Planned Parenthood Trains Abortionists to Send Women Home With Potentially Fatal Injuries

Dave Andrusko responded to my article from last week about Christine Henneberg’s 2022 book Boundless: An Abortion Doctor Becomes a Mother. I want to follow up with another article that relates to some of the quotes he shared.

Christine Henneberg Describes Her Mission

In a glowing review of Boundless, Kirkus Reviews quoted Henneberg saying that she treats each patient “with respect and dignity” and “perform[s] a procedure that is as safe, short, and painless as possible.”

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In an interview (cited by Dave Andrusko, thank you), Henneberg says:

I really love meeting a woman in a place and a time in her life when she has every reason to feel anxious, afraid, or certain that she’s going to be treated poorly. To meet her and say, ‘I completely trust you. I’m going to treat you with all the dignity and respect you deserve and keep you safe.

So let’s look at the quality of “care” Henneberg actually gives the patients who lie down on her abortion table and trust their bodies, their health, and their safety to her. How is she really treating them? And is she keeping them safe?

Botched Abortions During Training

In fact, in her book, Henneberg admits to botching abortions. And worse, sending women home with potentially life-threatening complications.

This, she says, she was trained to do at Planned Parenthood.

Henneberg learned to do abortions through the TEACH partnership, which stands for “Training in Early Abortion for Comprehensive Healthcare.” However, the name seems to be a misnomer. The TEACH program also taught Henneberg to commit second-trimester abortions.

Henneberg trained at Planned Parenthood of Long Beach under abortionist “Rebecca.”

During training, Henneberg perforated a woman’s uterus while performing an eight-week abortion. This means she thrust her instrument, a cannula, right through the wall of the woman’s uterus into her abdominal cavity. As we shall see, this is a dangerous complication.

Henneberg relates what happened when she told Rebecca what she had done:

[Rebecca] had been checking something on her phone. She looked up. “Suction off,” she told the assistant. “Let me feel.” She placed her hands on the cannula and probed the wall of the uterus, feeling what I did.

‘Yup, you did,’ she said. ‘You perforated.’ She didn’t bat an eye.

Rebecca examined the abortion remains and confirmed that no parts of the baby remained in the uterus. She checked the woman again and told Henneberg, “Don’t worry. She’s going to be fine.”

Sending the Women Home Instead of to the Hospital

Henneberg says:

My face must have been ashen. “Have you ever perforated before?” she asked me.

“No.”

She gave a little laugh. ‘The thing you have to remember is that abortions are one of the safest procedures there is. Perforation is like your worst nightmare, right? We are so careful to avoid it, and we should be.

But now it’s happened to you. You poked a little hole in her uterus. You have to watch her for bleeding, make sure you didn’t suck any bowel through with your cannula. But 99% of the time that doesn’t happen. You’ll watch her. She’ll go home. This will heal itself up in a few days.’

Apparently, the protocol at Planned Parenthood is to send patients with perforations home instead of the hospital. And they did.

Henneberg says, “She went home. We went home. I couldn’t wait to go back the next morning.”

Henneberg perforated another woman’s uterus on the first procedure of the next day. This woman received the same “treatment.” They checked to see if they removed the whole baby (which should be done after every abortion regardless), examined the perforation under ultrasound, checked bleeding, and sent her home.

A Uterine Perforation is a Life-Threatening Complication

Here is more information about uterine perforation. As you read it, you will see just how serious these injuries are.

Medic-Journal calls a uterine perforation a “formidable complication” that can cause “life-threatening bleeding, peritonitis, loss of reproductive function.”

Medic-Journal gives the symptoms of a uterine perforation as:

intense pain in the lower abdomen and signs of intra-abdominal bleeding: bloody discharge from the vagina, weakness, dizziness, tachycardia.

It says:

Untimely diagnosis of uterine perforation can lead to formidable and life-threatening complications and consequences. These include intestinal injuries or bladder injuries, massive hematomas, bleeding, peritonitis, sepsis.

In addition, uterine perforations can permanently destroy a woman’s ability to carry another pregnancy to term, or cause infertility outright:

Damage to the internal uterine pharynx can contribute to the formation of cervical insufficiency, miscarriage during subsequent pregnancy.

Uterine perforation can have serious consequences for reproductive function and cause the development of infertility due to the formation of intrauterine adhesions (Asherman syndrome) or the need to remove the uterus.

Appropriate Treatment for a Uterine Perforation

According to Medic-Journal, this is the preferred treatment for a minor perforation:

If the perforation is incomplete, the hole is small, and there is absolute confidence in the absence of damage to the OBP, parametral hematoma and intra-abdominal bleeding, conservative-observational tactics can be undertaken. In this case, bed rest is prescribed, cold on the stomach, uterotonic drugs and antibiotics are used. Dynamic ultrasound control is carried out.

In other situations (in the presence of peritoneal symptoms and increasing signs of internal bleeding), laparoscopy or laparotomy, a thorough revision are indicated.

If a small defect is detected in the uterine wall, they are limited to suturing the wound.

Henneberg didn’t suture the perforations and says nothing about giving medications or specific instructions.

Abortionists and clinic workers often don’t see complications because post-abortive patients go to emergency rooms or follow up with their own private OB/GYNs, rather than going back to the abortion facility for treatment.

Other complications, such as those relating to fertility, may not show up for years.

Henneberg doesn’t know if either of the injured women ended up in an emergency room, much less if they were unable to conceive or miscarried future pregnancies. “Rebecca” may not know either.

Women Who Have Died from Uterine Perforations

Here are just a few of the women who have died from perforations:

· Gloria Small was 43 and a mother of six.

· Germaine Newman was 14. Her mother found her dead at home the day after her abortion.

· Teresa Causey’s last words were “Oh, mama, mama, it hurts so much!” She was only 17.

· Margaret Paula Clodfelter was 19. Like Henneberg’s patients, she was sent home, where she died.

· Maureen Espinoza, 16, was also sent home. She went to the hospital six days after her abortion, and doctors operated on her twice but were unable to save her life.

· Leigh Ann Stephens Alford, 34, died 18 hours after the facility sent her home with a perforated uterus.

· Virginia Wolfe, 33, died on the abortion table.

· Shirley Payne was 33 when she died.

· Rhonda Rollinson had a perforated uterus. In her case, the abortionist also failed to remove the whole baby. The facility sent Rhonda home despite knowing the abortion was incomplete. They told her to come back another day. She died before she could.

· A 20-year-old Newark college student, name unknown, also died of a perforation, leaving her four-year-old son motherless.

· Anjelica Duarte, 21, left behind two young daughters, ages one and three.

· Mickey Apodaca was 28. Her abortionist, Raymond E. Showery, had been convicted of murder for allegedly drowning a baby girl who was born alive after an abortion. When he killed Apodaca, he was out of jail, appealing the verdict. Showery was charged with manslaughter for Apodaca’s death.

While he was awaiting trial, pro-abortion activists demonstrated outside the jail with signs supporting him. They called for his release, despite his role in Apodaca’s death.

· Carolina Gutierrez was 20. She suffered a massive infection after a uterine perforation.

When Gutierrez realized she was sick, she called the abortion facility but was hung up on. Over the course of the next two days, as her condition worsened, she left repeated messages, but no one returned her calls.

The infection spread throughout her entire body. After she was admitted to the hospital, surgeons amputated both her legs in an attempt to save her, but it was unsuccessful. Gutierrez suffered for over a month. She finally passed away six weeks after the abortion.

She left behind two children, five and two, and a grieving husband.

Henneberg Still Sends Injured Patients Home

Henneberg has now made abortion her career, and says, “I still manage perforation according to the exact protocol we followed (twice) while I was training with [Rebecca].”

So, she still sends women home with no treatment.

And so, apparently, does Planned Parenthood. How many of those women went on to bleed to death or develop life-threatening infections? How many became infertile?

In the article cited earlier, Henneberg said:

We’re so proud to be there helping women through these difficult decisions. It’s very rewarding work that we take a lot of pride in. Women leave the clinic carried to some extent on that pride they feel from the good care they’ve received there.

In fact, some of them may leave the clinic carrying a serious injury, a medical time bomb that could kill them, cause them to miscarry future babies, or leave them infertile.

Source: Christine Henneberg Boundless: An Abortion Doctor Becomes a Mother (San Francisco, California, 2022) 213, 214, 246—247, 263

LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.

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