Julia Fortmeyer was a 19th-century

abortion Abortion is the early termination of a pregnancy by removal or expulsion of an embryo or fetus. Abortions that occur without intervention are known as miscarriages or "spontaneous abortions", and occur in roughly 30–40% of all pregnan ...

st from

St. Louis St. Louis ( , sometimes referred to as St. Louis City, Saint Louis or STL) is an independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. It lies near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a populatio ...

Missouri Missouri (''see #Etymology and pronunciation, pronunciation'') is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking List of U.S. states and territories by area, 21st in land area, it border ...

, who was convicted of

manslaughter Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th ce ...

in 1875 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, and served seven. Author L.U. Reavis later recounted that prosecutor Colonel Normile had unsuccessfully sought to prove that Fortmeyer had burned a baby alive. During the trial, Normile argued for both

murder Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification (jurisprudence), justification or valid excuse (legal), excuse committed with the necessary Intention (criminal law), intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisd ...

in the first degree or manslaughter in the second. A transcript of the trial was published in 1875 by Barclay & Company of Philadelphia. In 1899, a St Louis newspaper compared Fortmeyer to another abortionist, Henrietta Bamberger, who had been arrested under similar circumstances. The paper reported that Fortmeyer had "killed infants and burned their bodies in a cook stove."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fortmeyer, Julia American abortion providers Criminals from Missouri People from St. Louis Manslaughter trials 19th-century American women physicians 19th-century American physicians