Well, allow me to extract some quotes, with links provided to the improvements we've seen since these bad old days.
There I saw and treated almost every complication of illegal abortion that one could conjure, done either by the patient herself or by an abortionist — often unknowing, unskilled and probably uncaring.
Let's start, shall we, with Raymond Showery, who performed the fatal abortion on Mickey Apodaca while out on bail appealing a murder conviction. Another patient, "Ida," age 25, told the El Paso Times that she submitted to an abortion by Showery in January of 1978. She found out he'd failed to kill the fetus and returned to Showery on April 20 to complain. Showery refused to complete the abortion for free as follow-up, telling Ida "he wasn't Sears. He didn't have to guarantee his work." Ida paid her money, and Showery performed an exam so painful Ida described it as "like he just put his whole fist up there, just jammed it." Showery told Ida and her boyfriend he would have to charge more due to the complicated procedure necessary. "He showed us the diagram and how he'd have to section off the fetus," Ida said, imitating slicing movements Showery had made with his hands." Ida said Showery told her, "you ... whores just get in trouble all the time." Showery performed the second abortion, and Ida awoke in a hospial bed, "in a pool of blood." One week later, she expelled 6 inches of umbilical cord and "a small, bloody four-fingered hand." Ida told the reporter that she dreamed "about chopped-up children," and woke up crying many nights, afraid to be alone. The same report says Rape Crisis and MH-MR Crisis Line stopped referring to Showery's hospital due to complaints. (El Paso Times 4-5-81)
Surely Showery was a total fluke! Well. How about these cases: Jammie Garcia drowned in her own feculent fluids because her abortionist had shoved her fetus into her bowl and left it there to block things up; Carolina Gutierrez endured the amputation of her gangrenous limbs in a futile attempt to save her from abortion-related sepsis; and Lawson Akpolonu was raping patients in his filthy clinic -- something Diane Sawyer considered "a non-story" when we tipped her off.
Yet the patient never told us who did the work, or where and under what conditions it was performed.
As compared to what? The woman who goes to a modern abortion facility and if she's injured she has to have her attorney file suit against every doctor who works there because they won't tell her the name of her abortionist? Some guy in a mask who doesn't even introduce himself walks in, spend three minutes shoving things into your uterus, and walks out.
Then our lamentatious doctor goes into a litany of the things they pulled out of women: "darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off." There's a word for sticking things like that into your body, and it's not abortion. It's deliberate self-harm, and it's a symptom of mental illness. Legalizing abortion, last I checked, wasn't a mental health treatment for anybody with a mental illness that leads to deliberate self-harm.
The worst case I saw, and one I hope no one else will ever have to face, was that of a nurse who was admitted with what looked like a partly delivered umbilical cord. Yet as soon as we examined her, we realized that what we thought was the cord was in fact part of her intestine, which had been hooked and torn by whatever implement had been used in the abortion. It took six hours of surgery to remove the infected uterus and ovaries and repair the part of the bowel that was still functional.
Disemboweled patient? How about Scott Barret's patient. He pulled out her innards through her vagina then sent her to the hospital in a friend's car.
How about Andre Nehorayoff's patient "Brandy" -- Nehorayoff pulled a loop of Brandy's bowel through her cervix through a 2.5 cm tear he'd made in the back of her uterus. Instead of stopping the procedure and transferring Brandy to a hospital, Nehorayoff just pushed the loop of bowel back through the hole and continued with the abortion. Only after the abortion did he hospitalize Brandy. Surgeons there found "a 6.5 segment of devascularized bowel" which they had to remove.
And Saihb Sinuhe Halil bent his forceps pulling on a patient's pelvic organs and finally tried to finish the abortion with a desk scissors -- Halil pulled out Thelma's right ovary and fallopian tube, severed her left fallopian tube, and caused a large uterine rupture, left about four feet of her small intestine lacerated and necrotic.
This wasn't the only patient Halil mangled. Vivian Q. underwent an abortion by Halil. "[Halil] halted the procedure because he suspected he had perforated the patient's uterus." Halil performed an ultrasound, which "determined that the pregnancy was still intact (albeit with a maimed fetus)." Rather than accurately charting this or informing Vivian, he discharged her. On November 7, Vivian was admitted to the hospital, suffering from a perforated utuers and a necrotic sigmoid colon. She required a colostomy and surgery to repair her uterus. (Los Angeles Times 7-6-93; California medical board Case No. D-5193, OAH Case No. L-60576)
How about patient Marcia -- First the abortionist perforated her uterus and intestines and "shoved the aspirator in more" after she screamed and begged him to stop. She was hospitalized and her abortion completed by another doctor, who then discharged Marcia despite persisting pain and vomiting. Marcia suspected that she was suffering from a perforated uterus and stomach, but Rand diagnosed indigestion. Marcia refused to go home. A barium enema showed intestinal blockage, but Rand discharged Marcia anyway. Three days later Marcia returned and she saw different doctor. Marcia underwent immediate and subsequent surgery which removed 2 1/2 feet of intestine. She required the insertion of a 35-foot tube from her throat to her anus, and was hospitalized for 60 days. She also was left infertile. (San Diego Superior Court Case No. 640957)
Steve Brigham's patient Anne. Brigham removed a fetal arm and part of the placenta, then detected a perforation. Although he was reaching for bony parts of the fetus and instead grasping soft tissues, he continued to grasp and pull with his instruments. Brigham admitted that he did not know what he was grasping with forceps, "the ultrasound picture was not consistent with what he felt," but he "opened his forceps wider and grasped again, with force." This caused an 8-10 cm uterine laceration. Brigham perforated Anne's sigmoid colon, and caused extensive cutting of the connective tissues of the colon. Anne required a colostomy, and the removal of a 16 cm segment of her colon.
Rosa Naperstek-Taft, a Chicago-area attorney, was very politically active in championing legal abortion. She and her friends had actually celebrated the night before her abortion, because she was the first among them to have one of the new safe-n-legal abortions instead of the old-fashioned illegal kind. She certainly got to reap what she'd sown. Rosa said that she screamed in pain during the abortion, and a staffer responded by stuffing a tampon in her mouth. The abortion was so badly botched that Rosa lost all her reproductive organs and her spleen. She had to undergo a colostomy and tracheotomy, and suffered damage to her heart, lungs, kidneys, and vocal cords. She was hospitalized for eight months, with three of those months spent in intensive care. After her injuries were repaired, Rosa had to undergo intensive therapy to learn to walk and talk again. Rosa said, "I don't have my normal body. My abdomen looks like a sky map of the Grand Canyon. ... My voice is totally changed, and I have a lot of psychological scars that will be with me forever." (Chicago Sun-Times 11-15-78; Wayne County Circuit Court Case No. 73 250 920 CM)
These patients got off easy compared to Magdalena Rodriguez, whose safe and legal abortion mangled her uterus, vagina, bladder and colon so horribly that the surgeons couldn't save her. Her abortionist admitted that he knew he'd "screwed up" when he pulled out her bowel instead of featl parts, but he left her unattended anyway for half an hour while he performed other abortions. Yeah, he was a huge improvement on the uncaring pre-Roe abortionists!
And let's pull out the violins for the nauseating final paragraph:
What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.
Did you hear that, ladies? The only way you can be a first-class citizen is to have a man stick sharp things into your uterus and kill your baby. Until you experience an abortion, you are NOT a "first-class citizen". Mothers of live babies, women who have never been pregnant, women who have lost children to accident or illness, are not "first-class citizens".
And if what those quacks and others like them do to women is treating women as "first-class citizens", I want no part of it. I want my babies alive and my internal organs unmolested.
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As always, your work is incredible!!
ReplyDeletePlease put your findings into a book format.
For the babies,
And their moms.
Keep up your work, please. It is obvious how much time you put into it.
ReplyDelete