Dr. Keith Reisinger-Kindle, associate director of the OB-GYN residency program at Wright State University's medical school in Dayton, Ohio, leads a lecture of OB-GYN residents in the Wright State program Wednesday, April 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Paul Vernon)
Warning: The following article contains upsetting and graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.
CV NEWS FEED // An Illinois-based abortionist is facing a lawsuit alleging that he botched a surgical abortion by leaving more than half of the unborn child inside the mother’s body, prompting her to need an emergency surgery.
“This was the worst thing I’ve ever seen at surgery and I’ve been doing this for over 30 years,” one of the surgeons told Melinda Henneberger, author of a March 23 opinion article about the lawsuit for the Kansas City Star.
“We knew from the CAT scan that she could have a perforated uterus, because you could see what looked like a human body. You could see a spine,” the surgeon said.
According to both the surgeon and the lawsuit, most of the child was still there, except for his or her legs, and parts of the arms.
The American Association of Pro Life OBGYNs posted excerpts from the lawsuit, which includes the surgeons’ notes from the operation: “The patient was found to have half of a deceased pre-born human being in the right pelvis of the patient with evidence of severe and intentional trauma … The skull was crushed and no brain was present. The face was non-recognizable. … There were small bony fragments in the mother’s pelvis.”
To respect her privacy, Henneberger did not name the mother, a 32-year-old woman of color who has four children and little income and was experiencing pressure, “in my mental space and my environment,” regarding the challenge of having another child. The mother had previously scheduled an abortion at one facility but backed out.
She went to the second facility, Dr. Keith Reisinger-Kindle’s Equity Clinic in Champaign, Illinois, in April 2023, for an abortion when she was between 22 and 23 weeks pregnant.
After the abortion, she began experiencing excruciating pain in her abdomen.
She said that Reisinger-Kindle responded to her calls to his hotline by saying she should take Tylenol and then a laxative. She went to the emergency room and underwent a CAT scan two days later, suffering from crippling pain.
“They said, ‘You have a baby in there, and you need emergency surgery,’” the woman explained to Henneberger.
Reisinger-Kindle, who is based in Ohio, opened the Illinois-based Equity Clinic after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, according to Henneberger. He travels to the Illinois facility to commit abortions on weekends.
The woman told Henneberger that she had difficulty finding a lawyer willing to take on her malpractice case. The response from some lawyers was that her case would be hard to sympathize with both because she chose to have the abortion and because she survived it. Henneberger posited that some lawyers may have considered the payoff of this lawsuit as too low — the settlement would have been higher if she had died.
“Most lawyers preferred if my family members had reached out due to my death,” the woman told Henneberger.
Richard Craig, a lawyer based in Chicago, took the case. He said, according to Henneberger, that while the abortion was elective, “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,” Craig said. “How could you look and not see? He sent her on her way and the community hospital had to clean up his mess.”
