Three Deaths: 1891, 1971, 1979

At around 9:10 p.m. On December 15, 1891, Dr. J. M. Ryall was called to the Pittsburgh home of 32-year-old Nancy Arabella Hildinger. He found her dead. Her family told Ryall that Nancy had been sick and bleeding from her period. He performed an autopsy. Nancy was a large, muscular woman weighing about 160 lbs. and found her uterus enlarged to about three months size, flabby, inflamed, and marked by an injury caused by some sort of instrument. She had already expelled the fetus. Her lungs were also congested. The coroner's jury found that Nancy had died at the hands of an unknown abortionist.

Twenty-year-old LaSandra Russ, from Berkley, California, went to Los Angeles to have an abortion on December 13, 1971. She was six weeks pregnant. At the time, abortions were legal in California as long as they were performed in a hospital. The abortion was performed at Memorial Hospital of Hawthorne the next day, December 14. LaSandra went into cardiac arrest almost immediately after the abortion. Attempts were made to revive her, but she was finally pronounced dead on December 15, 1971.

Abortionist Andre Nehorayoff was disciplined over the abortion death of "Faye." She was 19 years old when she went to Nehorayoff's office for a safe and legal abortion on December 15, 1979. Nehorayoff failed to record an adequate history or medical exam for Faye. Nehorayoff left Faye in a recovery room at 2:25 p.m., without any monitoring. When somebody finally checked on her an hour later, she was cyanotic (blue) and had no pulse. She was pronounced dead at a hospital. Nehorayoff was also disciplined regarding Patient E, an 18-year-old patient who bled to death after Nehorayoff sent her home in 1983 with a fetal leg still in her uterus.

NAF's Failures Since 2004 Raise Troubling Questions

Yesterday I addressed the failings of the National Abortion Federation after the December 14-15, 2009 site visit that revealed to a NAF representative how bad things were inside Kermit Gosnell's clinic, the Women's Medical Society. NAF did nothing to address the clear danger to women's bodies and lives beyond denying Gosnell's membership application.

But the National Abortion Federation's culpability in the Gosnell fiasco goes back earlier than that. It goes back to the day Gosnell and Leroy Brinkley first started discussing whether he would become an employee of Brinkley's Atlantic Women's Services, a National Abortion Federation member clinic in Delaware.

Atlantic Women's Medical Services

According to USA Today,  Delaware state records indicate that Gosnell was working at Atlantic Women's Medical Services as early as 2004. This means that patients that specifically should have been protected from the likes of Gosnell by the National Abortion Federation had been handed off to him by a member clinic for five years prior to the site visit. These patients would have been handed off to Gosnell indefinitely were it not for a totally unrelated drug raid that closed the Women's Medical Society down in 2010.

Since as early as 2004, women such as the mother of Baby Boy A would walk into that highly reputable clinic, which would collect their money and turn them over to Gosnell. He'd start their abortions at the NAF clinic, then send them to his clinic to finish. Those women would end up doped within inches of their lives by untrained people and left to moan on blood-stained recliners amid the fleas and cat feces.

Does the National Abortion Federation do nothing to ensure that the quality of doctors who work at their member clinics is at least marginal? "Better than Gosnell" isn't that high a bar to clear. Do they have no policy guidelines for vetting doctors? Do they have no mechanism for checking on the backgrounds of the doctors that their clinics use before admitting those clinics as members? Do they not periodically verify the quality of doctors their clinics use in order to ensure ongoing quality of care in those member clinics?

Screenshot of NAF membership requirements
Click to enlarge.

According to their web site, they do. They state (emphasis in original):

• NAF sets the standards for abortion care in the U.S. and Canada. Therefore, NAF member facilities are required to participate in periodic quality assurance site visits. Currently, NAF’s Clinical Services Department conducts Quality Assurance and Improvement (QAI) visits with prospective members prior to their acceptance into NAF and on a regular basis thereafter.
• We will also ask for specific information about the individual medical personnel working at your facility. The Physician’s Questionnaire must be completely filled out for each full- or part-time employee who provides abortion care. Questions regarding date of birth, social security number, and DEA number are required for the National Practitioners Data Bank, which NAF uses as part of its certification process. All information is held in the strictest confidence and will be redacted, at your request, once the application process is complete.
• Each year, NAF publishes Clinical Policy Guidelines (CPGs). All NAF Provider Members adhere to these evidence-based clinical standards. A copy of the CPGs will be sent with your membership package and a CPG compliance form is attached to the application.

Whatever they might have in writing, in actual practice the National Abortion Federation clearly does not have even a remotely adequate mechanism to ensure that their member clinics only use doctors who can be trusted to provide their patients with at least minimal quality of care. Either that, or Gosnell met their standards. Neither possibility inspires confidence.

One could legitimately argue that NAF has no responsibility for the patients of non-member providers, but they do have a responsibility toward the patients of their own member clinics. Regarding Gosnell, they failed miserably for at least six years, and would have failed for far longer if left to their own devices. Further, it wasn't until 2011, a year after the raid that exposed the conditions inside Gosnell's clinic for all the world to see, that NAF finally expelled all of Leroy Brinkley's clinics from their ranks. For an additional year, they had entrusted women to the care of a man who had demonstrated either an inability or an unwillingness to protect his own patients from somebody like Gosnell.

How many Gosnellesque doctors are currently working at National Abortion Federation facilities? How many women who are trusting NAF with their bodies and lives are being handed off to appalling quacks? Will NAF get to work ferreting these guys out and expelling those that hire them from their ranks?

Considering the "at least they're better than the Women's Medical Society" quality of an abundance of NAF member clinics, I sincerely doubt it.

Five Abortion Deaths, 1911 - 1991

There are five abortion deaths in the Cemetery of Choice that took place on this date: three illegal and two legal. Four of the five were performed by doctors.

On December 14, 1911, 34-year-old mother-of-four Ella Kettler died at German American Hospital in Chicago from an abortion that Dr. Robert H. Foster had perpetrated at his practice on December 2.  Ella, a homemaker, had named Foster as her abortionist in a deathbed statement. Foster was held by the Coroner's Jury and indicted on December 19, but the case never went to trial.

On December 14, 1916, 19-year-old Eleanor Dillon died at Chicago's Columbus Hospital from septic peritonitis caused by a criminal abortion.  Eleanor had named Dr. M.R. Perlstein as her abortionist in a deathbed statement.

Walter Hufnagel of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, noticed on Wednesday, December 4, 1918, that his wife, 19-year-old Emma Hufnagel, was sick with body aches. By Saturday, December 7, Emma's mother, Louise Jackson, was told of Emma's illness and went to visit her. Emma told her mother that, since her period had been about two weeks late, and believing herself to be pregnant, she had used a catheter on herself on November 30. On December 9, the family agreed to move Emma to her mother's house, but Emma didn't do any better under her mother's care, so they the next day they brought her to Presbyterian Hospital. In spite of doctors' best efforts, Emma died of peritonitis and septicemia at around 2:15 a.m. on December 14.

Twenty-year-old LaSandra Russ, from Berkley, California, went to Los Angeles to have an abortion on December 13, 1971. She was six weeks pregnant. At the time, abortions were legal in California as long as they were performed in a hospital.  The abortion was performed at Memorial Hospital of Hawthorne the next day, December 14.  LaSandra went into cardiac arrest almost immediately after the abortion. Attempts were made to revive her, but she was finally pronounced dead on December 15, 1971.

Edith Cote was 38 years old when she submitted to a safe and legal abortion in New York. On December 14, 1991, she was unresponsive and was taken to the emergency room at Syosset Hospital.  Hospital staff were unable to save Edith's life. Her cause of death was listed on her death certificate as pulmonary amniotic embolism after an induced abortion.

The National Abortion Federation and Kermit Gosnell

Dr. Kermit Gosnell

After the death of Karnamaya Mongar in 2009, quack abortionist Kermit Gosnell applied to become a member of the National Abortion Federation
(NAF).  According to their web site, "The mission of the National Abortion Federation is to ensure safe, legal, and accessible abortion care, which promotes health and justice for women."  (emphasis in the original)

NAF's actions with regard to Kermit Gosnell illustrate exactly how dedicated this organization truly is to the "safe" part of "safe, legal, and accessible abortion care." Their dedication to "accessible" can not be doubted, given their willingness to allow Gosnell to continue his practice without let or hindrance even after one of their inspectors had seen his clinic with her own eyes. The National Abortion Federation has shown such dedication to "accessible" in the past.

In 1991, when 60 Minutes was investigating an abortion mill where one woman had been allowed to die and another left incapacitated, Barbara Radford, then-president of the National Abortion Federation, 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."

Judging by the organization's actions, or rather lack thereof, regarding Gosnell, the "choices when it comes to abortion services" NAF wants women to have includes the quality of services provided by practitioners like Kermit Gosnell and facilities like his Women's Medical Society. The NAF evaluator testified to the Grand Jury about what she observed during the site visit on  December 14 and 15, 2009:


Women's Medical Society

{S]he found that the facility was packed with so much “stuff, kind of crowded and piled all over the place,” that she couldn’t find a space to put her small overnight bag. She found the facility’s layout confusing, and was concerned that patients could not find their way around it or out of it. She was also concerned that there were plants everywhere, including in the procedure room and rooms designated as “labs.”
Most alarming was the bed where Gosnell told her out-of-state patients were allowed to spend the night. These patients were unattended and it was difficult to locate the bathroom facilities and the exits. Such a practice does not meet NAF protocols.

The NAF evaluator watched a few first-trimester procedures. She noticed that no one was monitoring or taking vital signs of patients who were sedated during procedures. She asked Gosnell about the pulse oximeter that should have been used for monitoring, but he told her it was broken. Apparently, Karnamaya Mongar’s death a month earlier had not caused Gosnell to obtain equipment that worked.

The evaluator did not observe Gosnell’s practice of allowing unlicensed workers to sedate patients when he was not at the facility, as she was there only when Gosnell was there. Such a practice would not comply with NAF standards. The evaluator did note, however, that while she was talking to Gosnell in his office, a patient appeared to have been sedated by one of the staff. Such an action does not comport with NAF standards either. The evaluator cautioned Gosnell that he should make sure he was complying with state requirements because many states – including Pennsylvania – do not allow unlicensed workers to administer IV medication.

Clinic anesthesia chart created
by 16-year-old employee

The level of medication administered was also troubling to the evaluator. She testified that Gosnell’s own description of the effects of his routine second-trimester dose – that the patient would feel no pain at all – was a description of deep sedation. She added: “that … would really not be a safe situation … for him to be handling himself.” She explained that when deep sedation or general anesthesia is administered, NAF standards not only require that the doctor performing the procedure be present when the anesthesia is administered, they also require that another doctor or an anesthesiologist administer the sedation and monitor the patient. Instead, Gosnell had Lynda Williams, Sherry West, and his other unlicensed workers routinely administer anesthesia without proper supervision or appropriate monitoring of patients.

The evaluator explained to the Grand Jury, as did several medical experts, that because everyone reacts differently to anesthesia, a doctor has to be prepared for a patient to slip into a level of sedation beyond that intended. In cases in which Gosnell’s objective was deep sedation, therefore, he should have been prepared for the patient to react as if under general anesthesia. Significantly, it is not uncommon for patients under general anesthesia to lose the ability to breathe on their own. Gosnell’s clinic – without the drugs, staff, or equipment necessary to monitor, resuscitate, or assist his patients in breathing – was not even close to meeting NAF standards or any other standard of care. The evaluator noted that Pennsylvania requires that anesthesia be administered only by licensed personnel, a regulation that Gosnell failed to follow even during the NAF review.
 

Consent form
Click to enlarge.

Aside from these life-threatening practices, the evaluator noted numerous deficiencies in the clinic’s recordkeeping, including no notation of RH blood-typing and no record of sedation medications administered or the level of sedation. The clinic’s consent procedures also failed to meet NAF standards. Even with the evaluator watching, patients were not being informed of the risks of the medications, the sedation, or the procedure itself.

The evaluator testified that during the “counseling” she witnessed, a patient was told that Pennsylvania requires a 24-hour waiting period between when a patient is counseled and when the abortion can be performed. After stating the requirement, however, the counselor, according to the evaluator, said: “Okay, well. When do you want to come back for the abortion? Do you want to come back at 8 p.m.?” When the patient’s mother said, “but I thought we had to wait 24 hours,” the staff person responded, “if you want to come back at 8 p.m., you can come back at 8 p.m.”

Patient confidentiality is another important standard for NAF, and another that Gosnell flagrantly violated. The evaluator was troubled to find:

Throughout the office, there were patient charts everywhere. On desks, on this – the area in that upstairs sleeping area by the sleeping room. There were piles and piles and piles of medical records. That was – if that were in an area that was closed off and nobody had access to it, charts being stored there weren’t a big deal, but if there were patients in the sleeping room, who had to leave there to go to the restroom, they had full access to all of these people’s medical information if they wanted to look through it, it was very, very concerning to me.

When asked if she had ever seen anything like the conditions and practices she observed at Gosnell’s clinic in any of the roughly one hundred clinics she has visited in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the evaluator answered: “No.”

Based on her observations, the evaluator determined that there were far too many deficiencies at the clinic and in how it operated to even consider admitting Gosnell to NAF membership. On January 4, 2010, she wrote to Gosnell informing him of NAF’s decision and outlining the areas in which his clinic was not in compliance. The evaluator told the Grand Jury that this was the first time in her experience that NAF had outright rejected a provider for membership. Usually, if a clinic is able to fix deficiencies and come into compliance with the standards, NAF will admit them. Gosnell’s clinic, however, was deemed beyond redemption.

Gosnell's application was denied. This was the only case in the evaluator's knowledge in which an abortion facility's application was outright rejected, with most facilities being allowed to remedy any defects. While noting that they had no legal burden to do so, the Grand Jury questioned why an organization which supposedly exists to ensure access to safe abortion care for women did not report the gross inadequacies of the Women's Medical Society to the authorities.

Atlantic Women's Medical Service

This failure to report is hardly the beginning, though, of the National Abortion Federation's doings with Gosnell. In fact, Gosnell had been working part time for years at a National Abortion Federation clinic in Delaware. Women, such as the mother of Baby Boy A, would walk into that highly reputable clinic, which would collect their money and turn them over to Gosnell. He'd start their abortions at the NAF clinic, then send them to his clinic to finish. Those women would end up doped within inches of their lives by untrained people and left to moan on blood-stained recliners amid the fleas and cat feces. Given the blithe indifference of Pennsylvania authorities to the conditions at Gosnell's clinic, NAF's failure to report had no real impact on the fact that Gosnell was able to remain open. If a detailed and alarming report from a former employee could be blown off in its entirety, a heads-up from NAF would no doubt have been greeted with a resounding, "Meh." Reporting Gosnell's clinic to officials, however, was not the only action NAF could have taken to protect women from appallingly unsafe abortion practitioners. The first actions they failed to take were both years earlier and ongoing. Those inactions are in regard to Atlantic Women's Medical Service, the NAF member clinic where Gosnell worked part-time. Does the National Abortion Federation do nothing to ensure that the quality of doctors who work at their member clinics is at least adequate? Do they have no policy guidelines for vetting doctors? Do they have no mechanism for checking on the backgrounds of the doctors their clinics use before admitting those clinics as members? Do they not verify the quality of doctors their clinics use periodically in order to ensure ongoing quality of care in those member clinics?  Whatever they might have in writing, clearly in actual practice they do nothing to ensure that their member clinics only use doctors who can be trusted to provide their patients with at least minimal quality of care.
Further inactions follow the site inspection and the rejection of Gosnell's application. Why was there no word put out, at least among their member clinics, to beware of Gosnell? Why were National Abortion Federation member clinics not instructed to immediately sever any existing ties they might have with Gosnell and to blacklist him as a future employee?

Karnamaya Mongar

The final inaction is a broader issue. If NAF feared public knowledge of the conditions inside Gosnell's facility, could they not at least have put out word to referral sources that might send women to Kermit Gosnell? Karnamaya Mongar had been referred to her death by another abortion facility.  Desiree Hawkins, one of the patients whose baby's feet ended up in a jar on Gosnell's shelf, was referred to Gosnell by Hagerstown Reproductive Health Services. The Grand Jury Report noted:  

Gosnell [relied] on referrals from other areas where abortions as late as 24 weeks are unavailable. More and more of his patients came from out of state and were late second-trimester patients. Many of them were well beyond 24 weeks. Gosnell was known as a doctor who would perform abortions at any stage, without regard for legal limits. His
patients came from several states, including Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, as well as from Pennsylvania cities outside the Philadelphia area, such as Allentown.

Surely significantly fewer women would have been subjected to the horrors and risks of Gosnell's practice if referrals from other clinics had dried up. The National Abortion Federation had a chance to protect at least those women who were getting referrals from those clinics, yet failed to take any action toward that end.

If one is convinced that late abortions are beneficial to women there are, after all, other abortion facilities in the area that clinics could have sent women to. There is one clinic each in New Jersey and New York that take patients to 24 weeks and one in Maryland that takes patients who are even past 26 weeks. Granted, two of those facilities are documented not to be exemplary, but "better than Gosnell" is not a high bar. Surely it was a goal that the National Abortion Federation could have urged other clinics to aim for and a goal the clinics in question could easily have attained.So far, nobody has asked the National Abortion Federation what excuses they can possibly have.

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.