News to Me: Failure to Diagnose Leads to Death in 2019

While checking the Operation Rescue site to see if there were any Planned Parenthood abortion deaths I'd missed, I found a tragedy that took place at the notorious Preterm facility in Cleveland. Her name was Tai Archevia Parks and she was the 26-year-old mother of a 4-year-old girl. Operation Rescue obtained the autopsy report to learn how Tia died.

Tai went to Preterm on June 7, 2019 for a first trimester abortion. Tai was obese and had an enlarged heart, conditions which would make her high risk. When preforming pre-abortion examinations, nobody noticed that Tai was actually pregnant with twins -- one in her uterus, and one in her fallopian tube. Though this condition, heterotopic pregnancy, is rare, occurring between 1 in 7,000 and 1 in 30,000 pregnancies. A high-volume abortion facility might expect to see at least one patient with the condition.

Tai was discharged after her abortion. The next day Tia began sweating profusely and suffering abdominal pain. She was transported by ambulance to the Cleveland Clinic, arriving at 1:48 p.m. Doctors there determined that she had a lot of free blood in her abdomen. Attempts to save her were to no avail. The unnoticed fetus had caused her fallopian tube to rupture, causing massive bleeding. She was pronounced dead in the ER at 5:01 pm on June 8.

Though the abortion didn't cause Tia's death, Preterm, as a high-volume abortion facility, should have had people on staff with the experience and skills to detect the second embryo. Thus their failure to perform an adquate pre-abortion examination missed the opportunity to diagnose the heterotopic pregnancy and save Tia's life.

Women with ectopic pregnancies should be less likely to die if they choose abortion because the pre-abortion examination is supposed to include a careful and detailed ultrasound, but they're actually more likely to die than women who either do not yet know they are pregnant or who are intending to carry to term. This is because symptoms that the ectopic pregnancy is about to rupture are attributed to the abortion, not to an ectopic pregnancy. Hospital staff also might be less likely to suspect an ectopic pregnancy in a patient with a history of a recent abortion.

Operation Rescue has carefully documented many alarming cases of injury at Preterm, including the death of Lakisha Wilson in 2014. When Lakisha's heart started slowing alarmingly and eventually stopped beating entirely, Preterm staff did not follow all proper procedures to treat her. To make it worse, because the building wasn't set up to allow for easy EMS access, medics had trouble getting Lakisha to the ambulance. They had to halt CPR while extricating their patient because the elevator was too small to lay the gurney flat. Staff at the hospital were able to get Lakisha's heart started again but she never recovered.

It's also interesting to note that both of the young women who died after abortions at Preterm were Black.