By Dave Andrusko
Late on Friday, Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration [ACHA] issued an emergency order suspending the American Family Planning’s operations until an administrative hearing can be held in Tallahassee effective Saturday. “Pensacola’s abortion clinic was ordered to close by the state of Florida after three women were hospitalized in the last nine months requiring major medical intervention to survive,” Jim Little reported for the Pensacola News Journal.
On its website, the clinic says it “serves” women from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.
The cases did require major intervention, according to Little.
In one procedure in August 2021, the patient had to be hospitalized and have parts of her colon removed, according to the emergency order.
In March, another woman started bleeding following an abortion and the clinic’s staff determined the woman needed to go to the hospital. When EMS personnel arrived to transfer her to a local hospital, they documented “pools of blood on the floor,” the order said.
The woman was cool to the touch, did not have a pulse detectable in her wrist and had extremely low blood pressure.
At the hospital, she had emergency surgery where a doctor found a “big hole on the left wall of the uterus and another on the right side” along with lacerations to her cervix, according to the emergency order. After an emergency surgery failed to try to save her uterus, the woman had to undergo a complete hysterectomy and received 10 pints of blood to stabilize her.
It gets worse!
In May, another woman arrived for an abortion, and after she was administered drugs beforehand was told to wait in her car despite regulations requiring her vital signs be monitored in an exam room, the order said. Her procedure was halted before it was complete after she received lacerations to her cervix and a possible rupture of her uterus.
The clinic staff told her and her spouse to go to a hospital in Mobile, Alabama rather than a local one in Pensacola as the woman’s spouse wanted and as required under the clinic’s license, according to ACHA’s emergency order.
The clinic didn’t document the woman’s discharge, though her spouse was given discharge paperwork.
The woman’s spouse told ACHA that the staff of the clinic was unable to get a blood pressure reading from the woman. She was driven by her spouse to the hospital in Mobile, and when she arrived the hospital recorded that she had no blood pressure and her blood oxygen level was at 80%.
She was resuscitated at the hospital and had to have a blood transfusion to “replace egregious blood loss,” according to the ACHA’s emergency order.
The abortion clinic “kept no records of any vital signs during and after the procedures, ”in the March and May “incidents.”
Finally, the abortionist “also did not communicate with the hospital doctors about the patients’ conditions and what procedures had been done as required under the clinic’s license,” Little reported.
Incredibly, according to the newspaper accounts, the abortionist “candidly” admitted to ACHA officials “that he is unfamiliar with (the clinic’s) policies and procedures” and that he should know them but relies on the clinic’s manager for direction. The manager holds no medical or clinical license, the order noted.”