Safe-n-Legal or Back Alley Butchery?
Dateline 9/18/00
Today I'll bring you an exercise. I'll descrive several situations to you, and you decide if we're dealing with a "safe and legal" abortion provider or a criminal abortionist.
And you can cheat on this -- all of these doctors have been mentioned on Pro Life Views someplace.
Doctor A had a license and a clinic. Many doctors in the area referred patient to him for abortions. He did counseling with the abortion patients, taking a medical history. He did a physical examination, verified the pregnancy and the duration of the pregnancy. He performed the abortion using the most up to date equipment and techniques. He monitored the patient in recovery, gave her aftercare instructions, and set her up for a follow up appointment. He keept statistics on the number of abortions he did, the complication rates. |
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Doctor B did abortions in the basement of a used car dealership. He didn't have equipment for general anesthesia, and he'd discovered that if he just used local anesthesia, the patients tended to rooch around a lot on the table, so he developed a technique of injecting an overdose of local anesthesia, which renders the patient unconscious. Sometimes they stopped breathing, but he and his nurse just did some artifical respiration and got them going again. His records were sketchy and were demonstrated to be inaccurate after a patient died. |
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Doctor C started out as an obstetrician, but he lost his license after he and his partner botched a delivery and let a patient die. He also got into a lot of trouble after he got caught having sex with his 14-year-old goddaughter. He left the state and moved to a large city in a neighboring state, a city with a large population of immigrant women with a poor grasp of English. He set up an abortion practice in a filthy building with no hot water. He used expired medications and dirty, moldy equipment. When authorities in that state closed him down, he fled to another state, where he was caught raping abortion patients. |
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Doctor D ran a small private hospital. He had a thriving abortion practice, but faced numerous malpractice suits and was caught doing abortions with dirty instruments. He moved to another state and started doing abortions in a hotel suite. Eventually he botched an abortion in which he allowed an unattended patient to bleed to death in recovery. He was arrested, and while out on bail awaiting trial, he sent another abortion patient to a motel room after her abortion, where she bled to death. |
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How did you do on this quiz? Tell us in the Forum.
For more on legal and illegal abortion practice:
Pre-Legalization Practice
Abortionists Post-Roe
Behind Closed Doors
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