What The Cop Saw at the Abortion Clinic

HT: Safe & Legal

The following is a letter, reproduced here in its totality, written to the Kansas House of Representatives in support of a bill requiring that abortion clinics be subject to inspections. You can view the original as it was saved at the Internet Archive to see that it is legitimate and was not created by me. The URL clearly indicates that this letter was archived from www.kslegislature.org, the official website of the Kansas House of Representatives.

The letter was written by a police officer, Detective William Howard, who had been called to the Affordable Medicine Clinic by the owner, Dr. Krishna Rajanna, on a complaint that his employees were stealing money from him. What this police officer saw when he entered the building staggered him and his partner, just as Kermit Gosnell's clinic staggered the police officers who had entered the facility for a totally non-abortion related reason.

Officer Howard's words speak for themselves. I will insert photographs taken inside the facility so that you can get a glimpse of what these two police officers saw. Click on them to enlarge and see the details. At the end of this post are images of the original letter. Click on them to enlarge.

March 15,2005

Proponent, House Bill 2503

House Committee on Health and Human Services

Dear Chairman Morrison and committee members,

Food processor on counter
near autoclave

My name is Detective William Howard. I joined the Kansas City Kansas Police Department in 1982. I am here today to testify truthfully about events that I witnessed at an abortion clinic while performing my lawful duties as an officer. I am only here to relay the facts of my official investigation and do not represent either side of the issue of abortion by virtue of my role in the community.

Recovery room

On September 18 , 2003 my partner and I went to investigate a theft reported by Dr. Krishna Rajanna, at the Affordable Medicine Clinic at 1030 Central Ave, in KCK. Dr. Rajanna took us to the rear area, which could be described as a break room, to discuss employees he held responsible for money missing from his business. During this interview phase, my partner and I made these observations.

First, the doctor had an unkempt appearance. Dr. Rajanna lacked personal hygiene. His hair was messy, hands dirty, and his clothing was wrinkled and stained. He put on old, used foot booties while we were there.

The "break room" in
Dr. Rajanna's clinic.

The clinic was dirty inside. As we proceeded through the facility I noted the back area was very dark and dingy looking with poor lighting and smelling musty. We entered the "break room" to interview Rajanna. There were dirty dishes in the sink and on the tabletop, trash everywhere, and roaches crawling across the countertops, with a smell of a stench in the room. Frankly, I was reluctant to sit down. I noted there weren't containers for medical waste with universally recognized hazardous waste labels on them. On the way out my partner observed that the "procedure room" was filthy. He told me that he saw dried blood on the floor and the room looked "nasty" to him.

Combination patient
bathroom and
sterilization room

The clinic was disorganized. Papers and other miscellaneous documents were strewn about causing there to be clutter everywhere. Dr. Rajanna apparently kept very poor records. He could not recall when these alleged thefts had occurred nor was he organized enough to locate any documents to support his allegations. I also noticed that the assistants seemed to be running everything though they were barely out of their teens. There were no credentials on the wall. One spoke only Spanish. I looked at the patient sign-in sheet as part of the investigation and it consisted merely of notebook paper.

Dishwasher in the
sterilization room

This general lack of a professional and sanitary environment starkly contrasted with all my experiences inside other doctor offices.

It was determined that Dr. Rajanna's theft charges could not be substantiated. Employees told us Dr. Rajanna has such loose record keeping practices concerning payroll checks that fraud could never be verified. Apparently the employees are allowed to write out their own payroll checks because Dr. Rajanna's printing is difficult to read. I was also given several checks to verify this for comparison and his signature is indeed a scribble mark.

Dishwasher and
toilet in proximity

I received full co-operation from the Employees accused of the theft. They were initially treated as suspects, given their Miranda rights and provided us with full statements. In a statement to me one witness/suspect related how Dr. Rajanna was a filthy man who did not properly sterilize his equipment. The medical equipment was cleaned with Clorox and water then put in a "dishwasher". 

Styrofoam cup from
break room refrigerator

The aborted fetuses were placed inside Styrofoam cups and put in the refrigerator freezer next to TV dinners. The female witness went on to describe of how she and other girls actually witnessed Rajanna microwave one of the aborted fetuses and stir it into his lunch. I have heard that some Middle Easterners eat the placenta from birth and that they believe that this adds longevity to life. I thought "Maybe" this could be what she was referring to. This witness claimed other employees who had seen him do the very same thing.

The initial witness related that she felt that she had been terminated because she was pregnant. She was repeatedly encouraged to terminate the pregnancy and told that she would not serve as a good representative of this clinic by carrying the pregnancy to term. According to this witness, she was starting to feel compassion for the females who were being summarily ushered in and out without adequate recovery time.

Patient toilet

I became so disturbed by the condition of this medical clinic that I contacted District Attorney Nick Tomasic and requested a meeting to discuss these issues. Bare in mind, I am an experienced police officer who has worked in every aspect in law enforcement and had spent my last five years in the homicide unit where I worked countless community deaths. I thought I had heard and seen every vile, disgusting crime scene but was in for a new shock when I started this investigation. 

Break room fridge

Nick Tomasic permitted me an appointment so I brought the witness directly to him where she gave him a first person statement of her account. I repeatedly warned her not to lie or exaggerate. The witness was also told that she could be prosecuted for any false statements made from this moment forward, but that the prior statements would not be prosecutable. She told the exact same story to DA Tomasic as she had told us.

Break room fridge

I was informed that no laws had been violated. After this Meeting, Mr. Tomasic told me that he would have his staff research the information for any law violations. Later, Mr.Tomasic provided me a list of 3 numbers and agencies that I could contact to complain to about this clinic. I personally contacted the numbers on the list. One of the people I talked with was a female from Board of Healing Arts. I no longer have her name or any of the numbers I called regarding this investigation, but I believe I contacted Board of Healing Arts and someone from hazardous waste disposal center. 

Break room fridge

I do not recall the third agency. The person at the Board, whose name I don't know, related that numerous complaints had been made about the clinic but no laws have been violated. Finally, I gave this list of phone numbers to the witness and advised her that she could contact these numbers to describe the environment she had worked in and this was my very last contact with anyone involved with this investigation.

In March of 2004, I learned that an official investigation was underway and was requested to give a statement. My partner has testified as to these same events April 30, 2004, before a group of Senators here at the Capitol at the request of Sen. Kerr. Thank you for your time, I stand for questions. 

The Forgotten Victim of "The Angel of Ashland"

On Saturday, December 8, 1956, 26-year-old Mary Davies of New York City arrived in the Ashland, Pennsylvania office of abortionist Dr. Robert Douglas Spencer. As a physician, Spencer (pictured) was typical of criminal abortionists. What was unusual about him was that rather than sneak the woman in through the back alley, Spencer plied his abortion trade openly.

The Fatal Abortion

According to Spencer, Mary was alone, and reported that she'd been bleeding for about two weeks. He didn't examine her, but gave her medication for pain and Ergotrate to stop the bleeding. He told her to return the following day for her abortion. 

Mary returned at about 10 AM on the 9th. He administered 13 ccs. of Evipal in a 10% solution to induce anesthesia. "I injected that solution into the vein of the left arm and in ten seconds she was asleep." Spencer said that the next thing he noticed was that Mary wasn't breathing. Mary did not respond to medications intended to revive her, so Spencer attempted to resuscitate her with oxygen. He called his assistant, Mildred Zettlemoyer, into the room to assist him.

Mary still was not responding, so Spencer had Zettlemoyer call the laboratory assistant, Steve Sekunda, and tell him to come to the office. Spencer put a breathing tube into Mary's throat, but had to work blind because the light on his scope wasn't working. He resumed artificial respiration. By the time Sekunda arrived, at around 11:30, Spencer had concluded that Mary was dead.

Preparing for Trial

William J. Keuch, chief detective of Schuylkill (pronounced "school kill") County detective, said that when he'd asked Spencer what a young woman from New York City was doing in Spencer's office in Ashland, Spencer answered, "I'm well known in the east. I specialize in women's diseases." Women, Spencer told Keuch, came to him from all over.

Spencer wasn't arrested until after 12 weeks of investigation, which included sending Mary's organs to Dr. Milton Helman, a member of the New York Medical Board, for toxicology review..

When the case was finally ready to go to court in May of 1958, the entire trial was derailed when, during jury selection, one woman asked to be excused because, she said, "I served on a jury in which Dr. Spencer was involved before." This statement was considered prejudicial to Spencer, thus tainting the other jurors.

Trial

The defense seemed to be based mostly on raising reasonable doubt that Mary had actually been pregnant at the time of the abortion. Different experts testified about how they'd drawn their conclusions. The argument evidently worked. Proceeding with an abortion procedure if the patient wasn't actually pregnant, evidently, regardless of Spencer's intention to abort a viable fetus, would not be considered a crime even if the patient died

Spencer's Response

Spencer's widow, Eleanor, told author Patricia Miller that her husband had been quite stricken by Mary Davies' death. He continued to perform abortions, however, along with his regular medical practice, up until the trial.

Spencer briefly stopped doing abortions after the trial, "for a month or so," his widow said. But he resumed his business and eventually got entangled with a fellow named Harry Mace who set up a business for himself rounding up abortion patients and bringing them to Spencer. Spencer's widow lamented that Mace flooded Spencer with patients, pressuring him to rush through abortions. Spencer's health began to fail. He was arrested again, due to the attention from Mace's activities, but died in 1969 before the case went to trial.

1994: Left Bleeding on the Floor

Suresh Gandotra

On December 8, 1994, 23-year-old Magdalena Rodriguez went to Suresh Gandotra's clinic, El Norte Clinica Medica, for what she thought was a safe, legal second-trimester abortion. Gandotra, who already had an unsavory background, later said, "I knew I screwed up," when he pulled out bowel instead of fetal parts.

Gandotra called a hospital and asked for directions to send Magdalena there by car. The staff at the hospital insisted that Magdalena should be transported by ambulance. They began to assemble an expert team for the expected catastrophic injuries.

In the mean time, Gandotra left Magdalena unattended while he did abortions on other patients. After a half-hour delay, he finally called an ambulance, but did not inform them of the hospital that was awaiting her arrival with a team ready to treat her. 

When the ambulance crew arrived, they found Magdalena in ventricular fibrillation, with no pulse, bleeding, and on the floor. The ambulance crew was not informed about the hospital that was awaiting this critically injured patient, so they took Magdalena to another hospital, one that was not prepared to treat a patient with her specific injuries.

Gandotra sent Magdalena to the hospital without a medical history or any information about her condition or what he'd done to her. The staff were totally unprepared for what they found when they examined her. Magdalena had no vitals on arrival at hospital. She was unresponsive with fixed, dilated pupils.

When the surgeon at the hospital opened Magdalena's peritoneum, it was so distended with blood that the operating room was spattered with the escaping blood. Magdalena's uterus was ruptured, with a fetal limb protruding into her abdomen. Her cervix, uterus, bladder, and colon were lacerated. The mangled and partially dismembered fetus was of approximately 30 weeks gestation.

As the autopsy describes the unborn child, "the body of the baby was not complete when autopsied. Both arms had been cut off; the heart, lungs, liver, and other organs had been cut out, the front of the chest and abdomen were missing, the right femur was fractured, the head was intact except for an area on the scalp which had been taken off from the back of the head."

Magdalena bled to death during surgery. Her death was attributed to "complications of the acute pelvic injuries which consisted of lacerations of the lower uterus, vagina, bladder and colon."

Gandotra told the medical board that he had delayed calling an ambulance because he had no admitting privileges and that the patient had asked to be released so she could walk home. Gandotra's attorney said, "We don't believe this was blow the standard of care nor do we believe it was malpractice." A nurse at the hospital that tried to save Magdalena's life said, "I've never seen anything like this before and I don't want to again."

Illegal 1914, Legal 1987, Equally Dead

There is scanty information about two of the abortion deaths on Cemetery of Choice for this date. I'll address the other two, which present copious sources, in separate posts.

On December 8, 1914, 13-year-old schoolgirl Ida Kaufman died in her Chicago home after an abortion performed by an unknown perpetrator. She had suffered uterine hemorrhage. 

Life Dynamics lists 28-year-old Myria McFadden on their "Blackmun Wall" of women killed by legal abortions. LDI summarizes Myria's case with the following information: Myria underwent a second-trimester abortion on December 7, 1987, in Washington, DC, performed by Dr. Hazel Tape. Myria had trouble breathing after the abortion. She suffered heart and lung failure and died the following day at Holy cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland.

A Mystery Death, Chicago, 1925

On December 7, 1925, 18-year-old Margaret or Marguerite Zito died at Chicago's West End Hospital from a criminal abortion performed that day. The person responsible for Margaret's death was never identified.

Keep in mind that things we take for granted, like antibiotics and blood banks, were still in the future. For more about abortion in this era, see Abortion in the 1920s.


For more on pre-legalization abortion, see The Bad Old Days of Abortion

"Safe and Legal" in 1988

Life Dynamics lists 16-year-old Katrina Poole on their "Blackmun Wallsafe, legal abortions.

LDI notes:

• Katrina's abortion was performed the afternoon of December 5, 1988, in a doctor's office in Jacksonville, Florida.
• She suffered a perforated cervix and uterus.
• She died of hemorrhage the following day.

Supporters of legalized abortion would argue that though Katrina's death was indeed tragic, there would be more such tragic deaths were it not for the lifesaving effects of legalization. Is that assertion true? Look for yourself at the numbers:

During the 1940s, while abortion was still illegal, there was a massive drop in maternal mortality from abortion. The death toll fell from 1,407 in 1940, to 744 in 1945, to 263 in 1950. The graph below, showing illegal abortion deaths in purple and legal deaths in orange, shows the number of abortion deaths in the US each year from 1940 through 2003. The first state to legalize abortion-on-demand was New York in 1970. The Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973 struck down all the laws in the US criminalizing abortion. Would you conclude that legalization is what we have to thank for the fact that abortion deaths are not as commonplace now as they were in the 1930s? Or do you think there were other factors that did the job, and abortion advocates just claimed credit? Explore the question more here.

How do Changing Laws Impact Abortion Mortality?

First, look at these two charts showing abortion mortality trends in two different countries.Can you spot the point at which abortion laws changed in that country?Do you think abortion was legalized or banned in that country at that point in time?

I'll give you hints. The top graph is for Chile. At some point abortion was banned. The bottom graph is for the United States. At some point abortion was legalized nationwide.

Does that help you to identify the points in time at which abortion laws changed?

Are you ready for the answers?

The two graphs show the same downward trend in abortion mortality over time. And each graph shows the impact of changes in abortion law on abortion mortality: exactly zip.

How can that be?

This happens because other factors, such as overall maternal health, medical care infrastructure and advancements, and family prosperity have a huge impact on mortality for everything from cancer to diarrhea, and that includes abortion.

Abortion laws do have some impact who practices abortions: with legalization, non-physicians lose customers and eventually fade almost entirely away. With criminalization, many physicians stop doing abortions and some non-physicians take their places. However, the bulk of abortions, legal or illegal, are performed by the same core group of doctors who ply their trade regardless of whether abortion is legal or illegal.

The legal status of abortion does not change whether or not these doctors perform abortions, but it does change how they go about it.

When abortion is illegal, the consequences of injuring or killing a woman are usually dire. At the very least the doctor can expect an investigation and arrest. He will likely lose his license. If the patient dies, he might very well be prosecuted for murder and might even face the death penalty.

But when abortion is legal, on the other hand, the consequences of injuring or killing a woman are, frankly, usually quite trivial. If a patient sues, the doctor's insurance carrier will most likely settle out of court. If the malpractice is egregious, the woman or her family might refuse to settle and will go to court. Only the most appalling malpractice can result in arrest and prosecution. Laws against abortions give the abortion practitioner a strong motive to stay out of trouble, which means using every means possible to avoid injuring a patient. Legalization allows him to relax.

I know of three erstwhile criminal abortionists -- Jesse Ketchum, Milan Vuitch  (pictured, right) and Benjamin Munson -- who practiced carefully prior to legalization and managed to avoid killing any patients. Each got sloppy after legalization and went on to kill two patients.

There is also another dynamic that we saw in the Kermit Gosnell debacle we saw in Pennsylvania. When abortion is legal, there is a presumption of safety that leads to complacency among those who place their faith in legalization as the key factor in patient safety. Officials become lax in regulatory enforcement and abortion-rights organizations become careless about where they are referring women for abortions. This allows somebody like Kermit Gosnell to thrive under legalization in a way that would be nearly impossible were abortion a criminal act and a patient death a case of murder.

But what of the balance between physician and non-physician abortion practitioners relative to abortion laws? Yes, it is true that there will be far fewer non-physicians doing abortions when they are legal, but the increasing laxness among the physicians and blithe oblivious of possible risks among officials and abortion-rights groups clearly offset the increased level of medical training in the pool of those performing abortions.

The statistics don't lie. People's behavior adjusts to the legal status of abortion. Areas where legalization improves safety and areas where legalization encourages risk-taking balance each other out, resulting in a net zero change in abortion deaths among women who choose abortion regardless of changes in whether abortion is legal or  not.

What Caused Gosnell: Mark Greenwald of the Pennsylvania Dept of State

In December of 2001, employee Marcella Choung became so alarmed at conditions at Kermit Gosnell's clinic that she simply walked off the job and promptly notified state officials of the appalling conditions. About the untrained staff doping patients within inches of their lives, the dirty instruments, the sickly flea-infested cats roaming the building, the death of Semika Shaw.

 Mark Greenwald, lawyer at the Pennsylvania Dept of State, responsible for deciding whether or not to prosecute Kermit Gosnell in the death of Semika Shaw, was also assigned to the case of Marcella Choung's allegations, yet did not pursue them. He allowed Gosnell to ply his trade for an additional decade. Gosnell's abuses might have gone on indefinitely had not a drug raid, entirely by chance, uncovered for public view what the Department of State had known for ten years and had pointedly failed to take action on. 

What follows is verbatim from the Grand Jury Report: 

Lawyers at the Pennsylvania Department of State behaved in the same fashion [as lawyers at the DOH]. Attorneys Mark Greenwald, Charles Hartwell, David Grubb, Andrew Kramer, William Newport, Juan Ruiz, and Kerry Maloney were confronted with a growing pile of disquieting facts about Gosnell, including a detailed, inside account from a former employee, and a 22-year-old dead woman. Every time, though, they managed to dismiss the evidence as immaterial. Every time, that is, until the facts hit the fan.

The next action recorded in the file is a one-paragraph “Prosecution Evaluation,” dated April 29, 2004, in which Mark Greenwald, a prosecuting attorney for the Board of Medicine purportedly summarizes the case and concludes: “Prosecution not Warranted.” Here is the paragraph:

Brief Factual Summary: The file was opened as a result of a Medical Malpractice Payment Report. The underlying malpractice case involved the death of a 22 year old female following the termination of her 5th pregnancy. Following a seemingly routine procedure on 3/1/02, the patient was taken to the ER at the University of Pennsylvania with complaints of pain and heavy bleeding. The patient underwent surgery but the surgeon was unable to locate any perforation and the patient died from infection and sepsis. Although the incident is tragic, especially in light of the age of the patient, the risk was inherent with the procedure performed by Respondent [Gosnell] and administrative action against respondent’s license is not warranted.
RECOMMENDATION: Z-02, Prosecution not Warranted

In fact, all the information in this single paragraph is taken entirely – including incorrect dates – from the insurance company’s original paragraph-long report sent to the Board in October 2002. And yet, while Greenwald included the irrelevant, but pointed, assertion that this was the patient’s fifth pregnancy that was being terminated, the Department of State prosecutor omitted from his summary the most important information that the insurance company had provided: “Autopsy report indicated perforation of cervix into uterus. Heirs alleged our insured improperly performed the termination procedure and failed to diagnose post-op uterine perforation resulting in sepsis and death.”

Greenwald’s supervisor, Charles J. Hartwell, the Senior Prosecutor-in-Charge at the Department of State’s Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs, purportedly reviewed Greenwald’s “evaluation” and approved it on May 14, 2004. Hartwell did so, ostensibly, knowing nothing beyond the bare facts that Semika Shaw died from infection and sepsis two days after Gosnell perforated her uterus and cervix during an abortion procedure. (Greenwald also omitted from his evaluation that the insurance carrier had settled the case for $900,000, the majority of which had to be disbursed by a Pennsylvania catastrophic expense fund.)

According to the files turned over to the Grand Jury by the Department of State, no further action was taken until April 29, 2004 – nearly two years later – when Greenwald, the same prosecuting attorney who recommended against following up on Semika Shaw’s death, also recommended closing the case on Choung’s allegations. With serious allegations that Gosnell was allowing unlicensed workers to administer IV anesthesia, that he was over-prescribing Percocet, and that he was violating many provisions of the Abortion Control Act, Greenwald did not subpoena any records from the clinic. He did not send the investigator back to talk to the other unlicensed workers, as Choung had recommended. He simply concluded that the allegations had not been confirmed and recommended no prosecution. And Hartwell, the Senior Prosecutor-in-Charge, agreed.

Even though the alleged violations were ones that the Department of State was charged with enforcing, Greenwald seconded, in 2004, the recommendation that the investigator had made in 2002 – to send the case off to the Department of Health for “review and investigation.” Records subpoenaed by the Grand Jury from both the Department of State and the Department of Health fail to show that even this shirking of responsibility – the simple act of handing off of the case to someone else – was ever carried out.

The Department of State had supposedly been investigating Marcella Choung’s alarming allegations since December 2001 – long before the department and the Board of Medicine received the report of Semika Shaw’s death as a result of an abortion procedure at Gosnell's’ clinic. It is incomprehensible to us how state officials could decide not to investigate the 22-year-old’s death after having heard Choung’s complaints. Especially since an insurance carrier and the State of Pennsylvania’s catastrophic loss fund had already agreed to settle with Ms. Shaw’s heirs for nearly a million dollars.

There can be no claim of a communication gap or of a case simply falling through the cracks: A single Board of Medicine prosecutor and his supervisor disposed of both the Choung allegations and the Shaw case at the same time. The Board has the authority to impose disciplinary sanctions or take other corrective measures if it finds that a doctor has practiced negligently. 40 P.S. §905. If nothing else, the Board prosecutors should have contacted the insurance company to find out what its investigation had revealed that prompted it to settle the malpractice suit in the Shaw case.

Clearly, Greenwald, who handled Semika Shaw’s case, also knew of Marcella Choung’s allegations – he was assigned to that case as well – though this did not stop him from closing the Shaw case without investigation.
 
In spite of this clear dereliction of duty by state officials -- dereliction that the Grand Jury learned was motivated by a pro-choice stand toward abortion "access" -- the abortion lobby places the blame not on the prochoice Governor who ordered a halt to abortion clinic inspections and not on prochoice officials that turned a blind eye in the name of "access," the abortion lobby and many in the mainstream media place blame for Gosnell's existence on the very prolifers who had given these officials the authority to close Gosnell's clinic at any time they discovered what was going on there.
  

"Black Lives Matter"

The Left, with all its current "Black Lives Matter" exhibits a resounding indifference to lives of Black women who suffer disproportionately from abortion quackery. 

That the abortion horror stories happen disproportionately to Black women is interesting, since Black women are the population cohort (by race and sex) most opposed to abortion.

Lakisha Wilson

Blacks comprise about 13 percent of the US population, yet Black woman are sold roughly 35 percent of abortions. But most disturbing is this fact: Black women account for at least 50 percent of known abortion deaths.

This bears repeating: A young Black woman is more than twice as likely to be sold an abortion as a young white woman, and once she gets on the abortion table, she is about twice as likely to suffer fatal complications as a white woman.

More to the point, a Black woman coming of age in the US is at least four times more likely to die from abortion complications than a white woman coming of age.

Tonya Reaves

To my knowledge, nobody has ever done a study investigating why abortion mortality disproportionately effects Black women. Is it because they're more likely to be public pay patients (who have a higher rate of abortion complications)? Is it because they tend to have fewer financial resources than their white counterparts, and therefore are more likely to fall prey to cut-rate abortion mills? Is it because they get even poorer care than their white sisters at the hands of racist abortionists? Nobody knows because, to my knowledge, nobody is asking.

I'm not the only person who has noticed this profound indifference to the lives of Black women entering America's abortion clinics. Matty Byrd, whose daughter Belinda died of abortion malpractice, wrote to the Los Angeles District Attorney:

Belinda Byrd

I am the mother of Belinda Byrd, victim of abortionists at [Inglewood]. I am also the grandmother of her three young children who are left behind and motherless. I cry every day when I think how horrible her death was. She was slashed by them and then she bled to death ... and nobody cares. I know that other young black women are now dead after abortion at that address. ... Where is [the abortionist] now? Has he been stopped? Has anything happened to him because of what he did to my Belinda? Has he served jail time for any of these cruel deaths? People tell me nothing has happened, that nothing ever happens to white abortionists who leave young black women dead. I'm hurting real bad and want some justice for Belinda and all other women who go like sheep to slaughter.

The other young Black women were Lynette Wallace and Cora Lewis.

Antonesha Ross

Indeed, getting people to care about young Black women's deaths is an exercise in futility. When we were working on Lime 5, I opened an envelope full of death certificates a researcher had sent. They were death certificates for women who had died from abortions in Illinois. I'd long known about these deaths; all I needed to do with these death certificates was check for any details other reports had not included.

For some reason, as I leafed through the death certificates, my eye was drawn to the box marked "Race."

Edrica Goode

My co-worker, Mona, walked past my office a few minutes later and found me with my head down on my desk, crying. She asked what was wrong, and I shoved the fistful of death certificates at her.

"Look at these, Mona," I told her. "They're all Black women. We're never going to be able to get anybody to care."

That was nearly twenty years ago, and it seems that I was right. As long as abortion quackery continues to be predominately a problem of Black women, it will continue to be an invisible problem that doesn't get acknowledged, much less addressed.

A young Black man gets shot by a police officer under unclear circumstances, and entire neighborhoods burn. A young Black woman is left unattended to bleed out at an abortion clinic, and the silence is deafening.

It's about time for that to change.

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.

....

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.

Doctors' Fatal Work, 1905, 1988

On December 5, 1905, 19-year-old laborer Annie Killhoff died at her home on Ashland Avenue in Chicago from an abortion. Two physicians, Joseph Vassumpaur and Charles Boddiger, were arrested, Vassumpaur as the principle and Boddiger as an accessory. Patrick Dillon was also held as an accessory. The case, however, never went to trial.


Seventeen-year-old Janice Gumm of Beach Park, Illinois, went to Dimensions Medical Center in Des Plaines, Illionis, for an abortion on December 5, 1998, to be performed under anesthesia. Her abortionist was Dr. Jesse Chandler, and the anesthesiologist was Dr. Murray Rosenberg of Hospital Anesthesia Group. The suit by Janice's survivors held that Dimensions failed to perform an adequate physical examination prior to the abortion, particularly in that they did not properly assess her increased risks due to the fact that she had asthma. As a result, Janice suffered an anesthesia-related complication that resulted in her death that day.

Five Deaths, 1878 - 1983

Of the five women from the Cemetery of Choice whose deaths took place on this date, only one had an abortion perpetrated by somebody other than a physician. 

Ann E. Roberts, 25 years old, submitted to an abortion November 29, 1878 in Saint Louis, Missouri. She died of peritonitis on December 3. She was attended to by William Stapp and Stephen L. Metcalf, neither of whom was a doctor. Before her death, Ann identified Stapp as her abortionist. Metcalf was arrested as an accessory.

Grace Wolf, a young married woman, traveled from her home in Lansing, Iowa to the office of Dr. C. Allen Snyder (pictured) in Dubuque on November 19, 1917. Shortly after leaving Snyder's practice, she took ill. By November 29 she was in the hospital, and her condition deteriorated until her death on December 3. The autopsy had found evidence of recent pregnancy and a puncture in Grace's uterus. Dr. Snyder was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years at hard labor. His conviction was overturned on appeal. He was also charged with murder in the 1918 abortion death of Mrs. Frank Gagne of East Dubuque, Illinois. 


On December 2, 1977, 29-year-old Jacqueline Bailey was injected with saline by Dr. Eboreime (Possibly Babatunde Eboreime. I am trying to verify this.) for an instillation abortion at Pacific Glen Hospital in Los Angeles County. This kind of abortion worked because the baby would swallow and inhale the extremely salty fluid which would cause massive internal hemorrhage and fatal organ damage. Five hours after Jackie expelled the dead baby, her condition appeared grave. Shortly after midnight, she was transferred to Memorial Hospital of Glendale. Doctors at Memorial suspected a uterine laceration, so they performed exploratory surgery. The bleeding was so profuse that they then performed a hysterectomy in a last-ditch attempt to save her life. Jackie died just before sunrise on December 3. The autopsy report found that Jackie's uterus had ruptured during the abortion, and that her uterine artery had been lacerated. She had bled to death from her injuries. Two years earlier, Cheryl Tubbs also bled to death from a ruptured uterus caused by a saline abortion at Pacific Glen.

Cora Lewis is one of six abortion deaths currently attributed to Inglewood Women's Hospital (aka Inglewood Women's Clinic) in Los Angeles County. Twenty-three-year-old Cora had her safe and legal abortion at Inglewood on November 4, 1983. She had gonorrhea at the time of the abortion, which led to inflammation of the cervix and uterus. Cora developed fever and chills after her abortion, and was finally admitted to a hospital on November 11. She was aggressively treated for pneumonia, including surgery, but died December 3. The coroner attributed her death to pneumonia and lung abscess contributed to by the uterine and cervical inflammation. Other abortion deaths at Inglewood include Kathy Murphy (September, 1973), Lynette Wallace (September, 1975), Elizabeth Tsuji (February, 1978), Yvonne Tanner (August, 1984), and Belinda Byrd (January, 1987),

Andre Nehorayoff

Dr. Andre Nehorayoff performed a safe and legal abortion on "Ellen" on November 29, 1983. She was 18 years old and in the second trimester of pregnancy. After the abortion, Nehorayoff discharged Ellen from his facility. He had not removed or identified all fetal parts. Nehorayoff entered the following note in Ellen's chart: "Pt. is advised that she might pass some tissue, contact me at any time or if she bleeds heavily." He was clearly aware that he'd preformed an incomplete abortion. At 5:10 AM on December 3, Ellen was rushed to an emergency room. She was already in a coma upon admission. An hour and 10 minutes later, she was pronounced dead. At autopsy there was a portion of the fetal left leg protruding from the uterus, and the cause of death was determined to be from hemorrhaging due to the incomplete abortion. Nehorayoff was also disciplined regarding Patient F, whom he left unattended in a recovery room following her abortion on December 15, 1979, without any monitoring. She turned blue and no pulse could be detected. She was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Reminder of the Repudiated, Antiquated Favorite Abortion-Rights Claim

One of the most popular beliefs behind the abortion-rights movement is the claim that prior to legalization, criminal abortions were killing between 5,000 and 10,000 women a year in the United States. This belief persists even though the claim has been totally debunked for decades now. It was repudiated by the very man who generated the numbers. But, as Bernard Nathanson said, it's a useful number, so despite the fact that it's a load of dingo's kidneys, it gets bandied about anyway.

Where did they come from? Here's an interesting exercise: when you see the 5,000 - 10,000 claim, check and see who they cite (if they bother to cite any source at all). Odds are it will be Lawrence "Larry" Lader or some other late 1960's early 1970's abortion guru. This gives the impression that Lader (or whoever) looked at whatever the then-current situation was and wrote up his findings. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The 5,000 - 10,000 claim is one of the standard abortion promotion tricks: misleading citing. Often you'll see abortion advocates citing some recent (or relatively recent) "research." But when you check their source, you'll find that the source cites an even older source. And when you check that source, you'll find that it cites yet another, older source. You'll go round and round. (I've often joked that tracking down pro-choice original source material gives me motion sickness.) Eventually, you'll find the original source. If you're lucky.

Dr. Frederick Taussig

In the case of the 5,000 - 10,000 claims, the original source was a book -- Abortion, Spontaneous and Induced -- published in 1936 by Dr. Frederick Taussig, a leading proponent of legalization of abortion. Taussig calculated an urban abortion rate based on records of a New York City birth control clinic, and a rural abortion rate based on some numbers given to him by some doctors in Iowa. He took a guess at a mortality rate, multiplied by his strangely generated estimate of how many criminal abortions were taking place, and presto! A myth is born!

Even if Taussig's calculations, by some mathematical miracle, had been correct, they still would have been out of date by the end of WWII. Antibiotics and blood transfusions changed the face of medicine. And you will notice that abortion proponents are all too aware of how dated Taussig's numbers are -- why else would they play Musical Cites instead of simply citing Taussig in the first place? But not only are the Taussig numbers dated, they were never accurate to begin with. At a conference in 1942, Taussig himself apologized for using "the wildest estimates" to generate a bogus number.

Although it took Taussig six years to reject his own faulty calculations, at least he did admit that he'd been wrong. Other abortion enthusiasts lacked Taussig's compunctions. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL, admitted that he and his associates knew that the claims of 5,000 to 10,000 criminal abortion deaths were false. They bandied them about anyway, Nathanson confessed, because they were useful. This, too, is old news -- Nathanson came clean over thirty years ago.

How many criminal abortion deaths were there, then? An excellent question, and a tricky one to answer. Before the Centers for Disease Control began Abortion Surveillance Activities in 1968, and began looking at abortion mortality in earnest in 1972, all abortion deaths were typically counted together: legal (or "therapeutic"), illegal, and spontaneous (miscarriage). However, even without the CDC's intervention, public health officials were watching maternal mortality in general, and abortion mortality in particular, very carefully. After all, abortion itself was a crime, and an abortion in which the mother died could well result in a homicide investigation. This was not petty crime; the police, coroners, funeral directors, and hospital administrators were very attentive to possible criminal abortion deaths.

Peer-reviewed articles published in the decades before Roe gave varied estimates of the number of abortion deaths annually. One study determined that there were approximately 1.3 criminal abortion deaths per year in Minnesota from 1950 through 1965. Commentary on that study pointed out that if researchers combined known criminal abortion deaths with suspected criminal abortion deaths, 4.4 women were dying from criminal abortions per year in Tennessee from 1955 through 1965. A study in California reported 30 total abortion deaths per year during a period studied from 1957 through 1965, and as many as 87% of those abortion deaths were due to criminal abortions. This meant a maximum death rate in California of 26 women per year during that period.

But what can that tell us about mortality nationwide? In 1975 (the first year for which complete numbers are available), Minnesota reported roughly 1.6% of all legal abortions, Tennessee reported about 1.7%, and California about 22%. It is reasonable to assume that the proportion of illegal abortions in each state before legalization would be similar to the proportion of legal abortions in each state after Roe. If each of those states had been representative of the nation at large, that would put the national death rate at 78, 225, and 104, respectively. If we combine the totals, we find 31.7 criminal abortion deaths per year in three states, which represented roughly 26% of abortion deaths. This would mean approximately 123 criminal abortion deaths annually in the decades just before Roe.

Are these numbers realistic at all? Mary Calderone, who was then Medical Director of Planned Parenthood, reported on a conference studying abortion in America. She indicated that in 1957, there were 260 abortion deaths nationwide. That number included all abortions: legal, illegal, and spontaneous. The calculations based on state maternal mortality investigations are fairly close to Calderone's numbers based on national data. These numbers were based on alerting doctors, law enforcement, coroners, and hospital administrators, along with public records officials, of their responsibility to report these deaths. Taussig's estimates of 5,000 to 10,000 deaths would have meant that Minnesota authorities should have found 80 to 160 deaths per year when all their efforts could only find one or two. Tennessee should have been finding 85 to 170, rather than 4 or 5. And California should have been finding 1100 to 2200, rather than roughly 26.

Once more, with feeling:

• In 1936, Frederick Taussig announced that there were 5,000 to 10,000 maternal deaths from criminal abortion annually in the United States.
  
• In 1942, Taussig admitted that his calculations had been wrong, and that there was no way as many as 5,000 women were dying, much less 10,000.
  
• From 1940 through 1970, abortion mortality fell from nearly 1,500 to a little over 100.
  
• In 1972, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 39 women died from criminal abortions.

Are we supposed to believe that public health officials in Minnesota, Tennessee, and California, in cooperation with law enforcement, the medical community, coroners, and hospital administrators, were that far off? Are we supposed to believe that among abortion supporters, Planned Parenthood's Medical Director, the AMA, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and the Centers for Disease Control were all that clueless, when they were searching frantically for deaths they could blame on abortion laws? Are we to believe that only Taussig's numbers -- generated with admittedly faulty calculations over half of a century ago -- are the true measure of the cost of criminal abortion in the United States? This is what abortion promoters would have you believe when they cite Taussig's discredited numbers.

You would have to go back to before WWII to find as many as 1,000 women dying from criminal abortions annually in the United States. By 1967, when the first states started allowing very limited elective abortions, the number had fallen almost 90%, to 110. Criminal abortion deaths clearly were diminishing dramatically without taking the radical step of legalization. Other strategies, such as liberalizing sterilization laws, providing competent counseling to frightened pregnant women to help them overcome their fears about having their babies, and teaching doctors better diagnostic and treatment strategies for addressing criminal abortion complications, were based on sound research and were likely to reduce criminal abortion deaths to an unavoidable minimum. (As long as some women insist on having abortions, some of them will die, no matter how diligently we try to protect them.) When current strategies are working, it's foolish to throw a monkey wrench into the works. The strategy of improved medical care was solving the problem. Abortion advocates might have done well to listen to the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

1901, 1948, 1988 -- Dead is Dead

On December 2, 1901, the body of Rose Lefebre was found in the Chicago apartment of Mary Volbending. It appeared that Rose had died from internal hemorrhage caused by an abortion. Volbending was arrested, but she was later exonerated by a Coroner's Jury. The perpetrator of Mary's abortion was never identified. 

Sharon Hamplton died
from the same injury
that had killed Doris Becker.

On December 5, 1948, Dr. Cyril B. Babb pleaded guilty to performing a fatal abortion on Doris Becker the previous Wednesday in his office. During the abortion , Babb reportedly admitted, he had pulled some of Doris's bowel from her body. This complication continues to happen in modern "safe and legal" abortions, including the death of Sharon Hamplton (pictured left, with son) in 1996. Doris, described in news coverage as a "blonde, 21-year-old Broadway model," died 20 hours later, on December 2, at the apartment of a friend, Anne Martin. Anne and a bartender, George Kutrones, were held as material witnesses. Babb also admitted to performing 30 other abortions.

On December 1, 1998, 22-year-old Tamika Dowdy stopped breathing during a safe and legal abortion performed at  Brooklyn Women's Medical Pavilion. Her fiance, Rudy Alston, was in the waiting room when a doctor began walking in and out, sweating and pacing, before finally telling Rudy what was going on. Staff at the clinic summoned emergency care. The medics worked to save Tamika, performing CPR, as Alston waited. He rode by Tamika's side in the ambulance from the clinic to the hospital. She  never regained consciousness, and was declared dead the following day.

Bad Old Days vs. Safe and Legal

There are two deaths from the Cemetery of Choice that took place on this date. I know little about the first, an illegal abortion death, but have an abundance of information about the woman who died on this date from a safe, legal abortion.

The Bad Old Days

On December 1, 1928, 23-year-old Esther Wahlstrom died in Chicago from complications of a criminal abortion. Dr. Lou E. Davis (pictured) was held by the coroner for murder by abortion on December 12. She was indicted for felony murder on December 15. Davis was also implicated in the abortion deaths of Anna Adler , Mary Whitney, Anna Borndal, Irene Kirschner, and Gertrude Gaesswitz.

Fast forward over sixty years to the enlightened days of safe, legal abortion.

Safe and Legal

Susanne Logan died a long, lingering death after she went to Maryland's Hillview abortion clinic for an abortion on September 9, 1989. Her abortion was performed by Gideon Kioko. She was 13 weeks pregnant. There was no record of how much intravenous Brevital was administered to Susanne, or who administered the drug. There was also no record of any examination to determine of this drug was appropriate for Suzanne.

Susanne was already unconscious on the table when Kioko and his nurse entered the procedure room. Kioko was being assisted by an unlicensed nurse, who noted that Susanne's lips were turning blue. She told Kioko, who continued with the abortion procedure. There is no record that anybody monitored her vital signs or administered oxygen during the procedure. Only after the abortion was finished did anybody do anything to address Suzanne's respiratory arrest.

Eventually somebody summoned emergency medical services (EMS). The EMS personnel reported that the Hillview employees seemed "very confused and did not seem to know what they were doing." EMS staff also noted that Hillview staff had put an oxygen mask on Suzanne upside-down, so that she wasn't getting any oxygen.

Susanne was cyanotic (she had turned blue from lack of oxygen), her pupils were dilated. She was limp, and had no pulse and was not breathing. EMS workers managed to perform CPR and get Suzanne's heart and lungs working again, and transported her to a hospital.

Susanne remained comatose and was transferred to a nursing home. Four months after the abortion, she regained consciousness, but was paralyzed and unable to speak. She had no memory of the abortion, but was able to eventually recall having gone to the clinic.

Local prolifers visited Susanne, and bought her a device that allowed her to communicate. She was interviewed by 60 Minutes, and asked what she wanted. She replied, "To go home."

Susanne filed suit against Kioko and the clinic. In November of 1992, she finally won her suit, and was awarded $2.6 million and $10,000 a month for life, to cover her expenses. Sadly, Susanne died on December 1, before she had a chance to fulfill her wish of seeing her father again.

Debra Gray also died after an abortion at Hillview under circumstances almost identical to the chain of events that fatally injured Susanne.

A Blind Eye

The TV show 60 Minutes learned that abortion-rights organizations had long known hos seedy Hillview was. They interviewed Barbara Radford, then-president of the National Abortion Federation, she defended the head-in-the-sand attitude the organization took toward safety issues 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." When they asked pro-choice Maryland State Senator Mary Boergers why nothing was being done to address dangerous abortion clinics. Boergers said, "There's only so much of a willingness to try to push a group like the pro-choice movement to do what I think is the responsible thing to do because they then treat you as if you're the enemy."

The political goal of "access" trumped the bodies and lives of women like Susanne and Debra. Is the abortion lobby devoted to women's access to safe abortions, or abortionists' access to vulnerable women?