J., bled to death in a Bergen County hospital, several hours after abortionist Steven Berkman performed an abortion on her. Doe, a 20-year-old college student and the mother of a four-year-old boy, underwent the abortion on the morning of June 16 and started feeling dizzy in the recovery room. Two hours later, after Berkman examined her and realized he had perforated her uterus, his staff called an ambulance, and Jane was taken to a nearby hospital. Jane’s family’s lawyer accused the staff members at the abortion facility of delaying the call for an ambulance for Jane. It is this delay which likely led her to bleed to death. “We had a healthy 20-year-old go into that clinic and not come out,” the attorney for Jane Roe’s family said. “And I think a delay had something to do with it.” Jane died before sundown, leaving behind a promising college career, a grieving family, and a motherless little boy.

Source: Hackensack Record, July 16, 1993

Reprinted from The American Feminist, Fall 1999

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