Actually, this should have been called disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. It's a disorder, often triggered by foreign matter in the blood or by infection, which upsets the body's normal clotting factors. Some cases of DIC can cause excess clotting, but the abortion cases we have seen were due to the total inability of the blood to clot.
All of the women in this section ended up dead. If I list sources after a woman's paragraph, it's because I need the original documents. Otherwise you can follow the link to the woman's full story along with substantiating documentation.
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| Vanessa Gill Preston |
Vanessa Preston, a 22-year-old day-care worker, went with her husband to Curtis Boyd's Fairmount Center in Dallas on January 22, 1980 for a 16-week abortion. During the procedure at this National Abortion Federation member clinic, Vanessa suffered multiple vaginal punctures -- not the kind of injury likely to prove fatal. However, before Boyd could remove the placenta, Vanessa went into a grand mal seizure and then into cardiac arrest. To the credit of Boyd and the Fairmount staff, emergency procedures were immediately instituted. They summoned an ambulance and made appropriate and effective effects at resuscitation while waiting for EMS. During exploratory surgery at the hospital, during which 24 units of blood were administered to try to stop her circulatory system from collapsing, Vanessa died. An autopsy revealed that Vanessa's uncontrollable bleeding had been caused by an amniotic fluid embolism (AFE - amniotic fluid in the mother's bloodstream) and disseminated intravascular coagulopathy (DIC - a blood clotting disorder) during the abortion. When Boyd's staff resuscitated Vanessa, they caused a small laceration of her liver. This is typical in even properly performed CPR, and is not usually life-threatening. However, because of the DIC, Vanessa's blood couldn't clot, and she bled to death from the liver laceration.
Barbara Auerbach was 38 years old when she underwent an abortion in a New York hospital on December 11, 1981. In the early morning hours five days after her abortion, she was admitted to another hospital with intermittent vomiting, back pain, and inability to pass urine. She was diagnosed with septic shock, acute renal failure, and disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. She also had pelvic adhesions, an enlarged uterus, 1000 cc of gray fluid in her peritoneal cavity, and a hardened, twisted, yellowish-brown obstruction of the small bowel. Her entire small intestine had markedly dilated and inflamed loops. He lungs contained excessive pinkish watery fluid. She was pronounced dead at 11:35 a.m. It was actually the infection, rather than the DIC, that killed her so I'm uncertain as to why Mark Crutcher put Barbara in this category. (New Jersey Death Certificate; Mercer Count Coroner Report Case No. 11-81-0996)
Dawn Mendoza, a 28-year-old mother of two from the Bronx, underwent an abortion at the hands of Edward Rubin at Women's Medical Pavilion in Dobbs Ferry, New York, on June 29, 1988. Her brother, who had accompanied her, was instructed to wait in a grassy park across the street from the clinic and return at 4 pm to take her home. When he returned the staff again told him to come back later. When he returned at 5:30 they told him that Dawn was dead. Rubin had performed a D&C abortion on Dawn, who then started screaming and gasping for breath. Staff tried unsuccessfully to revive her, but she died without ever being transferred to a hospital. The medical examiner determined that she had died from amniotic fluid embolism, as evidenced by particles of placenta and amniotic fluid in her lungs. (Autopsy report #88-1488; New York Post, July 4, 1989)
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| Marla Anne Cardamone |
Marla Cardamone, age 18, wanted to have her baby, but a medical-social worker at Magee Women's Hospital in Pittsburgh pushed Marla to have an abortion, insisting that Marla had harmed her unborn baby because medication she'd been taking. No family would adopt a disabled baby, Marla was told. The social worker pointed out to Marla how difficult it would be to continue to assist in caring for her quadriplegic father if she also had to care for a disabled child. Marla asked for a sonogram to be sure. After the sonogram, the social worker kept pressuring Marla. Finally, Marla gave in. She was admitted to Magee Women's Hospital for the abortion on August 15, 1989.
Although the urea induction technique -- which involved injecting a chemical into the uterus -- was contraindicated due to Marla's medical history, Michael W. Weinberger injected urea into his patient's uterus anyway. Either an error during this injection or some other mishap caused the tissue of Marla's uterus to start dying. The laminaria used to dilate Marla's cervix had also been inserted by Weinberger in a manner resulting in massive infection. Her kidneys shut down. Marla became obviously ill during the night, with nausea, vomiting, urinary incontinence, and dried blood on her teeth. Her pulse and temperature were severely elevated. At 6:30 am the charge nurse contacted a the first of several doctors to treat Marla, but no were cultures taken. By 7 am Marla was "increasingly disoriented and speaking inappropriately." By 7:15, her blood pressure had fallen to 80/40, her pulse had shot up to 144, and she was "unresponsive, grunting loudly, and having seizures." At 10 am, intravenous antibiotics were administered, but of course they would do nothing to address the kidney failure or rotting tissue. Marla was dead from septicemia at 12:15 pm. The autopsy showed that Marla's baby had been perfectly normal.
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| NAF member Abu Hayat |
On September 17, 1990, 17-year-old
Sophie McCoy went to the office of National Abortion Federation member
Abu Hayat, accompanied by her mother, Carmen McCoy, and by the husband of the operator of a facility identified as "the Willoughby Avenue Clinic." Sophie and Carmen returned to Hayat's office the next day and paid $300 for the safe, legal abortion. Sophie was given intravenous medications which put her to sleep. She was kept about four hours and discharged with another prescription for antibiotics. That evening, Sophie was bleeding, had abdominal pain, and was having trouble breathing. The next day, September 19, Sophie was struggling to breathe, so Carmen took her to Kings County Medical Center. Sophie was admitted reporting vaginal bleeding, chest pain, and shortness of breath. Dr. Harding, who treated her, discovered that Sophie had a perforated uterus and serious sepsis. An emergency hysterectomy was performed, but Sophie developed disseminated intravascular coagulopathy (a clotting disorder) and septic shock. Sophie died on September 26, leaving her one-year-old son motherless. Hayat is also the doctor who tore the arm of the yet-unborn
Ana Rosa Rodriguez during an abortion attempt. The maimed baby was born the following day.
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| Dr. Youl Choi |
Angel Dardie, age 22, left two children motherless when she died on August 3, 1982, of disseminated intravascular coagulopathy (a clotting disorder) after a safe, legal saline abortion performed by Youl Choi at Plymouth General Hospital near Detroit. Choi performed this highly risky procedure even though three countries -- Japan, Sweden, and the USSR -- had entirely abandoned it due to the risk of serious injury and death to the mothers. Angel's mother sued, but was awarded a meager settlement of $6000 from Choi and $2500 from the hospital, roughly half of which was eaten up by legal fees and funeral expenses. Choi was also sued on behalf of two abortion patients who had been left incapacitated by their injures and on behalf of a baby who had been born alive then left in a bucket, delaying medical care until after she had suffered serious injuries. Choi also performed the abortion that left
Nina Gaston comatose for 16 years before her death in 2004. (Wayne County, MI, Circuit Court Case No. 84 423 794-NM)
Rhonda Rollinson, age 32, underwent a safe, legal abortion by Dr. Jay I. Levin at Malcom Polis's Philadelphia Women's Center September 3, 1992. The abortion attempt was unsuccessful. Rhonda was then sent home, with instructions to return on September 12 to try again. Rhonda experienced such severe pain, dizziness, fever, and discharge that on September 10 she sought emergency care at a hospital. She was suffering "severe non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema consistent with adult respiratory distress syndrome." Doctors did a laparoscopy, dilation and evacuation, abdominal hysterectomy, and splenectomy, to no avail. Rhonda died on September 14. The autopsy revealed a perforation from her vagina into the uterine cavity, sepsis, disseminated intravascular coagulopathy (a severe and often fatal clotting disorder), non-bacterial thrombotic endocarditis, pulmonary infarctions, and dysplastic kidney. The suit filed by Rhonda's survivors also charged the facility and Polis with hiring Levin despite his lack of competence, failure to properly supervise his work, violation of applicable laws and regulations, lack of informed consent, failure to give proper post-operative instructions, and failure "to respond to the requests of [Rhonda] and her family for post-operative medical advice." (Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas Case No. 291, 1994)
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