Category: On Abortions Dangers

Charles Swenson was concerned about the poor quality of abortion clinics after abortion was legalized in New York state, and the fact that so many clinics were badly run and dangerous to women.  He went went to the New York state attorney general, and told him that because of the new law they needed to start talking about the quality of care, of shaping up the clinics. The attorney general said:

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, there’s nothing in the law that says the state will play any role in the quality of care.”

I said, “you’ve got to be kidding.”

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) 139

There are still very few regulations that abortion clinics have to meet in order to operate. Many dangerous clinics continue to operate unlicensed and unregulated, and many clinics are rarely or never inspected. Pro-choice groups fight against laws that would make abortion safer. Read about some of these bad abortion clinics here.

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A doctor describes an abortion complication that he witnessed:

“What happened was this guy perforated; he thought it was the cord and pulled out – they measured in the laboratory – 8 feet of small bowels… He panicked and blew his cool. He got the 8 feet out know what he did? He cut it with scissors and then he put it in the bucket and then he called me.

So she’s in the hospital. She had a bowel repair, and the general surgeon finished and everybody’s telling me to do a hysterectomy on this 17-year-old kid from Birmingham, Alabama, no children. I decided no. She had a hole in the top of her uterus; I opened it up and removed the fetus… We sewed up the uterus… The patient had a very stormy course but she left the hospital with her pre-reproductive organs and she was okay… What I do want to know, and I’ve always wondered about these many, many years, was whether this kid never had any children.”

Dr. Rothstein

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) 119

Learn about other botched abortions here.

And read about some woman who died in botched legal abortions.

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An abortionist describes a D&C, an abortion procedure in which the  lining of the uterus is scraped to remove the baby and placenta. Now most early abortions are done by the suction curettage method, but in most cases the uterus is still scraped to remove remaining tissue that the  machine doesn’t suction out. So this quote is still relevant to the way abortions are performed today.

“I always used to tell medical students it was like being blindfolded and trying to scrape wet cotton balls out of a wet paper bag and getting all the balls without tearing the bag… The uterus was so soft, it was very easy to poke something through the uterus.”

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) page 58

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Abortionist who set up a clinic shortly before Roe versus Wade, when abortion was only legal in a few states:

“We did about 60 abortions a day. It was a wonderful service, and women were coming from all over the United States where it was illegal. They traveled long distances… And then the problem of getting care for them after they’d go home. They’d call up and be in trouble and we didn’t know where to send them. There were no doctors to take care of them. It was quite an experience… Back in the early days, the clinic had an ambulance that was kept on hand all the time. It was rarely, if ever, used and finally they got rid of it. It just fell apart from no use but we didn’t know if it might be necessary if a woman started bleeding in the clinic and we had to rush her to the hospital…”

Sending women home without follow-up care and operating without a means of transportation for injured women put women’s lives and health at risk in his clinic.

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) page 18

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“Postabortion complications are never made known to the public, because abortion has a built-in cover-up. Women want to deny it and forget it, not talk about it.”

Carol Everett, former director of four different abortion clinics, in a personal conversation with Randy Alcorn.

Randy Alcorn “Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments” (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2000) 183

To read Carol Everett’s full testimony, go here.

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Eugene Fox, doctor who referred for abortion shortly after Roe V Wade:

“Some of these places were terrible. They were just back alley shops that open their doors…”

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) 138

Many people don’t realize that very few legal safeguards will put in place after Roe versus Wade to protect women from unscrupulous and negligent abortion providers. In many cases, “back alley” abortionists simply hung up their shingles and began performing legal abortions. To read more about illegal abortions before Roe V Wade, go here.

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Sarina, who worked as an abortionist at Planned Parenthood before going to a private clinic, describes her experiences working at the Planned Parenthood:

“Sarina’s first job as an abortionist was with Planned Parenthood. She had not learned how to perform abortions in medical school, so she learned how to do first-trimester abortions on the job. The environment at the Planned Parenthood clinic was not much better than her prior experiences. “It was a rude awakening for me to go into a job where I was the only female physician…and to basically be discriminated against….I got disillusioned very quickly with the place.”

Planned Parenthood, whose mantra is safe, legal abortion, hires a doctor who does not know how to do abortions? She had to learn “on the job?” I would hate to be one of the women she learned on!

Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic by Wendy Simonds, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ., 1996 p 58

 

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Abortionist who switched from performing the occasional abortion in his office to working in an abortion clinic said the following:

“I’d never worked in a clinic. I’d always had my own private practice and run my own show… I was accustomed to operating in a very serious room with caps and gowns and masks and scrubbing for every procedure and to suddenly go in and there’d be a patient up in stirrups with no drape… It was a shocker. And I thought, were bound to have some calamities, we’re going to have some accidents, it’s just bound to happen. And it was like just walking on egg shells.”

Carole Joffe. Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe Versus Wade (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1995) 19

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News, WAFB, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 4, 1999; Executive Order MJF 995, Declaration of Public Health and Safety Emergency, dated February 5, 1999 (signed by Gov. Mike Foster)

 “An undercover news team entered a Baton Rouge, Louisiana abortion clinic and videotaped rusty surgical instruments and blood splattered surgical tables and floors.”

Denise M Burke, ESQ “Abortion Clinic Regulations: Combating the True “Back Alley”

Erika Bachiochi. The Cost of “Choice”: Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2004)

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Angela Lanfranchi, M.D., FACS “the Abortion – Breast Cancer Link: the Studies and the Science”

After discussing at length the connection between abortion and breast cancer, the author said the following:

“Doctors fear the repercussions to their name and their career if they disclose what is already known about the ABC link.

In my own case, I have worried that I would lose referrals from OB/GYN’s who perform abortions when I have lectured on this topic. Even a family doctor who had referred numerous patients said to me, “you don’t tell my patients that, do you?” I worried about my practice. I can understand why a Harvard professor of risk assessment at a Boston Cancer Institute would tell me privately that she knew abortion was a risk factor for cancer but would not bring it up in her talks on risk (meanwhile encouraging me to speak out about it.) She might lose her job. I have a colleague who did lose an appointment at a medical school in New York because he was quoted as giving credence to a study supporting ABC link in the medical Journal of Lancet. One pro-choice epidemiologist who co-authored a study evincing a link between abortion and breast cancer told me she refused to speak on the topic anymore because she was tired of “having rocks thrown at her.”

I learned what that felt like firsthand when I presented a research project in a session at the San Antonio breast Cancer symposium in December 2001. Although the abstract had been accepted six months earlier and had the word “abortion” in the title, the program director accused me of using his meeting as a platform to hand out antiabortion literature. More troubling is that several years ago, the president of the American Society of Breast Surgeons told me that her board did not want to have a speaker on the subject at their meeting because they felt it was “too political.” I argued that it was actually medical, not political, but to no avail. The director of the Miami Breast Cancer conference also felt it was “too political.” He returned the check I had given him to pay for an exhibit table at the conference.”

Erika Bachiochi. The Cost of “Choice”: Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2004) page 85

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