Abortion wars take two

Now docs will again see septic abortions and women dying from Clostridial endometriosis...

I'll translate this into English.

I am old enough to remember the "bad old days" when abortion was illegal...so women went to quacks...

Often the quacks, instead of removing the fetus and membranes, just poked into the uterus...and part came out, but the afterbirth/membranes were left behind...

And a week later, we docs would see a lady sick as a dog, who often didn't mention she was pregnant, but had a "hot belly", i.e. painful abdomen, mainly in the lower part, and when we did a vaginal exam, voila, pus coming from the cervix, and when we went in, we found infected membranes and often a piece of a foley catheter (which is a rubber tube used to drain urine, which was being used by a certain lady in South Philly instead of the more famous coat hanger)...

One of my fellow students had a lady die of Clostridium infection...clostridia is a nasty germ that grows without oxygen, so often doesn't grow easily in the laboratory..and it produced toxins that poison the body...

Think: Gas Gangrene of the uterus...

Well, when the abortion pill was being proposed, many of us older docs said: Wait a minute...ten percent of women taking it correctly will bleed, or will have incomplete abortions, i.e. part of the tissue left behind, and we will see a return of problems that no doc under age 60 has seen...

But with abortion politics, this worry was translated into: Bad Abortion vs Bad Anti Abortion people...and no one listened.

And the statistics are about people taking it correctly...
The bad news is that many women having abortions are poor, upset, teenagers, and/or not thinking clearly...so they don't take the pill correctly and don't go back for rechecks.

Indeed, I suspect many cases were treated without being reported, and the number of complications are higher than reported...

Why do I think this? Well, because when NY changed it's abortion laws, our hospital started getting complications from the shoddy abortionists who were now "legal" and went into practice...at one point we had five patients with infection, perforations, and a missed ectopic pregnancy...none died, but when I interviewed at a NYC hospital, they mentioned a patient with lupus who decided on a second trimester abortion, and died...

Twenty years later, I read an article claiming that the NYC clinics showed how successful they were at stopping complications of abortion...and that THERE HAD BEEN NO DEATHS from abortion in 20 years...

Duh...no reported deaths...like in suicides or with HIV, we docs lots of time lie to families and on death certificates, to spare the living...

Another dirty little secret no one talks about...