Carole Joffe still remembers the despair in the doctors’ voices and faces when they talked about the women.
The women – or often, girls – were patients, all rushed to emergency rooms in different parts of the country, some claiming to be miscarrying, others concocting back stories – but many severely, sometimes fatally, injured by illegal or self-administered abortion attempts in the years before the 1973 Roe v Wade decision.
