My great aunt worked in the maternity wards in Chicago back in the 20s and 30s. She has now passed, but I remember one night, she started talking about what she saw back then … the “poor scared young girls who came in all twisted up because they’d been trying to fix things on their own. All tore up inside. This was before all the miracle antibiotics, and by the time they came in, it was a death sentence.”

She said that the best they could do was drug them up to try to kill the pain. And that the deaths were written down as “bacterial infection” to keep the shame off the family. She was a gentle lady, but that was as close I ever saw her to actual rage.