Medicine: Murder

When the jury of eleven married men and one widower filed into the Chicago Criminal Court last week, Dr. Amante Rongetti, proprietor of a Chicago hospital, the prisoner, stood up. The jury foreman silently passed the written verdict to the court clerk, who read aloud in courtly monotone:

“Guilty and we fix his punishment at death.”

It was the first time in the U. S., according to the prosecuting attorneys, that a physician had been given a death sentence as penalty for having performed an abortion, although many a one has been fined or imprisoned. The crime is fairly common, say sociologists, in the U. S. and is increasing. Although abortions are exceedingly dangerous to the health & life of a woman, they are relatively simple operations to perform. Death is usually an untoward accident.

Convicted Dr. Rongetti’s operation—upon the body of one Miss Loretta J. Enders of Chicago—was replete with rude accidents :

1) The baby was born alive. After it died of neglect Dr. Rongetti ordered it tossed into a furnace.

2) He permitted the delivered mother to contract blood poison, from which she died.

3) He refused to perform another operation that might have saved her life because, “She had no money.”

4) He refused to let her go to a public hospital for fear of revealing his abortion.

5) He refused to let a priest shrive her before her death, for the same reason.

6) He issued a false death certificate, declaring that she had died of heart disease.

All this constituted premeditated murder decided the jury. Dr. Rongetti will, unless his lawyers can prevent, die in the electric chair, the first to do so in Illinois, which has hitherto despatched its convicted murderers by hanging.