The Gosnell Patient Who Barely Escaped With Her Life

Kermit Gosnell

The story of how 38-year-old Dana Haynes nearly lost her life is taken from the Grand Jury Report on Dr. Kermit Gosnell.

Dana went to Gosnell for an abortion in November of 2006. She was nearly 17 weeks pregnant. She said that no one counseled her about the abortion – and that no one had counseled her before three other abortions performed at Gosnell’s clinic. 

This lack of counseling was a violation of the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act, which requires that a doctor give information about risks and alternatives to a woman at least 24 hours prior to her abortion. This is that she will have time to reflect on what that information means for her without the pressure of already being expected to follow through with the procedure that same day.

Gosnell inserted laminaria dilators into Dana's cervix on November 10, 2006. These dilators absorb fluid and expand overnight. 

Dana arrived at the clinic the next afternoon and was given some Valium and medicine to help her cervix to further dilate. At 7:45 p.m., when she was taken to the procedure room, she called a cousin to tell her that she would be ready to leave soon.

Medical equipment in Gosnell's
procedure room

In the procedure room, one of Gosnell’s sons inserted an IV and administered anesthesia. Dana said she remembered Gosnell entering the room and talking to his son, but after that, she said, "everything else is a blur." When she woke up, she was in the hospital with her family around her. 

What had happened?

Dana's cousins said that when they first arrived to pick her up at 8:00 p.m., they rang the buzzer on the clinic’s front door, but were told that Dana was not ready and that they could not come inside to wait. The cousins went across the street to get pizza and returned an hour later. Again, the clinic staff refused to admit them. This went on for several hours as the cousins watched a continuous flow of people enter and leave the building.

Finally, sometime after midnight, the cousins threatened to call the police if they were not allowed into the building. A clinic employee then told them to wait a minute and eventually let them in.

Once inside, the cousins demanded to see Dana right away rather than wait until Gosnell would be available to talk to them. The worker who had admitted them escorted them to the back of the building where they found Dana alone, lying on a recliner, with no supervision, no monitoring equipment, and no pants. She was covered with a throw blanket and there was blood on the floor around her. She was slumped over and was completely unresponsive when they tried to arouse her.

Drug dosage chart created by 15-year-old
Ashley Baldwin for use by other staff
at Gosnell's clinic.

Gosnell appeared about five minutes later. He told them she was heavily sedated because she had just had the abortion – which they knew was false because she had called them at 7:45, when the procedure was about to start. He told them that there had been complications and that he had been unable to remove the entire fetus. He insisted there was no need to call an ambulance, but they demanded that he do so.

Gosnell employee Kareema Cross testified that, after having problems performing Dana's abortion, Gosnell had placed her in the recovery room while he performed abortions on other patients. He had kept Dana waiting for hours because he wanted to try to treat the complication himself. By the time Dana's cousins rescued her from the recovery room, Gosnell had tried at least twice, unsuccessfully, to complete the abortion.

Dana was transported to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. There, doctors discovered that Gosnell had left most of the fetus inside her uterus and had perforated her cervix and bowel. She required surgery to remove five inches of bowel, needed a large blood transfusion, and remained hospitalized for five days.

Karnamaya Mongar

As horrible as Dana's experience was, she was fortunate. Semika Shaw had entrusted her life to Kermit Gosnell six years earlier and had died in agony after being sent home with untreated injuries. Three years after Dana's abortion, Karnamaya Mongar entrusted her life to Gosnell and instead of being just doped into a stupor, she was drugged to death.

The kind of butchery that went on in Gosnell's clinic went on for decades because people in authority, who could have closed the place down, made a political decision to turn a blind eye in the name of "abortion access."

We need to awaken this country to the reality of what is done behind closed doors in the name of "reproductive health care." A contribution to GosnellMovie.com will help to make a TV movie about Gosnell's crimes -- and the complicity that allowed Gosnell to thrive while women and children suffered and died. This venue can present the story to the maximum number of people.
Funding need not set you back any more than $1 -- less than the cost of a cup of coffee or a bottle of water. If you can't contribute, or have already contributed funding, keep in mind that both prayer and spreading the word about the project are also vital contributions to the efforts. Together we can wake up a sleeping nation.

For more about why it's vital that the Gosnell movie be made, read:

• Verified: Gosnell Got Snipping Idea at NAF Seminar
• Gosnell Clinic Even Nastier than Grand Jury Reported
• Gosnell and the Milgram Experiment
• Gonsell: The One That Got Away & Hope for Others
• Gosnell and Viability: Where's the Line?  
• Why "Gosnell" Must be Told: The Compton-Carr Effect
• Gosnell and Post-Viability Abortions 
• Gosnell: Location Can Mean Misdemeanor vs. Murder 
• Gosnell: The Grand Jury Convened 
• Why the Left must Censor us on Gosnell: The "Outlier" Lie
• "Snipping" and why the Left Must Silence Us on Gosnell
• Semika Shaw and Why the Gosnell Story Must be Told