Website Under Deconstruction: Downtown Women’s Center

Today’s post is part of our “Website Under Deconstruction” series on abortion center websites. Read more here.

The Downtown Women’s Center abortion facility in Portland, OR has this to say about how totally safe abortion is (emphasis added): 

Not a single death from abortion since it was legalized in 1973? That’s demonstrably false. Setting aside the deaths of the preborn, twelve women died from legal abortions in the U.S. in 2008 alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Perhaps Downtown Women’s Center’s ambiguous statement only meant to claim that there has never been a death due to legal abortion in Oregon. It didn’t take long for me to find one: Loretta Morton, a 16-year-old who died of an abortion-related pulmonary embolism in 1984.* Although I’m unable to access her death certificate, she apparently died in Multnomah County, Oregon (which includes Portland). Several years later, her death was mentioned in a scholarly article in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

It’s also worth pointing out that Seth Jackson Huntington, an abortionist with Downtown Women’s Center, was once sued for perforating a woman’s uterus during an abortion. She apparently survived, but uterine perforation can be lethal.

Oregon’s political environment is highly pro-abortion and it is unlikely that the state will do anything about Downtown Women’s Center’s false advertising. Nevertheless, we have notified Oregon Right to Life.

*I don’t mean to suggest that Ms. Morton is the only woman ever to die in a legal abortion in Oregon. Information about her death happens to be the most readily available online.