ex-abortionists: Why they quit, The

Human Life Review, Spring 2000 by Meehan, Mary

Women whose babies were aborted at other clinics sometimes were physical wrecks as well. Judith Fetrow said she saw a doctor "perforate a woman's uterus and then lie about the severity of the perforation." Her clinic "often had women come back with severe infections caused by retained tissue or incomplete abortions-especially when we were training new doctors."

Perforating or tearing the uterus appears to be far more common than lay people realize; even competent doctors can do it. Dr. Jarrett explained that "the pregnant uterus in the first trimester is often the consistency of a wet paper bag"; it is frighteningly easy to push a suction curette or other instrument through its wall. 17

Hellen Pendley recalled how a doctor at her clinic, performing an abortion on a fourteen-year-old girl, tore her uterus and pulled the bowel through. He asked Pendley, "What do I do?" She interpreted that to mean, "What do I do to make sure that this stays under wraps?" Consulting the girl's medical record, Pendley found that she lived some distance from the clinic and was accompanied only by a friend. So Pendley said, "Poke it back in, and send her home." When she later described the case, Pendley admitted: "Whether she lived or died, I do not know."

Once an acquaintance of Pendley's alerted her about a young woman who was desperately ill in a local hospital. "She's comatose right now," Pendley's informant said. "We're getting ready to amputate her limbs. She's throwing blood clots. I don't think she's gonna make it. But we were able to determine that she had had an abortion today." They didn't know where the abortion was done, so Pendley drove to her own clinic at midnight to see if it was involved. She did not find any record of the woman at her clinic; if she had, she would have shredded it. "We had a personal shredder in my office for that purpose," she said. "There would not have been a medical record if the D.A. had shown up on my doorsteps the next morning."

Pendley described how Atlanta abortion providers responded to news reports that a woman had suffered cardiac arrest at one clinic. (The woman never recovered from her coma, and died months later in a nursing home.) Worried people from the clinics in the area met, but expressed no concern about the woman in coma. "We didn't care what happened to her," Pendley recalled. "We cared about what happened to us."18

Pendley said that state inspectors, visiting the clinic where the woman's abortion had been done, found:

a patient chart claiming that the woman had recovered from anesthesia and could be discharged

vacuum tubing that had not been properly disinfected

insects in the clinic

"The list goes on and on and on," Pendley remarked, "and this is in a state where it's regulated."

Some clinics, Pendley suggested, put women at risk of Hepatitis B or HIV/AIDS infection. "If you reuse a vacuum-aspiration cannula," she said, "you're going to infect the next person. But when you get busy in a clinic, there is no time to sterilize instruments. I'm sorry. You wash 'em; you repack 'em; and you reuse 'em:'19