As the state’s leaders crack down on pro-life pregnancy resource centers, New York Democrats fund abortionists who have killed dozens of women. At least 38 women and girls, as young as 13, have lost their lives during “safe and legal” abortions carried out by the state’s private abortionists, according to a private research report furnished to The Washington Stand.

Yet that greatly undercounts the number of total abortion deaths in the state, because these numbers do not include the harms caused by the nation’s largest abortion franchise, Planned Parenthood. Then-New York City Health Commissioner Stephen Joseph noted in a June 1987 memo, “During the period between 1981 and 1984, there were 30 legal abortion-related deaths in New York City.”

“Abortion is the original quackery. Abortion is a mercenary industry preying on women in crisis for profit and power,” Rev. Jim Harden, CEO of CompassCare, a New York-based coalition of pregnancy resource centers, told The Washington Stand. “I have said for years that the abortion industry represents serial medical malpractice.”

Despite these gruesome results, New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) and other Democrats have supported abortion businesses while trying to bring the full force of the law to bear against pregnancy resource centers. Last May, Hochul gave abortionists $35 million in taxpayer funding in the name of advancing “human rights.” Abortion activists firebombed Harden’s pro-life medical network last June 7; six days later, Hochul signed a bill authorizing the state health commissioner to investigate so-called “limited service pregnancy centers,” which do not take part in abortions.

At the national level, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has introduced the “Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation” (SAD) Act to essentially fine pro-life women’s centers out of existence, asserting pro-life centers “wish [pregnant women] harm.” And abortion advocates have called efforts to hold abortionists accountable for killing mothers a “modern-day lynching.”

“Far from just turning a blind eye, pro-abortion politicians like New York Governor Hochul insist upon promoting, paying for, and protecting abortionists from criminal liability through taxpayer funds and legislation,” Harden told TWS. “Meanwhile, they generate a propaganda smokescreen for their pet industry by vilifying their only competition: peaceful, pro-life pregnancy centers.”

Killing Mothers with their Babies

New York state became an abortion pioneer three years before Roe v. Wade, when Governor Nelson Rockefeller — a three-time Republican presidential hopeful who likely died while committing adultery — signed the most lax abortion law in the nation on April 11, 1970. The state’s history of killing women began a year later, when 25-year-old Margaret Louise Smith, who traveled to the state from Michigan, bled to death on June 16, 1971. Abortionist Jesse Ketchum was convicted of negligent homicide two years later. Thus began the abortion industry’s long history of mingling the blood of mothers with their children.

At least 38 women, as young as 13 and as old as 40, have died at the hands of abortionists, according to the research report, and hundreds of documents attesting its veracity, reviewed by this author. Women died when abortionists left aborted babies’ body parts inside the woman, perforated the mother’s uterus, failed to monitor vital signs, overdosed the patient on anesthesia, or oversaw a deficient abortion procedure that sent a woman into a death-inducing coma. One 31-year-old woman died from the side effects of the early abortion pill, prostaglandin, in 1984.

The mothers killed by New York abortionists hailed from Haiti, Jamaica, Honduras, Ghana, and multiple states.

Teenagers, including those well below the state’s age of consent, have died during abortions. Dawn Ravenall, the 13-year-old daughter of two black Pentecostal preachers and an honors student, died in February 1985 when abortionist Allen Kline left her unattended in New York City’s Eastern Women’s Center after the child suffered a massive heart attack.

Sometimes, deaths come amid a series of other abuses. State health officials took no action against abortionist Abu Hayat after he perforated the uterus of 17-year-old Sophie McCoy of Brooklyn during an abortion on September 18, 1990. One year later, a baby named Ana Rodriguez was born alive, but with one arm, following a botched, third-trimester abortion at Hayat’s hands. “After Hayat’s arrest, 15 women contacted the New York County district attorney in Manhattan, and another 19 contacted the New York Police Department to register complaints that Hayat sexually abused them, botched their abortions, or mistreated them in some other way,” the report states. Hayat lost his license in 1992 — two years too late for McCoy or Rodriguez.

At other times, it is the abortionist’s indifference to life and lack of familiarity with life-saving medicine that snuffed out women’s lives too early. An abortionist named Elyas Bonrouhi, who changed his name to David Benjamin, killed a 33-year-old immigrant from Honduras and mother of four, Guadalupe Negrón, during an abortion at the Metro Women’s Center in Queens on July 9, 1993. Bonrouhi left her to bleed after he lacerated her uterus and cervix during a procedure The New York Times described as a “complicated late-term abortion” at 19 weeks. One of the paramedics said the abortionist or personnel at the facility — which one juror described as “disgusting” and “very unsanitary” — stuffed a breathing tube down the deceased mother’s esophagus instead of her trachea, causing her oxygen mask to fill up with the contents of her stomach, which she then inhaled.

“The cause of death, determined by the medical examiner, was the same as that commonly associated with back-alley butchers in the days of illegal abortion: a perforated cervix,” noted Amy Pagnozzi in the New York Daily News. State officials said the abortionist showed “depraved indifference to human life,” of the mother. Jurors agreed after just two hours’ deliberation.

The death-dealing procedure would never have taken place without the leniency of New York state officials. “New York State Department of Health officials had revoked Benjamin’s/Bonrouhi’s license in June 1993 for ‘gross incompetence and negligence’ for perforating five other women’s uteruses,” states the report. Yet officials allowed the abortionist, who had a history of shoddy work dating back to 1980, to continue working while he contested the ruling. It was their second act of grace. In 1986, “State Department of Health officials ordered an emergency revocation of his license, but Board of Regents officials overruled them and instead merely suspended his license for three months,” the report notes.

Abandoning patients becomes a recurring theme in the report. A 26-year-old immigrant from Ghana died after being foresaken by an abortionist who first practiced in the former Soviet city of Leningrad. Eurice Agbagaa passed away in January 1989, eight days after abortionist Abram Zelikman perforated her uterus, told an unlicensed employee to administer anesthesia, then left.

Similarly, Jamie Lee Morales bled to death on July 9, 2016 — 23 years to the day Negrón died — hours after abortionist Robert Rho carried out an abortion. During the late-term procedure — Morales was 24-26 weeks pregnant, possibly past the 24 weeks then allowed under state law — Rho lacerated one of her uterine arteries. When her sister arrived at his Liberty Women’s Health Care, in Flushing, Queens, Rho merely released Morales to her sister, who later took her to a hospital. Rho would plead guilty to negligent homicide two years later.

The abortionist’s attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, called the case a “modern-day lynching.”

Harden says lynching better describes the treatment New York state is inflicting on life-saving pro-life women’s centers. “Never once has a pregnancy center sent a woman to the morgue,” Harden told TWS. “Compare that to the abortion industry in New York.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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