Two women’s abortion deaths in 2020 are sparking renewed calls for better oversight of the abortion industry.
The pro-life watchdog group Operation Rescue recently uncovered details about the two women’s deaths: April Lowery, 29, died after an abortion at the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Cynthia Quintana-Morales, 30, died after an abortion at Eastside Gynecology in New York City.
Cheryl Sullenger of Operation Rescue told One News Now that both abortion facilities are still operating, despite these and numerous other safety problems.
Meanwhile, feminists who support abortion have been silent about these women’s deaths. Others attack pro-life leaders’ efforts, claiming that abortion facility regulations are not really about protecting women.
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Speaking with the conservative news outlet, Sullenger pointed to recent inspection reports at the Tuscaloosa facility that found “a lot of rusty surgical instruments” and staff who were not trained properly to sterilize tools.
“Nobody seemed to know how to properly sterilize [the medical instruments] – nobody knew how to work the autoclave machine,” she told One News Now. “There was contamination pretty much everywhere. There were major infection-control issues.”
Then there was Lowery’s death. According to her autopsy, she suffered a “perforation of the left portion of the cervix,” which caused massive internal bleeding and ultimately led to her death. Her unborn baby also was left in her womb, dead. Lowery died after an abortion at the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on May 7, 2020.
Sullenger told One News Now that they have serious concerns about the current abortionist at the facility, too.
“Her name is Leah Torres,” she said. “She has had a lot of problems elsewhere, and we believe that that’s really bad news for women and their unborn babies. The medical board was able to determine that she had lied repeatedly on her medical license application, so they denied it. She worked for a little while kind of as a consultant, and then just a couple of weeks ago she was able to get licensed.”
Sullenger said New York City abortionist Ronald Blatt is another concern after one of his patients, Quintana-Morales, died after she was given an anesthetic drug called Brevital in 2020.
Here’s more from the report:
“It was a drug that actually slowed down the activity in the brain and the nervous system and something went wrong. She did not wake up,” Sullenger describes. “They sent her to the hospital and she died a few days later from cardio-respiratory arrest as a result of a lack of oxygen to the brain.”
The woman’s grieving husband filed a malpractice/wrongful death lawsuit and settled out of court for $1.25 million. But Sullenger points out that only five months later Blatt was involved in another abortion that Operation Rescue says was botched; that woman filed suit based on an allegation of unskilled and negligent staff.
Sullenger said the state medical board does not appear to have taken any action against Blatt, despite evidence of multiple botched abortions.
Operation Rescue and other pro-life organizations have been calling for years for better oversight of abortion facilities because they know that women often are second victims of abortion along with their unborn babies. Numerous reports of unsafe and unsanitary abortion facilities have been documented all across the country.
Hundreds of women have died along with their unborn babies in supposedly “safe, legal” abortions in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control. However, pro-life researchers believe the number is actually much higher because a number of states do not report their abortion data to the federal government.
