The late-term abortion business in southern California founded by the abortion practitioner who invented the partial-birth abortion procedure has closed down for good.
The California Catholic newspaper first reported on the shuttering of the Eve Surgical Center in Los Angeles, which has a message on its answering machine saying the abortion business, which first opened in the 1980s, is now closed. James McMahon, who once boasted that he developed the partial-birth abortion procedure, first ran the abortion facility, though he quickly came under heat from the California Medical Board, which repeatedly accused him of putting the health of women at risk.
According to the report:
McMahon further stated that he did 1,200 abortions annually until his death in 1995 from a brain aneurysm. Shortly before his death he was given last rites and a Catholic burial at Holy Cross Cemetery (Field of Martyrs section). A few days before his death McMahon provided key testimony to Sen. Ted Kennedy to read in Congress in support of Partial Birth abortion.
In 1996, McMahon’s wife, Gail, sold Eve Surgical to Dr. Christopher Columbus Dotson, a graduate of Howard University Medical School. In October 1997 Dotson filed articles of incorporation with the California Secretary of State for Eve Surgical Center. On December 2, 1997, the Secretary of State suspended the Eve Surgical corporation.
Like McMahon, Dotson paid no attention and kept the abortion business going. He secretly operated under the name of Youlom Medical Corp. Dotson has lived at an elegant mansion in Beverly Hills. The exclusive property, with luxury amenities, is for sale for $ 9 million. Dotson is currently 80 years old. He has had a total of 63 civil cases filed against him in Los Angeles County Superior Court, including 17 for medical malpractice, one for divorce, and one for paternity.
The medical board disciplined Dotson for causing the death of Ramona Jackson in 1992, but ignored the death of Oriane Shevin in 2005, despite a $1 million settlement in the wrongful death case against Dotson.
More recently, in 2010, Dotson came under fire when he was put in a supervisory role over an abortion practitioner who significant disciplinary issues for hurting women in botched abortions.
As LifeNews reported then:
The California Medical Board admitted it made a mistake when it put a doctor with discipline problems in charge of overseeing an abortion practitioner who then killed a woman in a botched abortion procedure. The board admitted it violated its own rules.
The admission came in relation to their naming Christopher Dotson, a West Los Angeles-based obstetrician-gynecologist who had been placed on administrative probation, to oversee Andrew Rutland.
Rutland surrendered his license in October 2002 after a two-year state investigation that resulted in accusations of negligence, misconduct and incompetence in his treatment of 20 pregnant women, newborns and gynecological patients
He then faced a hearing in front of the California Medical Board at a hearing in San Diego after documents showed Rutland killed a woman during an abortion by administering anesthesia to her and not knowing the proper dosage.
Candis Cohen, the medical board spokeswoman, admitted to the Los Angeles Times that the board violated its own rules requiring doctors who oversee others to have clean disciplinary records.
“This is a staff error that has been fixed,” she said.
The Times indicated Dotson had his own run-in with abortion problems.
In 2007, Dotson and another physician, Josepha Seletz, of Eve Surgical Center, agreed to pay a $1 million settlement when they wrongly gave the mifepristone abortion drug to Oriane Shevin, a mother of two. She was not supposed to get the abortion drug and eventually died when she acquire a fatal infection.
The patient in the case where Rutland killed her despite Dotson’s oversight, Ying Chen, visited Rutland’s San Gabriel facility last July for a second-trimester abortion.
Rutland injected lidocaine, a local anesthetic, in her cervix and the woman began to have an immediate reaction. The abortion practitioner began to perform CPR but the board documents say there was a “significant delay” in him calling 911 for emergency medical help for the woman.
The woman was in cardiac arrest when the ambulance arrived and was taken to a hospital, where she died six days later. An autopsy revealed Rutland gave the woman the wrong dosage of the anesthesia.
The case is pending and the medical board asked Rutland to stop doing abortions until its conclusion.
The Times indicated records showed Dotson wrote favorably of Rutland even after the failed abortion killed the woman.
In a report to the state, the Times says Dotson wrote, “Dr. Rutland and I discussed at length the tragic death of a patient by the name of Ying Chen who after the injection of a local anesthetic preparatory for a pregnancy termination suffered an anaphylactic reaction. In spite of appropriate resuscitation efforts, she succumbed in the hospital.”
But in a written decision, Administrative Law Judge James Ahler said Rutland’s doing the second-trimester abortion in a facility inadequately equipped for emergencies “casts doubt on his professional judgment,” according to the Times.
Judge Ahler said Rutland “presents a risk of danger and there is a likelihood of injury to the public” if he continues practicing medicine and he disagreed with Rutland’s contention that he was not actually performing an abortion at the time.
