‘The worst thing I’ve ever seen’: Lawsuit says abortion doctor left half a fetus behind | Opinion
She had scheduled the abortion once before, at another clinic, and then backed out. So by the time the then 32-year-old mother of four found her way from her home in Indianapolis to the Equity Clinic in Champaign, Illinois, in April of 2023, she was somewhere between 22 and 23 weeks along.
“Pressure was applied — ‘What are we going to do about this?’ — in my mental space and my environment,” said the woman, who asked that I not use her name out of concern for her privacy. “The weeks were going by, and I had to consider a lot of things.”
Finally, she decided to go through with it, and after she had the procedure, almost immediately felt “a bit of a relief — less drama up there” in her head, followed by excruciating pain in her abdomen.
What a surgical team at Community Hospital in Indianapolis found two days later, according to the lawsuit she filed on Friday against Dr. Keith Reisinger-Kindle and his Equity Clinic, is that he’d somehow left more than half of the fetus inside her.
She says Reisinger-Kindle answered her many panicked calls to his hotline by telling her to take some Tylenol and then to take a laxative, but “I didn’t agree with that. It was not supposed to be that bad.” The doctor did not return a call seeking a response to the suit.
“Even for the CAT scan” in the ER, “I could not move” from the pain, she told me. “They said, ‘You have a baby in there, and you need emergency surgery.’ ”
“We knew from the CAT scan that she could have a perforated uterus,” one of the surgeons told me, “because you could see what looked like a human body. You could see a spine.” And what the operating team found was “this — baby in the pelvis. This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen at surgery and I’ve been doing this for over 30 years.”
If I quoted from the legal filing’s absolutely gruesome medical report and expert testimony, from a doctor who has himself performed more than 1,000 abortions, you would not be able to eat today. But the suit and the Indianapolis hospital surgeon who spoke to me said he “delivered” all but the child’s legs and parts of the arms.
This is an extremely hard story to hear, one much easier to turn away from. Because it is so awful, I suspect that some of you are going to say this couldn’t have happened at all, and that others may think such horrors happen all the time, and I don’t think either is true. But if it happened this one time, and I believe that it did, then we should know that, and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.
Clinic treats many Missouri women
That would for one thing mean offering more help to low-income pregnant women instead of cutting Medicaid like Congress is getting ready to do. We know that poor women and women of color get significantly lower quality health care in general, and the woman who is suing the Equity Clinic is both. She was working two jobs, as a server in a restaurant and a phlebotomist in a clinic, at the time this happened. She now drives a bus.
According to the glowing profile of Reisinger-Kindle that ran in the Chicago Tribune a month after her emergency surgery, the Ohio-based doctor opened the Champaign clinic, where he practices on weekends, after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the legality of abortion to individual states.
“Unfortunately, we do know that pregnancies are being terminated later because of access” being limited, Reisinger-Kindle told the Tribune. “That of course means slightly more risk.” That would not explain what this woman says happened to her, though.
The piece also said that 95% of Equity’s patients are from out of state — mostly from Indiana, Ohio and Missouri. “Our patients are coming from states that lost access.”
To all of you lawmakers in Jefferson City who are so dedicated to making it impossible for someone like her to get an abortion in Missouri, what I would ask is when you are going to get around to making the kind of investment that really would make it easier for women to give birth instead, as this woman now says she wishes she’d done? Because it seems like the answer is never.
‘You’re a doctor, and I don’t understand’
Another thing that infuriates me is that this woman says she had a hard time finding a lawyer who would take her case. Some told her that she’d be seen as unsympathetic as someone who’d had an elective abortion, and as someone who had survived.
I’m not going to put the 16 exclamation points after that last sentence that it deserves, but I guess they thought it was hardly worth the trouble to get a cut of a lesser settlement because the injured party was still breathing.
“Most lawyers preferred if my family members had reached out due to my death,” she said.
Richard Craig, the Chicago-based lawyer who did take the case, said yes, the abortion was elective, “but I don’t think anybody elects to have half of her baby left behind; that’s a bone-chilling event. How a doctor misses half of the fetal remains is completely beyond me. How could you look and not see? He sent her on her way and the community hospital had to clean up his mess.”
She filed this suit, she said, in the hope of helping some other woman. Whatever our politics or views on abortion rights, can we not all want better for her, and anyone else who could find herself in that situation?
Maybe you think that could never be you, or someone you love, but she never thought that could be her, either. “This is something I don’t do,” is the first thing she told me. I have no judgment for her, and hope you won’t either, because as she says, “things can happen that surprise you.”
A doctor’s diligence, though, is something that we should be able to count on. “For us to confide (trust) in someone to take care of us,” at such a moment should never be taken lightly, she said. “You’re a doctor. My doctor, and I don’t understand.”
