George Lotrell Timanus

Who was George Lotrell Timanus?

Dr. George Lotrell Timanus was a physician who performed illegal abortions in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area from 1920 to 1951.

Timanus and one other abortion provider performed an estimated 90% criminal abortions in Baltimore.

In 1950, Timanus used his criminal trial to challenge the abortion laws in the United States, as Dr. Aleck Bourne had done in the UK. However, his trial and that of another doctor, Edgar Keemer, were not understood as challenges by the public, and Timanus and Keemer did not recruit other doctors or patients to their cause in a way that might have built a movement or sparked national conversation. He was fined $5,000, sentenced to six months in jail, and barred from further practice of medicine.

Timanus participated in the Planned Parenthood Conference on Abortion in America in 1955. He gave a detailed breakdown of his patients, of whom he kept meticulous records, noting that of 5,200 women on whom he had performed abortions, only two had died. As Garrett Hardin noted, this 0.04% rate, in the days before antibiotics, was not only far lower than the mortality rate for women carrying to term at the time, but still only half the maternal mortality rate a generation later. At the conference, Timanus also lamented that of the 353 doctors who referred patients to him—some of them, Timanus claimed, with letters recommending abortion—none stood up to testify for him when he was arrested.