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Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Gosnell: A December Debacle Cost Karnamaya her Life

In December of 2008, the Pennsylvania medical board had a chance to stop Kermit Gosnell in his tracks. When he applied that month to renew his medical license, nobody bothered to check a malpractice suit that had been filed just the month before.

Had they checked this lawsuit, interviewed the patient and Gosnell's employee, and yanked his license, his filthy clinic would have been closed. Karnamaya Mongar never would have gone there to be doped to death by Gosnell's staff.

I've taken the following accounts from the Grand Jury Report:

When interviewed, Ms. Haynes, age 38, told Gillespie that she was nearly 17 weeks pregnant when Gosnell performed a two-day, second-trimester abortion. Gosnell inserted laminaria on November 10, 2006, and she returned the next day for the procedure. 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. She arrived in the afternoon on November 11 and was given some valium and medicine to help her 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 for pickup shortly.

In the procedure room, one of Gosnell’s sons inserted an IV and administered anesthesia. Ms. Haynes said she remembered Gosnell entering the room, and talking to his son, but then “everything else is a blur.” When she woke up, she was in the hospital with her family around her. Ms. Haynes told the investigator that the clinic staff refused to let her two cousins come inside the building when they arrived around 8:00 p.m. to pick her up.

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Investigator Gillespie’s interviews with Ms. Haynes’s cousins confirmed that they had been purposefully locked out of the facility for over four hours. When they first arrived at 8:00 p.m. to pick up Ms. Haynes, they rang the buzzer on the clinic’s front door, but were told that she 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 admitted them. Once inside, the cousins declined the worker’s request that they wait to speak to Gosnell and demanded to see Ms. Haynes. The worker escorted them to the back of the building where they found Ms. Haynes by herself, 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.

Gosnell appeared about five minutes later. He told them she was heavily sedated because she had just had the procedure – which they knew was false because of Ms. Haynes’s phone call 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.

At the hospital, Ms. Haynes was told that Gosnell had left most of the fetus inside her, and that he had cut holes in her cervix and bowel. She required a large blood transfusion and remained hospitalized for five days.

....

Had investigators from the Department of State pursued Ms. Haynes’ complaint and spoken to Kareema Cross, she could have told them what she told the Grand Jury – that Gosnell did not call an ambulance because he wanted to keep trying to complete the abortion. He had already removed the patient from the room once, performed other procedures, and brought her back to try again. Cross knew that the doctor had punctured something. Had the cousins not threatened to involve the police, Gosnell would undoubtedly have brought Ms. Haynes back into the procedure room, for at least the third time, rather than summon an ambulance.

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