I guess it's a Philly thing, especially the poorer women who went to that abortion mill. It's a beautiful city downtown, but is ringed by oil refineries and crisscrossed by heavy traffic and noise even in the residential streets; you can clean your windowsills at noon and they will have a coat of fine black dust by 1:00. It's one of the oldest cities in the U.S. with old housing in the major part. People get conditioned to a certain degree of grime and funkiness.
People are very friendly in Philly, but also separate themselves into ethnic neighborhoods with defined boundaries and varying standards of housekeeping. That area of Lancaster Avenue adjoins a downscale African-American business corridor, the kind of place with payday loans, dank second-hand stores and owner-operated fried chicken stands, and funky is the standard in that section, with bars on most of the windows.
If you are poor to begin with, not accustomed to first class medical care, and doing something you are scared, ashamed and/or desperate about, broken old furniture is not much of a stretch. When people are ashamed or degraded to begin with, bad surroundings are a sort of self-flagellation.
This or some other article about this travesty also pointed out that he kept a separate, cleaner waiting room for white patients -- presumably he feared that they would be more likely to complain to authorities or judge him according to race, which he may have had hangups about, being a "person of freckle" with very light skin but African features -- in the era when he grew up, a constant irony about skin color privilege vs. more indelible perceptions of race/culture.
I glean that patients were drugged and sent to the waiting room until the "delivery of the products of conception" was imminent; and that the overdrugging was so egregious that some women rushed to the toilet and delivered too rapidly. Others were drugged to insensibility.
The whole thing is one of the most "Sweeney Todd" episodes in recent memory. God bless the souls of those innocent babies subjected to so much carelessness and pain where there should have been preparation, a loving home and welcoming arms. But how bourgeois of me to think so.
I had to go to Philly for a week of meetings, when living in Lancaster. I could not wait to get out of there! Went by train and then taxi to the Omni, each day, rather than stay in the city. It’s a very “dark” city.