A Woman's Death in 1996 Death Highlights Abortion-Rights Priorities

Both of today's deaths from the Cemetery of Choice are from safe, legal abortions.

I have almost no information on the death from 1984. Thirty-year-old Sandra Williams was 11 weeks pregnant when she underwent an abortion on December 12. She went home following the abortion. Less than twelve hours later, she was dead.  Her death certificate noted that she died from a pulmonary embolism.

There is a plethora of information, however, on the other abortion death. It became quite a cause of outrage from abortion-rights activists, not because a woman died, but because the man who had killed her was prosecuted for doing so.

Important Background

In one session of a National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar, a participant indicated that when he pulled bowel (extracted part of a patient's bowel through a perforation in her uterus), his preferred method of treatment (if you can call it that) was to stuff the bowel back through the perforation, administer medications 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 and 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.

This, mind you, was at a gathering of abortion practitioners who are held up as the most diligent and professional in the world. This was a gathering of practitioners who cared enough about staying up-to-date on developments in abortion practice to invest money and time attending a seminar on risk management. But even among this group, and even after the moderator had lambasted one participant for this alarming means of dealing with an injury, six participants nevertheless raised their hands and admitted to using it.

Sharon Hamplton with
her son, Curtis

It was only a matter of time before one of these bowel-pulling abortionists killed somebody. That's when the unwitting Sharon Yvonne Hamplton stepped into the picture. Sharon was a single mother who worked part-time at Burger King while attending community college. Sharon's mother said that Sharon wanted to get off welfare and become a nurse.

Misplaced Trust

Sharon went to Dr. Bruce Steir (rhymes with "fear") at A Lady's Choice Women's Medical Center for a safe, legal abortion on December 13, 1996.

Dr. Bruce Steir

Steir was already on probation with the medical board at the time of Sharon's abortion; he had a history of botching abortions, including causing uterine perforations. He'd been found negligent in six abortion cases, including three in which the woman had to undergo a hysterectomy. One woman had to have a fetal skull removed from a tear in her uterus. Joseph Durante, who owned the facility, was also on probation with the medical board at the time of Sharon's fatal abortion. He had attempted a late abortion which resulted in the birth of a live but injured infant.

Sharon's mother, Doris Hamplton, later said, "I don't know how she heard about Dr. Durante's offices. I think he was recommended by the people at San Bernardino County Social Services or by Dr. Krider."

"I understand that because Dr. Durante and Dr. Steir were on probation they were not entitled to Medi-Cal payment, but they got it anyway," Doris said. "I understand that their office was not accredited as an ambulatory surgical office, and that it was supposed to be accredited to comply with the law. I had no idea that Dr. Durante and Dr. Steir were on probation with the Medical Board for incompetence and negligence against women patients. I am sure that Sharon did not know either. If I had known, I would never have taken Sharon to such a bad place with such bad doctors."

At The Clinic

Sharon was 20 weeks pregnant. According to Nancy Myles, an ultrasound technician who was assisting Steir during Sharon's abortion, Steir was having trouble locating and extracting the fetal skull. She said that Steir looked at her strangely and said, "I think I pulled bowel." Steir remained at the facility for less than an hour after Sharon's abortion. She was still in the recovery room when he left.

Sharon's mother had been waiting outside the clinic with Sharon's son. What happened next is in Doris' own words:

Maybe around 3:00 pm I took Curtis inside to use the bathroom. I saw a grey haired man dressed in green surgical clothes sitting at a desk. He said, "You know she is far along." I said, "No. I didn't know because she didn't tell me."

Then I saw Sharon in the recovery room about 3:30 or 4:00 pm. She looked so bad that I felt scared. She was laying on a lazyboy style chair with an IV in her left arm and a blood pressure cuff on the other. She looked very pale. Her eyes were partially open and I could see only the whites of her eyes as if she were in shock. She was not speaking and her whole body was shaking real hard in big shivers. Her legs were especially bad. The doctor said, "She doesn't react to drugs well." ....

A woman came in and said that Sharon didn't need the blankets that were on her already and pulled the blankets off. Other girls in the recovery room were vomiting and the attendant woman told the girls to keep vomiting, that vomiting was good for them at this time. I went back to the waiting room and a Spanish lady came out and said that Sharon would be ready in a few minutes as soon as the IV finished.

Sharon was in the recovery for only about 45 minutes, because at 5:00 pm they came out and said she was ready to leave. I heard someone say that the doctor was real busy and he had to rush out like he was going to the airport, something about him having to go to Sacramento or San Francisco. I saw two women struggling to place Sharon in a wheelchair. Sharon could not walk at all and she was not speaking. She looked very, very pale now.

On the Drive Home

The women loaded Sharon into the back seat of her mother's car. Doris put Curtis in the car and they drove off. Again, this is what Doris had to say:

On the way home to Barstow, I stopped at Wendy's to get a sandwich for little Curtis. I tried to wake Sharon but all she said was "Huh, Huh." Then Curtis said, "Mamma, I love you. Do you need anything? Are you okay?" And Sharon said, "Okay. I'll take a drink."

Sharon was lying in the backseat of the car and said to Curtis, "Come on back with me Curtis. I love you and so I could hold you and you could go to sleep." She was silent for about one hour. Near Victorville, she said, "I'm so hot. Please let the window down." I opened the window a bit. After that, Sharon was silent forever.

We got home to Barstow and I saw that Sharon, still laying in the back seat was naked from the waist up, having removed her shirt, shoes and socks. I started yelling, "Sharon. Sharon. Wake up," but she didn't and my husband, Ben Hamptlon, said, "Call 911."

It was too late. Sharon had bled to death from the hole in her uterus.

The Aftermath

Steir's mugshots

Because of the circumstances surrounding Sharon's death as reported by her mother and by Steir's assistant, Steir was arrested and charged with murder in Sharon's death.

Pro-choice organizations, including the national leadership of NOW, and the National Abortion Federation, the ACLU of Northern California, and the California Abortion and Reproduction Rights League, rallied around Steir. One supporter stood outside the courthouse with a sign reading, "Abortion doctors are heroes, defend Dr. Bruce Steir." The Feminist Women's Health Center in Chico, with whom he once was affiliated, set up a "defense committee" and raised funds for his legal expenses.

The Steir Defense Committee painted a glowing picture of him, ignoring the injuries and disciplinary actions:

Dr. Steir, a Board Certified OB-GYN, has performed abortion since the Roe V. Wade decision in 1973. He has traveled extensively throughout the state providing services to women, both in urban and rural areas. He, like many abortion doctors, has worked in a variety of clinics over the years, including physician's offices, Feminist Clinics, and Planned Parenthood. He worked for the Feminist Women's Health Center in Chico, Redding, Sacramento, and Santa Rose for 12 years and served as Medical Director.

Given Steir's alarming history of malpractice, this is more of an indictment of California abortion facilities than a vindication of Steir.

Eventually Steir entered a guilty plea in exchange for a light sentence. He was sentenced to a year in prison, with six months of the sentence suspended in leiu of community service. He was also given five years' probation. At the sentencing hearing, four years after Sharon's death, Sharon's father said he still often pulled his car to the side of the road, looked at his daughter's picture, and wept.

Steir was released after serving only four months of his sentence. He is still viewed as a martyr for the abortion-rights and even wrote a book, Jailhouse Journal of an OB/GYN,  which is gushed over by abortion-rights activists, including Claudette Begin of Solidarity who dismisses the testimony of Sharon's mother as being purely due to anti-abortion motivation. One blogger even elevates him to "Dr. Steir: Warrior for Women."

The idea that Steir was railroaded simply because he did abortions holds little water when one considers how many other women have died from abortions performed in California without a single doctor being prosecuted. Surely if there was a huge and powerful anti-abortion conspiracy to persecute hapless providers of vital reproductive health care services, there would be homicide charges filed every time an abortion patient died. Steir stands alone in that, purely a victim. Sharon and her family are forgotten.

Doris's Closing Thoughts

I cry every day for the terrible loss of my daughter, and I am overwhelmed that 3 year old Curtis had his mother taken away forever. My husband, Ben Hamptlon, (father of Sharon), is sick with grief, has terrible head pain, is under the care of a doctor for this and has been taking strong pain medicine since Sharon's death. My prayer is that these doctors be stopped immediately so that no other girl will be killed and that no other family will have to suffer as we have.

Blast From the Past: Max, Judy, Voodoo, and Abortion Fraud

IMPORTANT: Current status unknown: Dr. Judith Comeau-Samuel has changed her name to Dr. Judith Prophete and is listed on many web sites as practicing obstetrics and gynecology, family practice, and/or addictions treatment in Philadelphia and occasionally in New Jersey. The Pennsylvania Department of State web site lists her as having an active license to practice medicine, but also on one of its pages lists her address as the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, PA. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections shows no inmate by that name. For public safety I think it's important that we verify where this woman is and what she is doing.

Voodoo Made Me Do It

The recent arrest of Dr. Narash Patel for selling abortions to women who weren't actually pregnant isn't an isolated incident. Similar frauds, as uncovered by the Chicago Sun-Times, have been found across the country. But the oddest case by far must be a husband and wife team of New York abortionists.

When called before the medical board in 1986, Dr. Judith Comeau-Samuel admitted to practices endangering the health of patients at her abortion clinics, but claimed that she had only done so because she was dominated by her husband and manipulated by him via voodoo.

The report indicated that Comeau-Samuel and her husband would charge $75 for a pregnancy test. They would then tell the patient she was pregnant, then offer to apply the $75 pregnancy test fee toward the cost of an abortion. Authorities estimated that 25% of the abortions performed at Comeau-Samuel's facilities were done on non-pregnant women. The number of victims in 1985 was estimated at 2,400.

The whole scheme got exposed after a woman who had undergone a sterilization procedure was told that she was pregnant at one of the Comeau-Samuel facilities. The husband-and-wife team were arrested after a sting by two non-pregnant policewomen.

What was particularly alarming, in addition to the unnecessary emotional distress and risks of the procedures themselves, is that these "abortions" were done under general anesthesia in a substandard facility, placing these women at severe risk of debilitating or even lethal anesthesia complications.

Medical board documents indicate that the Medical Board, Commissioner of Health, Regents Review Committee, and Board of Regents all found Comeau-Samuel guilty of:

• 65 counts of "practicing the profession with gross negligence"
• 29 counts of "Permitting, aiding, or abetting an unlicensed person to perform activities requiring a license"
• 90 counts of "Practicing the profession fraudulently"
• 65 counts of "Practicing the profession with gross incompetence"
• 139 counts of "Unprofessional conduct" 

The charges related to the following violations at Comeau-Samuel's two abortion clinics:

• performing abortions on non-pregnant women
• failure to take medical history or perform examinations
• administering general anesthesia without ascertaining if patients had eaten
• administering general anesthesia without proper resuscitative equipment
• failing to monitor vital signs during general anesthesia
• failure to provide post-anesthesia evaluations
• failure to give adequate aftercare instructions
• failure to obtain informed consent
• failure to supervise recovery
• failure to test for Rh factor hence jeopardizing health and lives of future babies of Rh-negative patients
• allowing her husband Maxen Samuel to practice without a license
• falsely advertising that medical services would be performed by board-certified specialist when they were performed by non-certified Comeau-Samuel and non-licensed Maxen Samuel
• having pregnancy tests performed by untrained individual if they were performed at all

Comeau-Samuel was fined $19,500, and her license was revoked. Her husband was jailed for performing abortions on non-pregnant women and for practicing medicine without a license. Samuel was also disciplined for having food, coffee, and wine available to patients in the waiting room then not warning them of the danger of eating prior to general anesthesia.

Samuel's attorney said that Samuel admitted to operating without a license, but insisted that he had to do so because he needed the money. The judge reviewing the case ordered the couple to surrender their passports to prevent flight to their native Haiti.

 For more on the Voodoo Abortionists, see:

• Holtzman v. Samuel 130 Misc.2d 976 (1985)

                                                                     

 

 

 

 

Deaths After Phony Abortions? A Call For Information

Naresh Patel

Secular Pro-Life raises in interesting question in the wake of the arrest of abortionist Naresh Patel for selling abortions to women who weren't actually pregnant: "Have any women been injured or killed by complications from fake abortions?"

I know of two verified deaths of women who had been sold abortions when they hadn't actually been pregnant.

"Sandra" committed suicide in 1971 after an abortion sold to her when she hadn't been pregnant. Before ending her life she had expressed remorse about having "killed her baby."

In 1989, Synthia Dennard bled to death from a combination abortion/tubal ligation sold to her when she hadn't actually been pregnant.

There is a third possibility that I have been trying to verify. In 1979, Deloris Smith had been injured during an abortion about four months before her 15th birthday and died shortly after her birthday. I recall seeing a news clipping that said her mother was suing and claiming that the pregnancy test done at the National Abortion Federation clinic prior to the abortion had actually come up negative. If anybody has access to Atlanta news archives, or can do a docket search for the mother's lawsuit, please follow through and let us all know what you find.

Three Typial Illegal Deaths: The Work of Doctors

Mary Calderone

All three of the Cemetery of Choice deaths that took place on this date are abortions that were perpetrated by doctors. As then-Planned Parenthood Federation medical director Mary Calderone estimated in The American Journal of Public Health, " (1960) 90 per cent of all illegal abortions are presently being done by physicians." Another researcher, Nancy Howell Lee, estimated in The Search for an Abortionist (1969) that 89% of illegal abortions were being done by physicians. These estimates are the result of totally independent research. Calderone was basing her estimates on Planned Parenthood's 1955 conference "Abortion in America," in which physicians, public health officials, and even one criminal abortionist worked together to draw as accurate picture as possible. Lee based her estimates on an extensive survey of women who had sought out abortions prior to legalization.

With that in mind, let's look at the women whose deaths we commemorate today.

Chicago, 1892: Dr. Lucy Hagenow

On Monday, December 12, 1892, Emily Anderson of Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, died of peritonitis from a criminal abortion. Emily, widow of Andrew Anderson, kept a boarding house.

Dr. A. P. Ohlenocher, whose office was just up the street from the unfortunate young woman's home, testified that he was called in to attend to her. A woman who was caring for Emily said that one of Emily's boarders, a shoe salesman named Henry Gilbspen, had gotten Emily pregnant. When Ohlenocher questioned Henry, he denied having gotten Emily pregnant, but he did tell the doctor that he had accompanied Emily to Dr. Lucy Hagenow's office at her request, but did not go inside with her.

Dr. Lucy Hagenow

Hagenow denied ever having seen Emily. Gilbspen turned State's evidence against Hagenow, but she was acquitted when the judge instructed the jury to return a not-guilty verdict, concluding on his own that the state had not produced sufficient evidence for a conviction.

Hagenow, who had already been tried multiple times for abortion deaths in San Francisco (Louise Duchow, Annie Dories, Emma Dep, and Abbia Richards) before moving to Chicago, and had already been implicated in the deaths of Minnie Deering and Sophia Kuhn, went on to be tied to nearly a dozen more Cook County abortion deaths: Hannah Carlson, Marie Hecht, May Putnam, Lola Madison, Annie Horvatich,  Lottie Lowy, Nina Pierce, Jean Cohen, Bridget Masterson, Elizabeth Welter, and Mary Moorehead. Hagenow told reporters that she was able to ply her trade so successfully because she bribed officials and police officers.

El Paso, 1917: Dr.  John C. Dysart

Mary Francis Falls died on December 12, 1917 from peritonitis caused by an abortion perpetrated on November 15 by Dr. John C. Dysart in El Paso, Texas. Her mother, Mrs. Stringfield, had reported the abortion to police. 
 
Mary Francis's sister-in-law testified that after Mary Francis had died, Dysart had prepared a paper for all the concerned parties to sign stating that they would not press for prosecution if he covered the costs for Mary Francis' treatment and funeral expenses.
 
During Dysart's trial for murder by abortion, Dr. Hugh White testified that Mary Francis had called him about two weeks before her death, saying that she had malaria. Dr. White doubted this an later discovered that his suspicions were correct and that his patient was suffering complications from an abortion. He performed the post-mortem examination and found pus throughout her abdomen.
 
Dysart's defense was that he had only treated Mary Francis for complications of a self-induced abortion. He was acquitted on the murder charge after five hours of deliberation. Another unspecified charge related to Mary Francis's death was not dismissed.

Chicago, 1930: Dr. Emil Gleitsman

Dr. Emil Gleitsman

On December 1, 1930, 22-year-old Jeanette Reder underwent a criminal abortion at the Chicago office of Dr. Emil Gleitsman. Jeanette died December 12. Gleitsman was indicted by a grand jury for homicide, but was acquitted on June 15, 1931. The source does not clarify why there was enough evidence to indict Gleitsman, but not enough to convict him.
 
However, like  Hagenow, Gleitsman was a persistent abortionist. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) noted in 1943 that the Illinois Supreme Court had upheld Gleitsman's 1942 murder by abortion conviction, for which he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. 

Gleitsman was indicted for 22-year-old Lucille van Iderstine's abortion death in 1928 and was convicted three times on a single charge of manslaughter by abortion in the death of 21-year-old Mary Colbert in 1933, but each time his lawyer got a reversal and eventually the prosecutors gave up.

1927: Criminal Abortionist Barely Escaped the Electric Chair

Dr. Amante Rongetti

The first man sentenced to die in Illinois's electric chair was not a typical death row inmate: he was a physician whose patient died from complications of an illegal abortion. Reporters covering the case in Chicago contended that Dr. Amante Rongetti (pictured) was the first doctor in the United States ever sentenced to die over a patient's abortion death.

Rongetti had been convicted of murder in the December 11, 1927 abortion death of 19-year-old Loretta Enders and manslaughter in the death of her baby.

Many factors disclosed in court helped to seal the jury's verdict:

• Witnesses said that the baby had been born alive; Rongetti left it unattended to die, then threw the body in the furnace.

• After Loretta had developed sepsis (blood poisoning) from the abortion, Rongetti refused to provide follow-up care, including possibly life-saving additional surgery, because she had no money to pay him.

• Not only did Rongetti refuse to provide the care himself, but he prevented Loretta from going elsewhere.

• Rongetti refused to summon a priest to perform last rites for Loretta, again fearing exposure of his illegal practices.

Rongetti's death sentence was handed down on March 1, 1928, after three hours of deliberation. Rongetti's scheduled execution date was to be April 13, 1928.

Rongetti's attorney, Scott Stewart, immediately filed motion for a new trial. The legal wrangling took a while. Rongetti spent a year on death row before being released -- whereupon he was promptly implicated in the criminal abortion death of Elizabeth Palumbo, who died May 23, 1929 after an abortion performed May 10.

Rongetti was tried again for Loretta's death in December of 1929. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 14 years in Joliet.


Everything Rongetti did has its continuation in legal abortion practice. Rongetti was a legitimate physician who performed abortions in his hospital, assisted by licensed nurses. Babies are born alive in abortions every year in the US, and are typically sent to the incinerator with the medical waste. (Even Planned Parenthood has admitted to live births.) Abortion doctors such as National Abortion Federation member Abu Hayat have been caught refusing to provide necessary additional care if women didn't have more money to pay for it. Abortion doctors have kept patients in their facilities, keeping them from getting care elsewhere. They have kept dangerously injured patients away from their desired companions for fear of getting caught committing quackery.

The biggest difference is that unlike the modern safe and legal abortion doctor, Rongetti faced the electric chair when he screwed up. Legalization certainly has been a boon to quack abortionists. But it has made zero difference in how, or how often, often women die at their hands.

Patel Shows: Abortion Practice Hasn't Changed, Abortion Journalism Has

Naresh Patel

I've blogged recently about Narash Patel, the rapey Oklahoma abortionist who got caught selling abortions to women who weren't actually pregnant. Patel is hardly a ground-breaker in that field, though.

Investigative Journalism

While I was looking for something specific about abortionist Ulrich Klopfer, who is in trouble now for failing to report the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, I went digging through the Chicago Sun-Times series, "The Abortion Profiteers." This series ran from November 12 through November 28, 1978.

Assisted by members of the Chicago Better Government Association, Sun-Times reporters Pamela Zekman, Pamela Warrick, and Ellen Warren completed a five-month investigation into Chicago abortion businesses. Volunteers went under cover, getting jobs at the clinics and telling the journalists what they saw.

I was looking, as I said, for something specific about Klopfer. I'll blog that later when I find it. What I did find quickly was an article I'd forgotten had even been in the series: "Pregnant or not, women given abortions," published on November 22.

I'll quote just a few key passages; you can read the whole thing for yourself on PDF if you follow the link above.

[W]orking undercover at the Water Tower Reproductive Center, ... BGA investigator Minda Trossman counted 81 abortion procedures performed on women with negative pregnancy test results. That was 12 per cent of all the women who received abortions during the two months Trossman worked there.

The article then goes on to report on Biogenetics, Ltd.:
During a five-month investigation ... we witnessed some of these painfully needless abortions and saw the aftermath. Women innocently underwent abortions they didn't need and, as a result, suffered massive infections, bruises, wrenching cramps, severe bleeding.

Observing Dr. Arnold Bickham:

Trossman watched once as Bickham turned what was supposed to be a simple examination into a fast abortion on a woman with no apparent signs of pregnancy. ....

"Am I pregnant?" the patient asked.

Bickham ignored her question. Let me examine you," he said. After a brief examination, Bickham turned on the suction machine and started the abortion.

Only then did he answer. "Yes," said Bickham, "definitely pregnant. Definitely pregnant ... but not any more."

The report then goes into a then-popular procedure for doing very early abortions called "menstrual extraction." The method fell out of favor because the embryo is so small very early in the pregnancy that the abortion is often unsuccessful and the woman needs to go through a second, later procedure if she still wants to abort the pregnancy.

Most women who undergo extractions aren't pregnant in the first place. Unless patients are carefully screened, as many as 80 per cent of the women who undergo extractions do so needlessly. .... Many doctors consulted by the Sun Times said they would not even consider performing a menstrual extraction on a woman with a negative pregnancy test. Yet, at the Water Tower and Biogenetics clinics, it's the women with the negative tests who are most often sold the extractions.

Same Old Same Old

Selling abortions to women who only believe they are pregnant isn't something that vanished after "The Abortion Profiteers" and then resurfaced recently with Patel. In March of 1995, I was at Life Dynamics and we were  working on Lime 5, a book about abortion malpractice and its enablers. We got a call from one of Diane Sawyer's assistants. Ms. Sawyer, we were told, had heard rumors that some abortion facilities were selling abortions to women who were not, in fact, pregnant; they just thought they were.

We told Ms. Sawyer's assistant that this was a slow news day kind of story that local journalists would often do: send female reporters to abortion clinic with male reporter's urine specimens, and then document being told that they were pregnant and the attempts to sell them abortions.

We supplied the assistant with what he asked for -- a list of abortionists who were still practicing even after having been caught selling abortions to women who were not pregnant.

Lawson Akpulonu

Though selling abortions to women who weren't pregnant was still a thriving practice, journalism wasn't. Ms. Sawyer's assistant said that she'd reviewed the information we'd sent her (along with additional information we'd sent her about appalling quacks who were still practicing, including a scoop on a California abortionist who was raping patients) and decided the whole thing was "a non-story."

Abortion practice hasn't changed, but abortion-related journalism has. Gone are the days of reporters investigating abortion clinics and informing the public about dangerous or fraudulent practitioners in their midst.

Why Has Journalism Changed?

Why has this changed? The attitudes of the journalists toward abortion hasn't changed. When Ms. Zekman,  Ms. Warrick, and Ms. Warren wrote "The Abortion Profiteers," they weren't anti-abortion reporters seeking to besmirch abortion providers. They were staunchly pro-choice reporters seeking to protect women from unscrupulous and dangerous practitioners. But when we provided Ms. Sawyer with a rogues gallery of Gosnellesque quackery, alerting women to unscrupulous and dangerous practitioners was no longer a priority. And as we saw with the media coverage of Kermit Gosnell and other deplorable abortion practitioners since he was exposed, alerting women to unscrupulous and dangerous practitioners remains a non-priority, just as Ms. Sawyer considered those practitioners to be a non-story.

I think what has happened is that journalists have been developing a deepening sense of unease about what goes on behind the doors of America's abortion facilities. Nobody likes to get bad news about people they respect and trust. We want to continue to think the best of them. And pro-choice journalists, being human, want to be able to respect and trust the abortion-rights organizations they depend upon for nearly everything they write about abortion. Nobody wants to learn that they've been duped, lied to, and used.

The unquestioned presumption that "safe and legal" is the status-quo can not stand under the weight of too much evidence of appalling wrongdoing inside American abortion practices. That evidence must be avoided at all costs, even if it involves averting one's eyes from the Gosnells and the Patels at the cost of women's well-being and even their lives.

Twitter Exchange of the Week: "Do Some Research"

Anybody who has followed this blog is aware of the massive amount of research that goes into my Cemetery of Choice, a wiki which looks at women's abortion deaths in the United States, both before and after legalization. In fact, I have a case from back to before there even was a United States, when the colonies were still part of the British Empire: the death of Sarah Grosvenor in 1742. For that death, my sources are depositions from the investigation into Sarah's death, along with the exhaustive work of researchers that came before me: The Grosvenor/Sessions Abortion: Timeline, A Colonial Abortion Drama, and An Abortion Case in 1742 Connecticut. I cite those sources and provide links. 

The first abortion deaths I ever researched are two I stumbled across in 1985. I had gone to NewsBank (then on microfilm in a library because the internet wasn't a thing yet) and looked for everything I could find on abortion. I discovered the deaths of Gloria Aponte and Ellen Williams. For Gloria's death I cite an Associated Press article from 1989 and a document from the  Connecticut Medical Board. For Ellen's, I cite three articles from the Miami Herald, Dade County (FL) Circuit Court Case No. 85-14112, and Ellen's death certificate. Gloria's abortionist had a receptionist administering general anesthesia. Ellen's abortionist poked holes in her uterus and intestines then sent her home with a bottle of oral antibiotics, which of course did nothing to stop the raging peritonitis that killed her. So I learned not only that legal abortion was killing women, but that there was appalling quackery in Choiceland.

This is the tip of my research iceberg. I spent six months badgering every vital records office and public health department in the United States learning how abortion morbidity (injuries) and mortality were detected, reported, and compiled. What I discovered was that it takes an extraordinary series of coincidences for the Centers for Disease Control to learn about an abortion death, yet their publications gave the impression that they're identifying all of them and giving accurate numbers. 

I also learned about how the CDC investigated abortion deaths: Lisa Koonin "verified" the abortion deaths (though I couldn't learn how she "verified" them) and then handed the information off to a research fellow, who at the time was Clarice Green. Ms. Green would then gather as much substantiating information as she could find and then presented her information to a committee that would deem each abortion death as from a "legal" abortion, an "illegal" abortion, or an "undetermined" abortion. I learned that "legal" and "illegal" as defined by the CDC had nothing to do with whether the abortion facility was operating openly and giving the impression to patients that everything was above-board. Nope. In fact, when investigating four abortion deaths at one clinic in Miami, the CDC classified one of the three as from an "illegal" abortion because the doctor's license was suspended at the time. This would raise the "illegal" numbers and lower the "legal" numbers to make legal abortion appear safer and to give the impression that women were resorting to obviously criminal abortions that could be blamed on prolifers.

I learned how lackadaisical Ms. Koonin was about uncovering abortion deaths. She was in attendance at a National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar in Dallas in 1992. At that seminar, Dr. Robert Crist discussed a patient who had died in 1991 after an abortion at his clinic. Unless he had two patients who died that year, he was clearly talking about Latachie Veal. There was massive publicity about Latachie's death, to the point where her death could only have been more obvious if she had crawled to Atlanta and expired on the floor of Lisa Koonin's office with her aftercare instructions clutched in her hand. Did Koonin "verify" her death?

The CDC doesn't give specifics about deaths they count, but we could get a breakdown by year, age group, and race. Latachie, a 17-year-old Black girl, obviously wasn't counted because the CDC had counted exactly zero deaths of Black patients in the 15-19 year age range in 1991.

But that's still not all the research I've done. I've tracked down the work of other researchers who found the source of the oft-claimed "5,000 to 10,000 women were dying of back-alley abortions before Roe vs. Wade" claim. It was a proponent of abortion legalization, Frederick Taussig, who had put forth this claim in a book he published in 1936. Six years later at a conference, he apologized for publishing bogus numbers based on "the wildest estimations." I found contemporary research on abortion mortality and found how thorough the research into abortion deaths was prior to the mid-1970s, and how sloppy it became afterward. I tracked down a copy of the summary report, prepared by then-Planned Parenthood Medical Director Mary Calderone, for a 1955 conference on abortion in America.

I've tracked down the source of the claim that "abortion is safer than a shot of penicillin." I tracked down the real story behind the "Koop Report" that abortion-rights advocates claim "proves" the safety of legal abortion. 

So one could hardly argue that I haven't done my research. Not by the wildest stretch of the imagination.

But lo! I've had this exchange this week on Twitter! Let me show you the three key tweets. Audrey begins with this oft-repeated abortion-rights tweet: "Roe vs. Wade was NOT the beginning of women having abortions. Roe vs. Wade was the end of women DYING from abortions." It included, of course, the obligatory coat hanger.

I responded with a tweet about an abortion death that had taken place on that date. With a link to the summary, complete with cites, I posted:

So... these 16 entities weren't women? Or they didn't die?

With this graphic:

"At a prestigious NAF member clinic: Nakia was not properly monitored. She was not given oxygen. Her oxygen saturation fell to 74%. She was given the wrong medicine. She became one of at least 16 patients to die in that chain of reputable clinics. "Safe and legal" didn't protect Nakia or those 15 other vulnerable women. Stop trusting the abortion lobby.

Audrey responded with what she evidently considered a clincher to the discussion: "stopped dying from back alley, self-induced abortions, you piece of shit. Do some research.

Of course, if Audry had bothered to click on the link she'd have found the research. But finding out that this "piece of shit" has done a staggering amount of very thorough research over a period of thirty years would mean that Audry would have to question her assumption that "anti-choicers" are ignorant savages. And she might have to question if what she's been told by abortion-rights organizations -- which are really lobbying and public-relations organizations for abortion businesses -- was really true. And that might mean she'd have to question her own beliefs.

And we wouldn't want THAT, would we?

1998: One More Dead for a Chain of NAF Clinics

On December 10, 1998, Nakia "Kia" Jorden, who would have graduated from Hyde Park High School in 2000, died of anesthesia complications during an abortion at the Albany Medical Surgical Center at 5086 North Elston Avenue in Chicago.
 
She left as her survivors her parents and sisters. They filed suit against Albany, Family Planning Associates Medical Group, abortionist Steve Lichtenberg, and nurse anesthetist Lawrence Hill. FPA is a member of the prestigious National Abortion Federation.
 
According to an expert in anesthesia who reviewed Nakia's records, Nakia was obese, had a history of bronchitis, had some upper airway congestion, and had a pulse ox reading of only 94% when she was sedated for her abortion. The records from Albany indicate that "deep sedation if not general anesthesia was used," but Nakia was not given oxygen, and was not monitored by EKG as appropriate when administering this degree of anesthesia to an obese patient. There was no note of any proper method of monitoring Nakia while she was under sedation. Although she was entubated for anesthesia, there was no documentation that anybody verified proper placement of the endotracheal tube. Hill documented using only Brevital, but Lichtenberg noted administration of both Brevital and Stadol.
 
The greatest fault that the anesthesia expert found was that Hill, upon noting a pulse ox reading of only 74% -- clearly showing that Nakia was not getting nearly enough oxygen -- he did nothing to ensure that she was in fact getting enough oxygen into her lungs. Instead, he administered atropine to increase her heart rate, "which likely delayed the critical intervention of ventilating the patient with oxygen."

Other abortion patients who have lost their lives after entrusting them to FPA include:

• Denise Holmes, age 24, 1970
• Patricia Chacon, age 16, 1984
• Mary Pena, age 43, 1984
• Josefina Garcia, age 37, 1985
• Lanice Dorsey, age 17, 1986
• Joyce Ortenzio, age 32, 1988
• Tami Suematsu, age 19, 1988
• Susan Levy, age 30, 1992
• Deanna Bell, age 13, 1992
• Christina Mora, age 18, 1994
• Ta Tanisha Wesson, age 24, 1995
• Maria Leho, 1999
• Kimberly Neil, 2000
• Maria Rodriguez, age 22, 2000
• Chanelle Bryant, age 22, 2004

Anger at Giving Women a Choice

Amanda Marcotte at Slate is pitching a hissy fit over the abortion-pill reversal protocol that helps women who change their minds after taking the first part of the two-step medical abortion.

Secular Pro Life does a good job of untangling exactly what Marcotte's beef is with abortion-pill reversal. 

First there's the issue of whether mifepristone is actually effective. She initially says that it's an important component of the two-pill procedure:

Misoprostol can work on its own—many black-market abortion pills are just misoprostol—but, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, taking the mifepristone improves the likelihood of a safe, complete abortion.

Then Marcotte quotes Dr. Daniel Grossman from Ibis Reproductive Health (which supports abortion). In his account, the second pill (misoprostol) is the key and mifepristone alone does basically nothing, to the point that an abortion pill reversal amounts to a placebo:

Mifepristone "by itself is not an effective abortion regimen," he said, and so many women who just take the first pill will not miscarry if they simply don't take the second. If he had a patient who changed her mind halfway through, he explained, he would recommend doing nothing and monitoring the pregnancy to make sure it's continuing normally.

Marcotte also can't decide where she stands on the safety of the progesterone injections. In one breath, she denounces it as a dangerous "experiment." ....  In the next, she returns to Dr. Grossman, who "says that the progesterone probably won't hurt a woman if she’s under medical supervision." Which she would be, because shockingly, pro-life doctors are doctors too.

If Marcotte is concerned because there is so little research on abortion-pill reversal, why isn't she advocating for pro-choice doctors to investigate how to help women who make the choice to halt abortions in-progress? If it's all about choice, isn't this a choice women should be allowed to know about? In fact, isn't it a choice that the abortion provider should be offering?

It's not until the very end of the article that Marcotte reveals the real reason she and other abortion-rights activists hate abortion-pill reversal. Informing women that this option is available "could mislead the public about the prevalence of abortion regret."

To which I'd say, "So what?" If women really are as firm in their abortion choices as Marcotte and company assert, the bulk of them will blow the whole thing off as irrelevant to them. Informing the public about this option would only offer a choice to those women -- however few -- who are not so confident in their decision.

I think that we need to go even deeper, to what Marcotte doesn't say but which is certainly clear in the subtext: If women are seeking abortion-pill reversal, that raises questions about how unbiased and thorough pre-abortion counseling is. That raises questions about how trustworthy abortion providers are. And that is something the abortion lobby can not afford to let the public start wondering about.

Rapey Abortionist Arrested for Fraud

Abortion doctor
Naresh Patel

KATV Arkansas is reporting about the recent arrest of abortion doctor Naresh Patel for lying to patients by telling them they're pregnant when they're not then charging them $620 for abortion drugs. This is a triple-whammy to the patients, who lose their money, needlessly take drugs that can cause fatal infections, and go through the emotional trauma of believing that they have aborted their babies.

Patel has a long history, though, of willingness to endanger and traumatize patients. It's staggering that, like Kermit Gosnell in Pennsylvania, he was free to practice after all the deplorable things he'd done.

Patient allegations. Click to enlarge.

In 1993, three of Patel's patients came forward reporting that he had raped them. Patient #1 was groggy, recovering from her abortion, when Patel put his penis in her mouth. Patient #2 was groggy from sedation for her abortion when Patel raped her orally, vaginally, and rectally. Patient #3 reported that he had raped her vaginally when she was on the procedure table. Somehow, in spite of ample evidence, including taped phone conversations in which Patel admitted to putting his penis in Patient #1's mouth, he was acquitted.

In 1995, a patient sued him for putting a 6 cm. tear in her cervix and being unable to treat her for this injury because he had no hospital admitting privileges. Another patient sued him in 1994 after he had mangled her uterus and refused to call an ambulance until her family members demanded that he do so; she required an immediate hysterectomy to save her life. Another patient sued in 1994 when she began bleeding and expelling fetal parts after he'd discharged her from his clinic.

News clipping about fetus dumping.
Click to enlarge.

In 1992 he admitted to burning a bag of 60 aborted fetuses in an open field.

In 1990 he was reprimanded for disemboweling a 15-year-old abortion patient. His medical assistant saw him "pull out some tissue and take it in his hands." She then testified that Patel said, "That's her small intestine" before stuffing it back inside. The teen was rushed to a hospital, where surgeons found a hole in her uterus and a fetus floating in blood in her abdomen. She needed to have her fallopian tubes, ovaries, and portion of her colon removed due to injuries.

Redacted patient record recovered
from dumpster. Click to enlarge.

In 2013 Patel also disposed of confidential patient information in a dumpster, including patient consent forms,  financial information, and abortion documentation. He also dumped job applications that had personal information about the applicants. As if that's not enough, he also disposed of  biohazardous materials in the dumpster.


Patel's appalling background didn't stop the University of Oklahoma from entering in an agreement with him in 2013 to be part of a nursing training program.

Sections of agreement between
Patel and U of OK.
Click to enlarge.

If forced to acknowledge this situation at all, the abortion lobby will dismiss Patel as a fluke, just as they dismissed Kermit Gosnell and Robert Alexander and Abu Hayat and Steve Brigham and Hillview Women's Surgical Center and scores of others as flukes. It's not just abortion doctors and abortion facilities, after all, that commit quackery and endanger and kill patients. While that is true, those other doctors don't have a dedicated group of lobbying organizations that enables their quackery under the guise of ensuring access to safe medical care to women. Other doctors don't have political organizations that claim to have their patients' well-being as their number one priority but who in fact put forth lobbying and public-relations campaigns asserting that efforts to close down these quacks will  hurt patients.

I'm not asking prochoice groups and citizens to convert to a prolife stand and join us in attempting to abolish abortion. I'm asking them to put women's safety first by at least checking up on practitioners before referring women to them and to stop derailing efforts to put quacks like Patel out of business.