Wall Street Journal, July 31, 1996
By Candice C. Crandall
Just how much bad medicine is being glossed over in the name of choice? "A lot," according to Warren Hern, a nationally known specialist in abortion and author of "Abortion Practice," the nation's most widely used textbook on the subject. Epidemiologists with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will say only that they cannot be certain that all abortion-related deaths are being reported. But today, anyone can sit down at a computer--as I did recently--and pull up hundreds of newspaper accounts of death, injury and fraud at walk-in abortion clinics across the country.
These are not the pristine establishments where Radcliffe girls might go for a weekend abortion. These are the clinics that advertise in Spanish-language newspapers and neighborhood weeklies, pay kickbacks to sleazy phone referral services, and lure women through the doorway with names that echo the political lingua franca--"choice" and "reproductive health." These are the nightmarish abortion mills where black and Hispanic women are dying at a rate 2.5 times that of white women; where doctors stop midway through a procedure to shake down patients for more cash and turn them out into the street bleeding if they can't pay up; where staff members seldom change the bloody sheets on the beds; where patients scream through their abortions with no anesthesia because administering painkillers is costly and risky. In an assembly line that performs as many as 90 abortions a day, there simply isn't time to take care of these problems. Yuri Kolyadenko/The Women's Quarterly
Most abortion providers, one assumes, are reasonably competent, as they were even before 1973, when Planned Parenthood estimated that nine out of 10 illegal abortions were being performed by qualified physicians. But prior to Roe v. Wade, the fact that these doctors were often breaking the law also kept the numbers of abortions low--as few as 200,000 per year by some estimates--and effectively discouraged most doctors from taking unnecessary risks with their patients. Legalization removed these constraints. An unscrupulous abortion doctor could simply hang out his shingle, confident that he would be shielded by abortion-rights rhetoric that uniformly proclaims him a hero, even if his motive is not compassion but greed. . . .
There are no federal agencies tracking injuries from abortion. Suspected abortion deaths reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention--some 550 between 1972 and 1990--have remained low in relation to the total number of procedures--about 27 million over the same period.
But how reliable are these figures? CDC officials themselves have expressed doubts. According to Clarice Green, who handles the CDC's abortion data, state health agencies are not required by law to report abortion deaths to the CDC. To estimate death rates, the CDC has to rely increasingly on alternative sources such as private citizens, maternal mortality surveys, even newspaper articles. This is clearly inadequate. Preliminary CDC data for 1991 and 1992, for example, list only two abortion-related deaths, one for each year. Antiabortion groups, however, can provide death certificates and autopsy reports showing at least 20 abortion-related deaths over that same period.
In September 1994, three months after the murder of an abortion doctor at the Pensacola Ladies Center, Florida health officials were publicly embarrassed by Associated Press reports that two doctors at the same clinic, listed in good standing with the Florida Board of Medicine, had lengthy records of medical and ethical violations.
The failure of state licensing boards to put such doctors out of business eventually leaves it up to law enforcement officials. Three years ago, a botched abortion performed in Queens, N.Y., by David Benjamin left Guadalupe Negron, a 33-year-old mother of three, sitting on his operating table covered in her own vomit, watching her life bleed out of her. Dr. Benjamin, who was convicted of second-degree murder, had scores of complaints on file and had been barred from two hospitals for gross negligence before the state Health Department finally revoked his license, just two weeks before Negron's death. Health Department officials permitted him to continue practicing while the decision was under appeal . . . .[emphasis added]
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More women are dying because far, far more abortions are being performed and because abortion is the gutter-practice of medicine, suffused at all levels with a gross disregard for life itself.