In a case that got very little attention from the national media, a 32-year-old mother of four from Indiana filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against a doctor who left half of a fetus inside her after performing an abortion.
The Daily Mail is reporting on the anonymous woman, known only as Jane Doe, who sought an abortion in Illinois after her home state of Indiana passed a near total ban on abortions in 2023. After struggling for a time with the decision to abort the child, she was between 22 and 23 weeks pregnant when she booked an appointment at Equity Clinic in the neighboring state of Illinois. The clinic was opened by Dr. Keith Reisinger-Kindle shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 to give abortion access to women in surrounding states where the procedure was either banned or restricted.
The woman came to the clinic on April 1-2, where the doctor performed a D&E procedure which involves dilating the cervix and removing the fetus with forceps. Following the procedure, the doctor reported that the woman’s uterus was empty and “products of conception were visibly inspected and confirmed to be complete.”
Jane Doe was discharged but called the clinic several times the next day to report heavy cramping. She was told to take Tylenol and a laxative, but she knew something was wrong. By the time she sought help at a local hospital, she was in such unbearable pain she could barely get into the CT scan machine.
Fetus at 18 weeks
It was there that doctors discovered fetal body parts remaining in her body and performed emergency surgery. Because her uterus had been perforated during the abortion, surgeons found fetal legs and part of an arm in her right pelvis and adhered to her intestines.
One of the surgeons who operated on Jane Doe told the Kansas City Star that “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen at surgery, and I’ve been doing this for over 30 years.”
A medical testimony included with the legal filings said had Dr. Reisinger-Kindle “performed an adequate exam of the remains, it should have been obvious that fetal parts were left behind.”
The filings also report that the size of the hole in the woman’s uterus was the size of a quarter. This kind of injury can be life-threatening, and can also lead to infertility due to scarring, making it more difficult for a future fertilized egg to implant.
Sadly, the filings also allege that Reisinger-Kindle did not administer any pain-relief medication to the fetus, which would have stopped its heartbeat, prior to subjecting the baby to dismemberment.
Richard Craig, the Chicago-based lawyer who is representing Jane Doe, and is suing Reisinger-Kindle and Equity Clinic for $50,000, was particularly disturbed by the lack of care that was paid to the fetus as well as his client.
Craig told Fox News, “The current laws would prevent me, for instance, from pursuing a claim against this doctor on behalf of the child for what had to be excruciating pain that the child underwent while he was being dismembered piece by piece, without any pain relief,” Craig said. “And so those laws do, in fact, prevent me, or anybody from taking that position and seeking redress for that on the behalf of the child.”
Instead, they are suing Dr Reisinger-Kindle and Equity Clinic for medical negligence.
Jane Doe later admitted she had trouble finding a lawyer because abortion is an elective procedure; however, Craig told the Kansas City Star that even though the abortion was a choice the woman made, “I don’t think anybody elects to have half of her baby left behind; that’s a bone-chilling event.”
And it is surely one that will haunt her for the rest of her life.
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