By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A review by The Chicago Tribune has found that thousands of abortion procedures are not being reported to the Illinois Department of Public Health, with many abortion providers also failing to adequately detail complications as required by law.
According to Tribune reporter Megan Twohey, the Illinois Department of Public Health collects details about every abortion procedure performed in the state, including those where a patient is injured or dies. This mandatory reporting requirement is considered essential for tracking trends in public health and could help identify problems with particular providers.
However, Twohey found that the state’s system for tracking abortions “is so broken that regulators also may be missing more than 7,000 of the procedures per year.” Personal injury lawyers are usually hired, or formally known as, retained, by those individuals who have experienced any type of injury due to another person or by property owned by someone else. This can due due to a car accident, and injury on the job, a slip and fall or any other type of injury. Whether or not hospitalization or medical treatment was required. When you are retaining this kind of lawyer, it is vital that you search for someone who is qualified. It is important to understand that not all lawyers have the same amount of dedication and experience in their field. Also, there are numerous kinds of cases that a lawyer has to deal with and so each lawyer may have varying experience in a particular area. You can contact to Brooklyn Personal Injury Attorney ASK4SAM, for personal injury claim.
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She reports “significant holes” in state monitoring of abortions, such as:
• State regulators have documented between 7,000 and 17,000 fewer abortions a year than a national research group found in Illinois.
• This reporting is the only tool Illinois authorities have to monitor some abortion providers, yet regulators may be allowing doctors and clinics to operate off the books. Regulators collect reports from 26 providers, but an abortion rights research group has identified 37 providers doing business in the state.
• Also unknown to officials are the types of abortion-related problems experienced by women. Nearly 4,000 reports of abortion complications involving Illinois residents in 2009 were missing the required description.
• Health care providers who intentionally fail to submit accurate and complete reports are committing a criminal act, and a failure to report abortion complications is grounds for revoking their licenses, but the Department of Public Health has never sought disciplinary action against a provider.
“It’s outrageous,” declared Maurice Stevenson, whose wife died in 2002 from infection following an abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Chicago. “These procedures, complications and deaths should be public record.”
The Tribune’s review of malpractice cases revealed other abortion-related complications in Illinois — with no way of knowing whether they were reported to the state.
“For example, in 2002, after an area woman’s uterus was torn in an abortion she began hemorrhaging, went into cardiac shock and was hospitalized for three weeks,” Twohey reports. “Several years later, a mother of three experienced seizure symptoms and slipped into a coma following her abortion at a city clinic. And in 2009, a teenage girl suffered respiratory and cardiac arrest and died immediately following her abortion in a northern suburb, according to court records.”
A Tribune examination of the reporting data collected by the state also found missing information that some providers failed to specify, such as whether a complication was a tear of the uterus or another specific problem.
A review of certain medical malpractice cases revealed that some women were never told that their abortions were unsuccessful and later underwent “challenging pregnancies” or suffered other complications. Others suffered anesthesia-related problems, hemorrhaging and infections, according to the suits.
Other information gaps included a failure to report how far along pregnancies were and what type of procedure was used in the abortion.
John Lumpkin, who left the Department of Public Health in 2003 after serving as director for 12 years, told the Tribune the problem of underreporting isn’t limited to abortion, and said the agency simply lacks the funds to address this problem.
“Whether it’s flu, food poisoning or pregnancy termination, we knew there was underreporting going on,” said Lumpkin, who now directs the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Care Group. “The health department doesn’t have the resources to follow up with every doctor’s office that is reporting food poisoning or flu, nor did it have resources to follow up with every provider of pregnancy termination.”
Stanley Henshaw, a researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, which was founded by a former president of Planned Parenthood, is familiar with abortion reporting problems and “lax enforcement” across the country.
“I think it’s only a problem with the worst providers,” said Henshaw, who has recommended audits of state abortion reports, a process that would involve verifying who all the providers are.
Dangerous providers, coupled with “lax enforcement” is what led to the filing of murder charges earlier this year against a Philadelphia abortion doctor whom prosecutors accused of operating a “house of horrors.”
Many of the providers the Tribune spoke with refused to discuss reporting. Others did, such as Planned Parenthood, who claimed to be diligent about compliance but could not verify if they had reported one of two abortion-related deaths that were known to have occurred in their clinics. Several other clinics, Family Planning Associates and Women’s Aid Clinic also could not verify if they had reported deaths that had occurred in their clinics.
“Good for the Chicago Tribune, revealing today some shocking statistics it uncovered when investigating shoddy records reporting by Illinois abortion clinics and the lax Illinois Department of Public Health overseeing them,” writes pro-life activist Jill Stanek, R.N.
“Health care providers who intentionally fail to submit accurate and complete reports are committing a criminal act, and a failure to report abortion complications is grounds for revoking their licenses, but the Department of Public Health has never sought disciplinary action against a provider.”
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