A Wonderful Thing in Georgia

A wonderful thing happened in Georgia on October 1, 2012. The Department of Community Health affirmed the denial of the waiver request of Atlanta Women's Medical Center located at 235 W. Wieuca Road, Atlanta, Georgia. This facility performs abortions up to twenty four weeks and regulations required that facilities such as these that are located on the second floor must have an elevator. This center does not, hence the request for the elevator waiver. After obtaining the waiver it became apparent they were not taking care to meet its requirements because when investigated it was determined they routinely failed to escort patients down the stairs after surgery and on at least one occasion failed to inform the 911 operator there was no elevator which delayed the EMTs in getting an injured patient out of the building. So it is wonderful news that the waiver was denied – the health of women was routinely being put at risk each and every time they failed to meet the waiver's provisions. Thank you Governor Deal and Commissioner Cook for putting Georgia's women first!

As excited as I am about the affirmation, I cannot and could not answer the questions that have been coming in about AWMC's status. Is AWMC still doing abortions or were they shut down? As of this writing they are still doing late term abortions, putting the health of Georgia women at risk and I can find no information online about what happens in these instances. Does the state issue a cease and desist order telling them to shut it down? Is there some kind of grace period they have to bring themselves into compliance with the ambulatory surgical center regulations? Can they just say they are no longer performing second trimester abortions and remain open doing only first trimester? These are questions I have no answers to. I have several calls into the Department of Community Health and I will ask these questions if anyone returns even one of those calls. Stay tuned. If I get answers I will pass them on to you . . .

Action Alert – Georgia Women Put First!!!!

A little more than a month and a half ago, I began writing about Georgia women being in danger because an abortion center, Atlanta Women's Medical Center chose to ignore the requirements for two story ambulatory surgical centers. They refused to install an elevator claiming an undue hardship (despite bringing in more than three million dollars of revenue each and every year), and safety of their staff over the safety of the women on whom they had just performed surgery. Today I ask you to join me in thanking Governor Deal (404-656-1776), and Commissioner Cook (404-656-4507) for taking action to deny the ongoing waiver to this facility that had put thousands of Georgia women at risk each year.

 

The Department of Community Health, on August 30, 2012, declined to renew the waiver because the center "failed to supply facts, financial, architectural, or otherwise, showing why it would not currently be feasible to construct an elevator, relocate to the first floor or otherwise come into compliance with the requirements of Rule 290-5-33-10 (f) without causing undue hardship. They were also cited for failing to assess the patients and provide an escort down the stairs after the surgery as well as failing to document that patients were escorted down the stairs as required in the waiver.

The Department of Community Health allowed for and accepted a request for an administrative review of the August 30^th decision. On October 1, 2012, DCH affirmed the decision to deny a waiver.

All across America states are finding that abortionists have failed to exercise reasonable standards of medical care to the patients that seek their services. Many facilities when inspected have been found to be squalid, and some are known to pass diseases and infections to the patients. It is more than heartening to see that our state is unwilling to allow abortion providers to flagrantly violate state laws and provisions for ambulatory surgical centers. Join me in applauding the willingness of leaders in our state to take steps to ensure patient safety in a procedure that routinely injures women and terminates the lives of children. Please call the Governor and Commissioner Cook. Let them know we appreciate their leadership on this issue.

Running to the Battle: Help Make Georgia Safe

I was interviewed on the Dave Madeira radio program this morning (http://bit.ly/QeXhih) and the discussion left me heavy as I recounted how many young girls and women are silently carrying the weight of their decision to terminate the life of their child. Many do not feel they can talk about their experience in the abortion center because of the deeply imbedded shame we feel once our wombs are emptied of the child. On the show I recounted the testimony of a young teen who without her parents' or any adult in her sphere of influence knowledge, terminated her child and for two years carried the weight of it until that Saturday when we prayed with and for her. She took off running around the Church, exclaiming her freedom from the burden she had been carrying, now celebrating that she was no longer bound. While I can rejoice that she was freed, and I do, my heart was heavy as I remembered there are so many more women and girls that still carry the shame and weight of their experience in one of America's abortion chambers.

With all this heaviness hovering around me, I happened upon this article: http://bit.ly/OL6ps1 . Even the title is gruesome so I ask that you click on the link and it will take you to the story. While reading this horror story, I received an email from someone in Georgia wondering how the State can be held accountable and ensure they are inspecting and monitoring abortion centers. As you know, there is an open review of Atlanta Women's Medical Center that was found to have violated a waiver the state had granted seven years ago. In addition to having violated the waiver it was determined they routinely put patient safety at risk even failing to properly sterilize instruments and chart patient treatment. (Note: they have changed their name. Could they be planning an end run around the Department of Community Health by reorganizing as a doctor's office? Please tell me no!). The state denied their new waiver request, but they continue to operate even putting patients at risk. A wheel chair bound woman had to navigate the steps because they continue doing business with no elevator. I shudder to think what would have happened if they needed to get her out quickly. Her wheel chair was in the car of the driver that brought her to the clinic.

I have also written about another abortion center that is allowed to operate as a doctor's office rather than a surgical center. Based on patient testimonies, the so-called doctor accepts Medicaid to pay for abortions. He uses a narcotic so strong that women cannot immediately wake up from the procedure, some not waking up for more than twenty four hours. He fails to properly complete abortions causing women to have to return for a second procedure or as was the case with one woman, experiencing three to four days of in-hospital antibiotic treatment so the infection can be brought under control in order to complete the procedure. Because this is a doctor's office there is no state oversight unless a patient files a complaint with the medical board. And as was the case with this patient, those complaints may mysteriously disappear allowing the abortionist to continue operating without repercussion for violation of patient safety and laws. It is even thought that someone notifies the physician of complaints before an inspector shows up so that he can fix whatever may be wrong inside the clinic – including sudden fires that destroy records and equipment even though no person is ever identified for what was deemed arson. Hmmm.

Let's add insult to injury, take a look at this article: http://bit.ly/UQGfY4 about a clinic in Alabama. And guess what? The owner of this facility has a clinic in Columbus, GA. Is that clinic putting women's health at risk as well? The abortionist was the subject of a 76 page scathing report that included charges of failing to properly train staff or document the credentials of those allowed to perform abortions. I can't help but wonder what kind of treatment and record management of that treatment is happening in Columbus.

In each of these cases complaints had to be brought by those outside of state government. Unless a pro-life activist or patient filed a complaint, we have idea if the state knows the condition of one abortion center much less the 18 or so that are operating, some as surgical centers, and some as doctor's offices. These abortionists could hurt women routinely and the citizens of Georgia would never know because of a clear lack of oversight. Georgia has at least two abortion centers that do not appear to be registered with the state, nor do they appear to be reporting the numbers of abortions performed, both violations of Georgia law. Yet you can Google them on the net and see they are performing abortions every day. We have to assume it is with the State's blessings because they have been reported and the Governor, we are told, is confident his Commissioner and staff are taking appropriate steps.

What can citizens do when the state refuses to bring any level of accountability into an industry that is the least regulated yet most dangerous? Perhaps you can help document breaches of our laws; take pictures of violations and video them as well. Perhaps you are able to set aside 10 minutes to make phone calls, or send letters and emails to the Governor and your legislator. Perhaps you can attend rallies, willing to speak out. And/or, you can refuse to vote for those that will not show leadership on an issue so vital to women's health. Perhaps you can run for office yourself. Now is not the time to back down or back up. It is time to run to the battle for the health and welfare of women in Georgia. Are you willing? Let me know.

The Nightmare Continues

And I am still in in. I cannot let go of the images that were painted in my mind as I listened to the horror that young woman experienced. I cannot imagine how she felt when she learned her baby, now dead, was left inside her and she could not reach the doctor. I wonder what it will take to shake things up enough in Georgia so that the government will begin enforcing the laws on the books. Abortion centers throughout the state are subjected to less inspection and regulation enforcement than nail salons! And when violations are found, our government refuses to take action that will move the state toward the standard of care most women expect. You may recall that the Atlanta Women's Medical Center was cited for failing to sterilize instruments according to policy and failing to properly chart patient records. If one abortion center that is licensed is this reckless in its standards of care, I am sure the other abortion centers, especially those that are not licensed, are putting patients at risk because they fail to properly sterilize the instruments and properly monitor and document patient care. 

According to the Georgia Department of Human Services, Division of Public Health, Georgia ranks among the top 10 states in the United States with high case rates for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis¹. It is not hard to imagine that some of these cases of sexually transmitted diseases are caused by the unregulated abortion centers and doctors' offices (whose primary business is abortion) that do not properly sterilize equipment. I can imagine that some of these doctors and centers do not have an AUTOCLAVE, the equipment most physicians use to sterilize instruments. Without that piece of equipment, the doctor must rely on some antiseptic that I cannot imagine is strong enough to thoroughly clean the instruments, particularly those that have been contaminated with blood.

 

I am reminded of the abortionist that was arrested in Philadelphia, PA after he murdered a woman and seven babies. His facility and practice was described as a filthy fraud². The Pennsylvania District Attorney rightly categorized the case as a disregard of the law and disdain for the lives and health of mothers and infants. Yesterday I wrote about just such a case here in the state of Georgia. Clearly the doctor in that case cared less about the mother and her health than he did about rushing through her procedure – so much so that he left the baby behind. I wonder if the inside of his facility is as squalid as the one described by the PA attorney general. Has he patched equipment together with duct tape as Gosnell did (see pictures in the Pennsylvania DA report – warning, they are graphic and disturbing). Is there blood in and on the instruments as they reused the equipment time and again without sterilizing it?. Because Georgia is failing to hold abortionists accountable for the surgical care they provide every day, there is no way to know how many women have come away from this abortion center and others infected or harmed in some way. Perhaps we should ask those women to come forward and tell their stories. It is time to force our Governor, Legislators, and even ourselves to face the horror that is abortion in Georgia.

 

1. http://health.state.ga.us/pdfs/epi/gers/Nov08GER.pdf
   
2. http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/PDFs/GrandJuryWomensMedical.pdf
   

Nightmare on Powers Ferry Road

I do not ever watch horror stories. Ever. Yet, I find myself in the midst of a real horror story that happened right here in Georgia, at an abortion center on Powers Ferry Road. And unlike the movies where the monster is stopped from harming others, this monster is still performing abortions and billing taxpayers for it!

It was 10:00 a.m., October 7, 2009 when this young woman sought an abortion. She was the last patient of the day. Upon entering the center she paid $250 in cash and gave them her Medicaid card, understanding Medicaid was to be billed the remaining $200.00 for the $450.00 abortion. Shortly thereafter she was given a sonogram and 5 pills, one of which was an antibiotic and the rest she was told was for pain. After drawing blood another technician gave her another pill that she was told to place in her vagina. She was led to a room where other patients were to await her turn to go into the procedure room. It was here that she encountered a sixteen year old that was drooling (because of the medication she had been given) and crying because she needed help to the bathroom. As the young woman helped her to the bathroom, the teen explained she was back for a second procedure because when she got home the night before she realized the baby was still inside her.

Despite having had a narcotic administered, the patients were told to walk downstairs (unescorted by clinic staff) and change into a gown. Periodically center staff came to "check" on them to see if the narcotic had taken effect. When a Latina patient began acting drunk she was taken to another room where the procedure was performed. But the drugs were not having the desired effect on the young woman, so she was led, finally, to the procedure room where an Asian man inserted an IV into her hand. The drugs, she said, burned as they entered her body and the last thing she remembered was screaming. Twenty four hours later, after having been carried from the abortion center by her brother, the young woman awoke, at home, feverish, her daughter reporting it to be 103.5. She called the doctor's office repeatedly, to no avail, each time she was told the doctor was not available. Finally she called her brother to take her to the hospital after the doctor's office again informed the doctor was not available and instructed her to go to Atlanta Medical Center. By the time her brother arrived to take her to the hospital, her temperature had gone up to 105 degrees. The hospital, she reports, failed to do an ultrasound, believing she was suffering from endometriosis. They gave her an antibiotic and sent her home. Days later she was still suffering and called her regular OB/GYN who did perform an ultrasound to see what was going on. To everyone's horror the patient was still pregnant, but the baby was dead. Immediately admitting her into the hospital, several rounds of antibiotics were administered twenty-four hours a day until the infection was reduced and the baby could be removed.

Once released from the hospital the young woman learned the reason she had not been able to reach Daniel McBrayer was because he had been arrested for assaulting a woman at a traffic light(http://bit.ly/OKyf8O). He punched her in the face. This is the same Daniel McBrayer that the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports was disciplined in 2001 for completing a late term abortion.

The young woman took every step she could to hold Daniel McBrayer accountable. She consulted attorneys but could not find one to take her case. She filed a complaint with the medical board that has mysteriously disappeared and the investigator, Lemuel Roberts has retired. However before he retired in September, 2011, Mr. Roberts told her that she would get an apology from McBrayer, he would return her money and demerits would be placed on his license. None of those things ever happened. How could this happen in an abortion center that completes 3,000 or more abortions annually and the state not take action? I have learned that this center is not licensed. It does not have to be because McBrayer says it is his office and doctor's offices are exempted from licensing no matter how many abortions they perform. Even if it was licensed I am not confident the state would take action. They have not taken action against Atlanta Women's Medical Center that perforated the uterus of a woman in 2011. Their inspection revealed AWMC had violated the state issued waiver, were not sterilizing instruments in accord with their own policies, and were not charting patient information properly. Yet there is no record of any penalty for their violations. The state did not take action in 2009 when a young woman bled to death as a result of a late term abortion performed by Tyrone Malloy, at another abortion center ruled a doctor's office,

What can Georgia women expect from our government? Clearly it is a hands off policy that has left a trail of dead, injured and wounded women all across this state. We can expect a lack enforcement of laws the Georgia Constitution demands our Governor take care to uphold. We can expect abortionists to repeatedly injure women without repercussion. We can expect a lack of action to close the hole that has allowed abortion centers to operate as doctor's offices rather than the ambulatory surgical centers they are.

Unless. Unless we take action to warn women about the substandard care abortionists are allowed to render in this state. We must demand our Government enforce the laws already on the books, and generate new laws to reign in the substandard medical care so prevalent in the abortion industry. We must demand the state investigate abortionists that bill Medicaid and other federal and state programs for abortions they have performed. Call the Governor today. Together we can make a difference.

Action Alert 3: Georgia Women In Danger

I want to go back to the question of Atlanta Women Medical Center and the entire abortion industry's lack of a standard of care for women. I can't help but wonder why there are not more inspections of these centers and when violations are found, why there is no enforcement of the laws. It appears the state and the culture has extended the patient's right to privacy (as spelled out in Roe v. Wade) to abortionists and abortion centers. So much so, that Georgia and other states have assumed a hands off policy, allowing the exploitation of that right each time the abortionist gets away with substandard care.

I am reminded of the House of Horrors that was reported a year or so ago in Philadelphia. The conditions of that abortion center were so squalid, the DEA agent investigating the doctor for prescription drug violations reported it to the Attorney General. One of the complaints over the more than 15 years that the state refused to take action against the center was the passing of venereal diseases through unsterilized instruments (see Philadelphia Attorney General Report: http://1.usa.gov/ec0mSy). AWMC also failed to properly sterilize it's equipment, but we have no way to measure if diseases have been passed to patients because of the lack of regulation enforcement.

I am told (by an ex-abortionist) that the goal of an abortionist is to do 10-12 abortions an hour. If they do not have enough sets of instruments to do fifty or more abortions a day, sterilization will be an issue. The autoclave only holds 2-3 sets of instruments at a time and the process of sterilizing them will take at lease an hour. When the autoclave is taken up to 270 degrees, the instruments have to stay in the autoclave at least 10 minutes, but preferably 20 in order to ensure they are sterile. The instruments then need to cool before they can be handled by the physician. In order to keep up with the abortions they would have to have at one least one set of instruments for each abortion sheduled that day, which would be rare. Even if they did, the violation found was that they were not sterilizing the instruments as outlined in their own policies and had not been doing so for months, perhaps even years!

They also had violated the elevator waiver for some time. Staff was not aware of the requirements of the waiver and the Facility Administrator acknowledged he/she had not instructed the staff not to escort patients because of an altercation that occurred sometime in the past. In other surgical procedures there appear to be rules that drive the medical industry and that drive the standards of medical care. I am not sure if it is because of insurer requirements or government regulations that medical standards are established and adhered to, but whatever it is, it appears to be absent from the abortion industry. Everyone seems to be looking the other way and applying privacy standards to abortion rather than the patient in whom the right to privacy vests. When women are injured by the abortionist, and later goes to her OB-GYN or the hospital, it is not recorded as a complication of an abortion. The diagnosis may be that they are septic, but will not document that the infection was a result of an abortion. Because of this we may never know the true impact that abortion and shoddy medical care has had on Georgia women.

I pray you will join me in urging our Governor to enforce our laws and require every abortion provider to comply with them. Urge our legislators to change the laws regarding physicians that do abortions in their offices, so that no purveyor of abortion is able to escape accountability for providing reasonable medical care. The health of Georgia women is at stake.

Action Alert 2: Georgia Women in Danger

Tears stream from my eyes because of the destruction of my people! Lamentations 3:48 (NLT)

Someone posted this comment on my blog post of last night (http://bit.ly/SIPI0F): "I'm not comfortable with calling Gov Deal and demanding that the killing centers follow state regulations on sanitation and elevators. I understand the idea --- slow 'em down for a little while by tying up some of their blood money in conforming to standards ---- but how will it look if the babies' fellow Georgians call in the hundreds demanding that they be murdered according to nice state regulations? What we needed to do in 1973 and every year since then is call in the thousands, every day, and demand that the Gov and legislature of GA nullify Roe v. Wade and simply enforce the murder/manslaughter laws in our Code against doctors, nurses and anyone else who performs abortions."

Really? Has the abortion debate become so politicized that we would not want to protect women from the physical harm is that heaped on top of the trauma of terminating the life of a child? Today there are women all over Georgia facing the same uterine perforation as the patient who was harmed in October of 2011. There are women all over Georgia facing the same death that happened in 2009 in one of these unregulated abortion centers. I pray our hearts have not become so calloused that we do not care about these women who actually believe the lie that abortion is the safest surgical procedure in the United States and Canada. I pray that our hearts are not so dark that we would not call the Governor and whoever else we need to call to ensure that the State of Georgia is not a party to the physical maiming or death of women.

Our state through our laws, policies and procedures has promoted a standard of medical care that creates an expectation of protection, whether through tort law or Georgia Code provisions. Before this information became available, I believed that every abortion center was subject to that standard of medical care. To learn this is not the case and has not been the case over the past 40 years is beyond troubling. Many of the abortionists in this state and the nation are not well credentialed. Some such as the physician in North Carolina who ranted about "ugly black babies" (http://bit.ly/NYEC9C) do not have privileges in local hospitals because of their dismal surgical performance. Others are being investigated for fraud as they bill the government for abortions through Medicaid (http://bit.ly/NXYKFu) . Centers such as the one in Chicago that did not get medical assistance for a patient whose abortion they botched show a wanton disregard for women and their "reproductive health" (http://exm.nr/MHrC8u). The reality is that the state of Georgia cannot assure us these atrocities are not routinely happening here. They have no way of knowing because they do not enforce the laws of the state and when they learn of a violation they take no steps to bring the violators into compliance.

Can we in good conscience ignore that our laws are violated with the blessing of our state? I cannot. I pray you will join me in calling our Governor and the Department of Community Health to make sure Georgia shows leadership in making sure every abortionist in Georgia is held accountable for violations of our laws.