Private Investigations

"Private Investigations" by Dire Straits has been the theme song of my work for over 30 years, capturing the frustration, grief, and sense of futility, of screaming into the void. It will loop in my head, a relentless soundtrack as I fight to commemorate the women their betrayers want us to forget.

Scarred for life. No compensation.

I first heard the song in Mark Crutcher's minivan when we were working on the Christi's Choice documentary at Life Dynamics. He played it for us, wanting the haunting music over the closing shot of Fred Stile waking alone in front of Mayfair Women's Center with his daughter's picture and the words, "Mayfair killed baby and MOTHER." The staff would come outside to mock him, laugh at him, spit on him. But Fred kept his lonely vigil, not wanting anybody else to suffer what his family was enduring.

Fred's daughter, Christi, had been left in a permanent vegetative state after a botched abortion at this ill-equipped, ill-staffed clinic. 

The song was perfect. Mark asked for permission. It was denied. Fred walks with no guitar, no voice-over, no catharsis. Just the sound of his shoes on the sidewalk and the occasional jeer from the people who took his daughter from him. 

It's a mystery to me. The game commences.

My journey down this macabre rabbit hole began back in 1984, of all years, when I read Bernard Nathanson's Aborting America, a memoir of his role in launching NARAL -- then the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now NARAL Pro-Choice America. I learned that deceit and slovenliness have been part and parcel of the abortion-rights movement from its inception.

Nathanson admitted that NARAL and other organizations lied to the public about abortion deaths:

In N.A.R.A.L. we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always "5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year." I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the "morality" of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? 

Dr. Milan Vuitch

Nathanson noted that NARAL had referred women to DC abortionist Milan Vuitch for years before finally sending Nathanson to check him out. With his laser-focus on abortions happening rather than on the welfare of the women, Nathanson observed Vuitch in action:

So nimble was he with the dilator, so elegant with the curette that one felt impelled to forgive him his minor lapses in sterile technique, such as failing to use sterile gloves or antiseptic solutions to prepare the vagina. ….. Even the occasional failure to wash hands between cases, a cautionary basic even to a veterinarian or a chef, did not seem as heinous as it should have. 

Nathanson declared Vuitch fit to care for the vulnerable women who were trusting NARAL.

Nathanson told about his experience at CRASH -- Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health -- where he came on board in 1971 to clean up the place. He found CRASH chaotic, crowded, ill-equipped, poorly run, poorly staffed, dirty, and operating with no back-up hospital. Abortionists were paid piece rate so experienced ones would purposely underestimate gestational ages on some patients to trick new, less skilled doctors into taking messy and time consuming late abortions, leaving the quicker, more profitable ones for themselves. Nathanson whipped CRASH into shape long enough to pass an inspection, but as soon as the inspector left, it was back to business as usual - chaotic and unsafe. Nathanson became disillusioned. The clinic’s administrators had a ghoulish preoccupation with doing more and later abortions. Nathanson had a staffer extract a section of liver from a cadaver and send it to the lab. The report came back “pregnancy tissue.” Nathanson eventually left in disgust. The largest freestanding for-profit abortion clinic in the world was a hot mess, and nobody in the abortion-rights movement had a problem with that. 

Aborting America changed my life. I have a low betrayal tolerance, so this evidence that the abortion lobby was betraying women -- promising safety and delivering slovenliness -- wasn't something I was ready to just gloss over. I wanted the truth, and I wanted to share it in the hope that if others knew, others would care and things would change.

I was in for a very rude awakening.

This is my investigation. It's not a public inquiry.

I started doing research at the library. There I discovered the first two of the hundreds of abortion deaths I've since documented: Gloria Aponte and Ellen Williams. Both had died due to appalling malpractice. Gloria's abortionist, Hanan Rotem, allowed his receptionist to administer general anesthesia. The clinic where Ellen had her abortion, Dadeland Family Planning, was a hell hole where a dying woman was offered tea, sympathy, and a bottle of antibiotics that couldn't touch the raging peritonitis. Both deaths bear witness to the type of systematic slovenliness that would reach its full flower in Kermit Gosnell decades later. The response to the revelations about Dadeland -- a closing of ranks by the self-appointed protectors of women's rights, blocking all efforts to shut down places like Dadeland -- sowed the seeds for that deplorable blossom. 

During the 1980s I saw news coverage of a group of prolifers holding signs shaped like tombstones, each commemorating a woman who had died from a "safe and legal" abortion. Clearly Ellen and Gloria had not been flukes. 

This was before the internet. I did what I could. I got a batch of those tombstone signs and did a vigil outside the Supreme Court with Feminists for Life. People saw the vigil live on local news and hurried to join us. Maybe people would notice. Maybe they'd pay attention. As the vigil broke up, somebody had left behind an "Abortion Death Log" that fell into my hands. I tracked down its author, Kevin Sherlock, a dogged abortion death researcher who uncovered scores of deaths. He had even gotten notes that a reporter wrote when investigating the death of Dorothy Muzorewa, describing her apartment as "wall to wall blood." 

I became active locally, wrote for newsletters, called in to talk radio, wrote letters to the editor. Nothing changed.

The futility was overwhelming. I wanted to quit. But I looked at the face of Barbaralee Davis on her tombstone sign. A beautiful young woman with long hair parted in the middle, just like my daughter wore hers. I went through the signs, one after the other, turning them over and reading the stories on the back. Erica Kay Richardson, brought for a secret abortion by her aunt then carried out to the car in the dead of night with instructions to take the moribund teen home. Sylvia Moore, only 18 years old, so weak from blood loss that she couldn't even stand up, literally shoved out the door to die on New Year's Eve. Dawn Ravenell, only 13 years old, her family trying desperately to bring her back from her fatal coma after a secret abortion arranged by the school. I started crying and said to my friend, "I can't quit. These are all somebody's daughter. I can't abandon them."

I go checking out the reports, digging up the dirt.

My volunteering led to a job at Life Dynamics. We provided litigation support to plaintiff malpractice attorneys representing abortion-injured women and the families of those who died. Most of that support took the form of public-records searches for information about practitioners and practices. 

One day Mark Crutcher poked his head into my office and told me that somebody from Henry Hyde's office had called, asking for a report on abortion malpractice. I was to have it ready in 30 days. I started pulling documents from our files and sorting them, trying to get an idea of what we had. Within a few days, I went to Mark. "We don't have a report here. We have a book."

He told me, "So write a book." That book became Lime 5.

Mark put out a call to our mailing list: "Send us dirt on abortionists." He asked for anything: malpractice, deaths, tax evasion, you name it. Documents came flooding in. I wrote summaries then gave Mona Passignano every clue that could lead to more information. Mona would order docket searches, death certificates, health inspection records, and autopsy reports. We became detectives of sorts. We had a prolife snippet about the death of Michelle Madden, but the court records from her family's lawsuit were sealed. We put our heads together and decided on a docket search in Dr. O.B. Evans' home county. His insurance company had sued him over the case. That record wasn't sealed. We got what we were looking for.

More and more documents came in. The pile on my desk was seldom less than two feet high. I'd plow through it with Mark Knopfler's voice and guitar echoing in my head. There was always more dirt. It never ended.

Treachery and treason, there's always an excuse for it.

Ana Rosa Rodriguez

Along the way, I started cross-checking malpractice cases against National Abortion Federation member lists in their annual reports. I found Hanan Rotem -- the one with the receptionist administering general anesthesia -- and Abu "The Butcher of Avenue A" Hayat on the NAF membership rolls, among many others. Hayat had made a brief splash in the news when he'd ripped the arm off Ana Rosa Rodriguez while trying to abort her at 32 weeks of gestation. He'd performed a fatal abortion on 17-year-old Sophie McCoy and sexually abused patients. Mona and I confirmed that 21 of the deaths we had uncovered had been at the hands of NAF practitioners. Mayfair, the seedy facility that had left Christi Stile in a vegetative state, was a member. NAF's promises of safety were ringing pretty hollow.

We started digging deeper.  We obtained tapes of years and years of meetings and seminars held by the National Abortion Federation. If I had my wish, every recorded minute of every word spoken at those seminars and meetings would be readily available to the public. They include some of the most damning words ever uttered about what goes on behind the scenes in America's abortion clinics. Some of the lowlights:

• In one session of a Risk Management Seminar, a participant indicated that when he pulled bowel (extracted part of a patient's bowel through a hole in her uterus), his preferred method of treatment was to stuff the bowel back in, administer drugs to make the uterus contract and control bleeding, monitor the woman more carefully in recovery, and if she seemed okay, send her home none the wiser. The moderator was appalled. He pointed out that even if there was no obvious injury to the bowel, it might be bruised and damaged. The recommended procedure is to admit the patient to the hospital, examine her bowel, and observe her for signs of further injury. The moderator then asked how many of the other participants followed this method of stuffing the bowel back in and hoping for the best. Six participants raised their hands to be counted.
  
  

• 

  Dr. Warren Hern

  During a discussion about malpractice suits, Dr. Warren Hern, a NAF board member, former head of its Clinical Guidelines Committee, and author of Abortion Practice, repeatedly scolded his fellows for their sloppy practices. "I think that our best defense is to practice good medicine." But Hern was cut off and the discussion moved to legal strategies for avoiding lawsuits rather than medical strategies for preventing injuries and deaths. Additional discussion focused on how to attack the women who sue, including ideas about how to discredit, frighten, and/or intimidate them into dropping their suits. 
  
  
• Kathryn Kolbert of the ACLU scolded the members for being so sloppy and committing so much malpractice. She told them she gets tired of "beating the shit out of this woman" to get her to drop her malpractice suit.
  
  
• Steve Lichtenberg, who was operating "Fast Eddie" Allred's Family Planning Associates Medical Group clinics in Chicago, boasted about performing risky abortions in his outpatient facility and treating life-threatening complications on-site instead of promptly transferring his patients to a fully-equipped hospital. The moderator, Planned Parenthood Medical Director Michael Burnhill, scolded Lichtenberg for "playing Russian roulette with patients' lives."

This was a stark contrast to the sessions where they told each other, always with a catch in the voice, that they do what they do "for the women." The same women they callously endanger, gravely injure, then bully and insult.

Betrayal is part of the package when you trust even the cream of the crop. Mark Knopfler's voice carries the sadness and despair of the injured women and the families of the dead as it echoes again in my mind. I write and we publish and there's a brief flash of public interest and then it all dies away, like Knopfler's last guitar lick and the faint final piano notes. 

And when I find the reason, I still can't get used to it.

I've since left Life Dynamics, but I never stopped checking out the reports and digging up the dirt. I started a website, a blog, and a YouTube channel. I'm far from alone. I owe a massive debt of gratitude to Operation Rescue for how meticulously they document every cause of malpractice and death they encounter. They have prevented cover-ups with their perseverance and determination to dig until they get to the truth. 

But what good does truth do?

Women's Medical Society

On February 10, 2010, the FBI and Philadelphia detectives conducted a drug raid on Dr. Kermit Gosnell's Women's Medical Society. They uncovered what was described as a "house of horrors." Women, many well past the midpoint of their pregnancies, lay moaning on blood-stained recliners while flea-infested cats roamed freely, defecating on the floors. From time to time, untrained staff would administer off-the-cuff doses of dangerous narcotics, followed by drugs to induce labor. The women would expel their living infants. The infants would then be murdered by severing their spinal cords with surgical scissors. 

The fetal remains were stashed all over the facility -- in piles of trash bags in the basement, in empty cat food and orange juice containers in the freezer. The severed feet of aborted babies were collected in jars, each labeled with the name of the mother and the date of the infant's death.

Two women -- Semika Shaw and Karnamaya Mongar -- died under this dubious care. 

A Grand Jury convened to investigate. Their report is jarring reading. The cops, the grand jurors, and the public were shocked by what was uncovered. But some people weren't shocked: the public servants at the health department and the medical board. They had known what was going on as conditions deteriorated year after year for decades. But they turned a blind eye. Why? Because inspections might lead to sanctions or even closure of the facility, thus limiting "access."

And there we have that magic word: access. 

• Bernard Nathanson had glossed over Milan Vuitch's failure to wash his hands and use proper sterile technique. It was more important that the abortion take place than that it be done in a safe, sanitary manner. Access was more important than safety. Better risk a dead woman than risk a live baby.
  
  
• In 1978, the Chicago Sun-Times did an undercover investigation. They learned of drunken doctors, abortions sold to women who weren't pregnant, rushed abortions, kickbacks for referrals, shoddy and falsified records, procedure rooms "cleaned" by wiping surfaces with wet Kleenex, and patients sent home after 15 minutes with no exam to make sure it's safe for them to leave. They learned about 12 dead women. Did anything change? Illinois passed a law to address the problems, only to have NAF member Richard Ragsdale successfully sue to block enforcement. The deaths continued.  Access über alles.
  
  
•  In 1989, an investigation by the Miami Herald revealed that Dadeland Family Planning, the clinic where Ellen Williams was fatally injured, was reusing disposable instruments, that the doctors were leaving while patients were still in recovery, that there were no nurses on staff, and that recovery was overseen by unqualified staff. The stirrups on the procedure tables were covered with blood. The oxygen mask had lipstick from the previous patient. Abortions were being sold to women who weren't pregnant. The response of the "responsible abortion providers" was to form the Florida Abortion Council, headed by Janis Compton-Carr. She led the fight to halt state oversight of abortion facilities in the wake of the scandal. She summed it up to the Miami Herald: "In my gut, I am completely aghast at what goes on at that place. But I staunchly oppose anything that would correct this situation in law." Access trumps all other considerations.

• In 1991, 60 Minutes did an expose of a clinic in Maryland where Debra Gray had died and Susanne Logan had been left mute and paralyzed because of slipshod anesthesia practices. When 60 Minutes interviewed Barbara Radford, then-president of the National Abortion Federation, she admitted that they'd known how bad the clinic was but kept silent. She defended the head-in-the-sand attitude by saying, "We want to make sure that women have choices when it comes to abortion services, and if you regulate it too strictly, you then deny women access to the service." It's the same refrain: Access is more important than safety.
  
  
• The current post-Dobbs trend of treating abortion pills as virtually risk-free -- sometimes with no pre-abortion exam or arrangement for aftercare -- has led to the deaths of "Luna," "Lucy," Candi Miller, and Alyona Dixon in 2022; "Alina" in 2023; "Jayden" around 2024; Amber Thurmond in 2024; and "Fawn" in 2025. The abortion lobby claims that this practice is a safe way to preserve access. Better risk a dead woman than risk a live baby.

I find it maddening that a movement that endangers women's lives under the pretense of saving women's lives continues to get away with it. I've been trying since 1984 to get people to care, and they still don't care. And every time I think about it, I get Mark Knopfler in my head again:

And what have you got at the end of the day?

What have you got to take away?

A bottle of whisky and a new set of lies

Blinds on the windows, and a pain behind the eyes

What have you got at the end of the day? Fred's lonely vigil. Christi's death over 21 years later. Ten more years of the same old same old. And nothing on the horizon but more of the same, because the only people with the power to change anything don't care. 

Scarred for life. No compensation.

Private investigations.

(1) Christi Stile died in 2015, 21 years, 8 months, and 28 days after that fateful day Kay had entrusted her to the clinic they'd been referred to by Planned Parenthood.

(2) The false numbers continue to get bandied about, albeit less frequently. They were first published in 1936 by Dr. Frederick Taussig, who apologized in 1942 for using "the wildest estimates" and repudiated his own claim.

(3) Vuitch went on to kill 17-year-old Wilma Harris and 32-year-old Jeannie English with quackery so spectacular that WDVM-TV won a Peabody Award for their expose of his practice. In spite of all of this, when Vuitch died in 1993 he was the subject of hagiographic obituaries praising his abortion work. Wilma and Jeannie were, it seems, just so much grist for the abortion mill.

(4) CRASH was the largest of the facilities entrusted to provide accurate information to the Centers for Disease Control's Joint Program for the Study of Abortion (JPSA, pronounced "gyp-sah"). They later let a patient die from staggeringly sloppy anesthesia practices. Inspectors noted that the dead patient was charted in clinic records as "pink, responsive, alert." The CDC never admitted to the public that much of their data on abortion safety had come from such an untrustworthy source.

(5)  The danger of this practice is highlighted by the death of Sharon Hamplton after Dr. Bruce Steir "pulled bowel" then abandoned his patient. I have no documentation that Steir attended that NAF seminar, but he seemed to take his "pulled bowel" protocol from the same book. NAF was among the organizations that rushed to his defense when he was prosecuted in Sharon's death.

(6) Even though Lichtenberg boasted of his recklessness at one of their events, neither Lichtenberg nor any of his facilities were booted out of NAF. Women calling the hotline looking for safety continued to be referred to him. It's unclear whether Lichtenberg fatally overdosed 13-year-old Deanna Bell on Brevitol in 1992 before or after the dressing-down, but it's likely that he'd already been warned to stop taking chances but did so anyway. Albany Medical Surgical Center (FPA's Chicago branch) went on to kill Nakia Jorden in 1998, Maria Leho in 1999, and Maria Rodriguez in 2000.

(7)  Subsequent deaths include Magnolia Thomas, who was sent home to die of a ruptured undiagnosed ectopic in 1986; Diane Watson, who died of anesthesia complications in 1987; Brenda Benton, who died of septicemia in 1987 after an abortion at the same facility where Sandra Chmiel had been mortally injured; Synthia Dennard, who bled to death in 1989 from an abortion performed when she wasn't even pregnant; Melissa Heim, who suffered fatal brain damage while inadequately monitored in the recovery room in 2001; Bonnie Hunt, who died after an abortion at a Chicago Planned Parenthood in 2008; Antonesha Ross, who was given a paper bag to breathe into as "treatment" when she started coughing up blood in 2009; Tonya Reaves, who bled to death after an abortion at a Chicago Planned Parenthood in 2012; and the 4 patients who died of malpractice at Albany medical Surgical Center.

(8) Susanne Logan died on December 1, 1992, less than a month after winning a lawsuit against Dr. Gideon Kioko and the clinic.