Vuitch administered general anesthsia for Jeannie, and she never woke up. She was transported to a nearby hospital where she died. Vuitch settled with Jeannie's family for $150,000. When Vuitch was investigated, it was discovered that he kept patients overnight in his home (an unlicensed facility) which he designated "The Annexe." Inspectors also noted repeated violations of medical standards regarding sanitation and anesthesia. Vuitch also admitted during another case that he had lacked hospital admitting privileges since 1963.
Vuitch was also responsible for the 1974 abortion death of 17-year-old Wilma Harris.
Vuitch is one of three abortionists I know of who started out as criminal abortionists with clean records -- no patient deaths attributed to them -- who went on to kill two patient by performing the supposedly safer legal abortions. They are Jesse Ketchum (Margaret Smith and Carole Schaner) and Benjamin Munson (Linda Padfield and Yvonne Mesteth).
For more abortion deaths, visit the Cemetery of Choice:
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10 comments:
I was brutally raped by Dr. Milan Vuitch and his anesthesiologist when I was 17. I am now 42. I went to his office in Washington, D.C. to have an I.U.D. inserted. They made a 7 PM appointment for me so I wouldn't have to miss work. As it was an office building (next to the World Bank, at about 18th & I Streets), there was no one around in the building, the receptionist had gone home, etc. I can't believe I trusted those two men just because he was a "doctor." They put me under general anesthesia a few minutes after 7, being so sweet and nice to me. I remember when they told me to count backwards from 20, I only made it to 18 and I was out. I woke up around 11 pm in excruciating pain. Dr. Vuitch and the other man were then very mean and angry...he threw a bottle of about 50 percosets at me from across the room, snarling "Don't be such a baby." My mom had to come pick me up because i couldn't drive. I was on the floor of the car the whole way home, screaming in pain. I spent 10 days laying in a pool of blood, sweat, and tears before my mom, (a Christian Scientist) took me to the Emergency Room. I had P.I.D. (pelvic inflammatory disease) and my body was in shock. The doctor there told her I would have been dead within 24 hours had she not brought me in. I suffered from pelvic pain for 20+ years. I was diagnosed with Fitz Hughes Curtis syndrome (every organ in my pelvic cavity covered with adhesions/scar tissue). Fallopian tubes “occluded” (blocked), the fibria “clubbed.” I was also diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease (a bowel disorder) and “Visceral Hyper-Sensitivity of the Colon.” I was told I would never be able to have children. I then suffered fom severe depression, and bi-polar disorder, as well. I was able to have children at the age of 25 & 27, without having laser surgery as I had been told would be the only way it might be possible. But my physical scars healed. By the age of 38, 21 years later, my pelvic pain finally stopped. It is now 25 years later and this is the first time I have approached this subject, except when I was about 30, when I decided I was ready to find this possible murderer (surely he had done this to many others). I searched on the internet and found his obituary in a New York City newspaper. It said something like "Champion of Women's Rights Dies at the Age of (whatever, 76, or 82, I don't remember now)...” The article went on to describe him as a hero for women because he fought for abortion rights. So he made it all those years, probably victimizing hundreds, possibly thousands of women, and still died as a “hero” and “champion” of women. I did see him one other time on the T.V., shortly after my own incident took place. It said he was giving abortions to girls who weren't even pregnant (in other words, he was putting them under anesthesia to rape them), in his own home. They showed a young girl crying and saying he wouldn't let her call home after her "abortion." It also said that he apparently was not even a real doctor, and that he had been arrested several times before, but was always able to get out of jail or avoid it, only to resurface in yet another state. Girls and women--do not trust strange men even if he is a doctor, a priest, a police officer, or whatever. There are evil, evil people out there.
Hugs, anon.
To the hardcore abortion lobby, all you need as a qualification to be a "champion of women's rights" is to be an abortionist. They don't look any further than that.
In Aborting America, Bernard Nathanson describes going to observe Vuitch's then quasi-legal practice in DC. He described Vuitch as sloppy and careless but hey, he did abortions and the cops weren't after him. Good enough.
Not good enough for Wilma and Jeannie in my estimation. Not good enough for a lot of women. In my estimation. But I do not worship at the altar of "choice" and therefore my standards are a bit different.
I thank Dr. Vuitch every day of my life for performing three safe abortions on me in 1965 -- the result of birth control being illegal. I was awake the whole time, with some kind of drug to slightly take the edge off. He gave me antibiotics to take for the next day or two. I think he even had me come back the next day to be sure I was okay. (I'm not sure about that.) I took a nap after the procedure and then went out walking for hours to see the sights in D.C. I have never regretted my choice and have been forever thankful that he was willing to help me. I am sorry to learn that others suffered at his hands at a later date, but he is still a significant person in my life history. As many studies point out, the same number of abortions are performed whether they are legal or not, so it's better to have safe and legal birth control and abortion. Then at least a woman is free to make a real choice.
Well your hero killed two women. Well, one woman and a teenage girl.
But since you're so grateful that he killed your children, I suppose that his killing other people's daughters is probably a matter of staggering indifference to you. You must figure that Wilma Harris and Jeannie English meant as little to their families as your children meant to you.
GrannyGrump, you make a lot of assumptions about someone you don't even know. You also make a lot of assumptions about the status of some tissue and then build a world view. I guess we all do. My view just happens to be different from yours.
If all Vuitch had removed was some tissue, then you'd not have been experiencing a normal pregnancy; you'd have had gestational trophoblastic disease. And any doctor is and always has been permitted to remove hydatidiform moles.
But you indicated that you had to avail yourself of Vuitch's illegal services in order to empty your uterus. This means, clearly, that what was in your uterus each time was a living baby. Which you wanted dead. Which he killed for you. For which you are grateful.
If your own children's deaths are something to be grateful for, I can't imagine you having too much sympathy with Wilma and Jeannie's families. Dead children? Something to spend a lifetime to be grateful for, not something to mourn.
Here’s the part I don’t understand. While it is certainly sad that these two women died after treatment by Dr. Vuitch, why is it that Jeannie went to his unlicensed clinic in the first place if abortion was then legal? If the clinic had been operating for two years without a license, then this seems like a failure on the part of local health regulators to protect the public by not shutting the clinic down. Or if the clinic was open “under the radar” did Jeannie go to him because there were no other licensed services available to her or because she feared being heckled if she went to a properly licensed clinic? For those who grieve the unnecessary deaths of these women, I should think the top priority would be to ensure that all women have unrestricted access to safe healthcare. Certainly there are risks with any medical procedure, but they are minimized in the proper environment. Even in hospitals, about 195,000 people in the U.S. die every year from medical errors (http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/hospital_errors.html). The usual response is to take measures to make hospitals safer – not to shut them all down so that no more medical errors can occur. Or are you suggesting that because Vuitch had a clean record as an illegal abortionist, we should make abortion illegal again for the safety of women?
Anon, abortion facilities typically don't put "Operating Illegal, Without a License, Since 1978!" in their ads or anyplace on the premises. They openly advertise and unless somebody knows not only that they're not licensed, but who to complain to about it, odds are they won't get caught for years. There's nobody going through the Yellow Pages checking to see that everybody advertising as a clinic actually IS a licensed, legal clinic. There ought to be. And not just for abortion. I mentioned this idea after that horrific bus crash in Texas. If it's your agency's job to license bus companies, you need to have somebody on staff checking regularly to see who is advertising and if they're unlicensed or not.
I'll agree with you that medical mistakes kill people in other arenas besides abortion. But there is no organization that I know of knowingly referring patients to dangerous cardiologists, oncologists, and so on. Just abortion. All they have to do, it seems, is hang out their shingles and the "prochoice" organizations typically refer to them without even investigating.
Many of the appalling quacks I've seen over the years have been National Abortion Federation members -- the prochoice equivalent of Underwriters' Laboratory! And no prochoicers are the least bit upset about this. They advertise referrals to the most professional, safest abortion practitioners, but in practice all the guy has to do is pay his dues and not get arrested for ripping the arm off a 32-week fetus then sending the mother home to give birth to a maimed baby.
GrannyGrump, this is one thing we certainly agree on – that clinics, bus agencies, restaurants, schools, etc. should be regularly monitored for safety and be shut down if found not to meet current standards. So you can list at least one pro-choicer who agrees with you on this. I imagine others would feel the same way if they knew of substandard conditions at a clinic. Nothing can be done about Vuitch now, 15 years after his death, but the whole point of Pro-Choice is to provide a safe alternative to an illegal (and more risky) procedure for those who have chosen that route. So it only makes sense to me that it is in the best interests of Pro-Choice advocates to ensure that clinics are safe.
Anon, there are a lot of prochoicers who agree with me. Sadly, they are not in positions of influence and power any more than I am.
The people in positions of influence and power are either prolife (in which case everything they say is dismissed out of hand with a snarky, "Well, of course they'd say that -- they hate all abortion!"), or they're really pro-abortion but they're passing themselves off as prochoice.
Take Obama, who is passed off by himself, his handlers, and the media as "pro-choice." But he has told Planned Parenthood that the first thing he'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act -- which would invalidate every law in the country putting any kind of limit on abortion. It wouldn't just "codify Roe", as its supporters (also pro-abortion disguised as prochoice) say.
No parental involvement laws. No informed consent. No limits whatsoever on late abortions. No requirements that risky abortions be performed in hospitals. No more conscience clauses for doctors and other health care providers who find it abhorrent to participate in abortions -- they'd be required to do so by law. And you can bet that if FOCA was passed, there'd be a concerted effort by the proabortion folks hiding within the prochoice movement to target these health care providers one by one and take them to court and force them to participate or to quit they jobs and take up selling paintbrushes or something.
They were very careful in how they worded it to make it sound benign. You have to have actually studied how courts have interpreted these words in the past to understand what it really says. For example, "Health", according to Doe vs. Bolton, is ANY factor -- family, income, emotional -- that is related to well-being. And you can see how this plays out in Kansas, where Tiller is doing third-trimester abortions on women with no physical problems whatsoever and no actual mental health diagnosis -- they just have reasons for undergoing abortions. And by Doe, that's all they need. A reason. Any reason. That's "health". It could be that they didn't want to miss a concert. Seriously. That's one of the reasons, approved by a Kansas judge who reviewed the cases and said they didn't break the law. A post-viability abortion because the mother didn't want to miss a concert. FACE would make this standard in EVERY state, regardless of how state judges wanted to interpret it, because FACE means EVERY abortion case is a federal case.
Sneaky bastards.
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