RealChoice: March 3: Patricia Chacon

The National Abortion Federation, an organization of abortion practitioners and their for-profit and non-profit abortion facilities, is highly reputable in abortion-rights circles. Sixteen-year-old Patricia Chacon lost her life after placing her trust in one of those NAF members.

Patricia had no way of knowing, as she climbed onto the abortion table at Avalon Hospital, that 24-year-old Denise Holmes had died at Avalon in December of 1970. She also had no way of knowing that she would become the second of more than a dozen women for whom a safe, legal abortion at Family Planning Associates would be the last choice she would ever make.

Edward Allred

Patricia, 24 weeks pregnant, underwent a safe and legal abortion at the hands of Edward Allred, assisted by Leslie Orleans at Allred's Avalon Hospital in Los Angeles on the morning of March 3, 1984. The abortion took five hours to complete.

Patricia retained fetal tissues, so she was scheduled for a second procedure that afternoon to complete the abortion.

There are conflicting stories as to what happened next. Allred pronounced Patricia dead at 4:30 pm, saying that Patricia died of an embolism during the second surgery. Patricia's parents claim that their child bled to death while left unattended.

An autopsy found numerous catgut sutures in Patricia's vagina and hemorrhage in her uterus. Death was attributed to disseminated intravascular coagulopathy (DIC, a clotting disorder) due to abortion-induced amniotic fluid embolism (amniotic fluid in the bloodstream).

Patricia's parents sued Allred and Orleans for their daughter's death. Since one of the things DIC causes is massive hemorrhage, Patricia's parents are probably correct in blaming her death on blood loss. They also asserted that Patricia had been given substandard care due to Allred's racism. Given Allred's public statemen about wanting to set up an abortion clinic in Calexico so that he could abort the babies of women crossing the border from Mexico, they might have had a point.

Avalon Hospital was part of Edward Allred's Family Planning Associates Medical Group, a National Abortion Federation member facility. Allred claimed that Patricia had been the first dead patient at one of his clinics, overlooking the fact that he had owned the hospital where Denise Holmes had died from abortion complications in 1970.

Other women known to have died after abortion at the chain of facilities founded by Allred include:

Mary Pena, age 43, 1984

Josefina Garcia, age 37, 1985

Laniece Dorsey, age 17, 1986

Joyce Ortenzio, age 32, 1988

Tami Suematsu, age 19, 1988

Susan Levy, age 30, 1992

Deanna Bell, age 13, 1992

Christine Mora, age 18, 1994

Ta Tanisha Wesson, age 24, 1995

Nakia Jorden, 1998

Maria Leho, 1999