A Florida judge recommended Tuesday that abortionist Christopher Saputa be permanently banned from performing surgical abortions after three women nearly died of botched abortions under his care.
Saputa’s license has been temporarily suspended since last July when state health inspectors described him as a “great public danger.”
In an order this week, Judge W. David Watkins recommended that the Florida Board of Medicine suspend Saputa’s medical license for one year and permanently ban him from performing obstetric and gynecological surgeries, The Tampa Free Press reports.
Saputa worked for the American Family Planning abortion facility in Pensacola, which the state shut down last May for “endangering the health, safety and welfare” of its patients. State health officials said the abortion facility had hundreds of safety violations, the worst involving nearly killing three women in botched abortions within a span of nine months.
In March, an order from the Division of Administrative Hearings permanently revoked the abortion facility’s license and banned anyone with direct or indirect ownership of it from ever applying for another abortion license in Florida.
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Saputa also is licensed to practice medicine in West Virginia, according to state health records. However, it is not clear if he currently is practicing there.
When Saputa was interviewed about the case, he pushed blame to the facility, the report said. He also said he had not read the facilities’ procedures on emergency management. The report also indicates several times when Saputa kept poor records or none at all on patients.
The report also noted that Saputa did not have the education, training, or experience to provide gynecological surgeries or procedures. Having unrestricted practice as a medical doctor would be a “serious danger to the health, safety, or welfare” to Florida citizens, the report said.
Within a nine-month period, state health officials said three women nearly died from abortion complications at the facility: one required resuscitation, another had parts of her colon removed and a third needed an emergency hysterectomy, the News Journal reported last year.
The three women’s cases are disturbing. State health officials said one woman had to be hospitalized in August 2021 and had parts of her colon removed after her uterus was perforated in a botched abortion. Another woman was found with “pools of blood on the floor” around her, according to their investigation.
In the case of the third woman, the abortion facility failed to monitor her vital signs when it gave her drugs and told her to wait in her car until the abortion procedure, according to the state health officials. Mid-abortion, the abortionist lacerated her cervix and possibly ruptured her uterus and had to stop the procedure, the report continues.
Rather than take her to the local hospital in Pensacola, the abortion staff told the woman’s husband to drive to a hospital in Mobile, Alabama, the health officials found. At the Mobile hospital, the woman had to be resuscitated after emergency room doctors found that she did not have a pulse, the state report continues. She also received a blood transfusion to “replace egregious blood loss,” according to the state health officials.
The Florida health agency also reported hundreds of other violations, including failing to document patients’ consent or follow the 24-hour waiting period.
Despite the abortion facility’s horrible record, local abortion activists in Pensacola lamented the news about its closure.
“It has felt like a regression for us, for women, for people who need access to abortions,” Amy Weintraub, reproductive rights program director at Progress Florida, told the newspaper.
A new pro-abortion group, the Pensacola Abortion Rights Taskforce, is trying to find another abortionist willing to open a facility in the city, according to the report.
The American Family Planning of Pensacola has a record of botched abortions and criminal activity by its abortionists, according to Operation Rescue. Another abortionist, Candace Sue Cooley, was arrested for driving under the influence and charged with child abuse, and others who work for the abortion chain are known sex offenders and drug abusers, according to the pro-life organization’s investigations.
