Dr. Eva Shaver was a physician and abortion provider in Chicago, Illinois. On May 26, 1915, a young woman named Anna Johnson was found dead in Shaver's home, with a bullet hole in her head. Police speculated that Johnson had died of complications of an abortion performed by Shaver, who then shot the dead woman in the head in an attempt to pass the death off as a suicide. Abortion was illegal at the time.
Shaver was tried for Johnson's death, as well as for the death of another abortion patient in 1916. Although she was a physician, the case rekindled a campaign against midwives, since journalists and politicians assumed that female physicians were midwives and that midwives provided abortions. Coverage exaggerated the idea that young girls were being killed by botched abortions from abortion providers, when in reality most deaths were from self-induced abortions.