The Los Angeles Times details the medical malpractice and sexual abuse that occurred at five abortion facilities in southern California. The paper reported that five abortion mills were raided last year by a special unit of the Los Angeles Police Department, the Health Authority Law Enforcement Task Force. The facilities were owned by Bertha Bugarin who, along with her sister were charged with practicing medicine without a license on five patients in February and March 2007.

Bertha Bugarin was charged with five felony counts of practicing medicine without certification and two misdemeanor counts of dispensing medication without a license and her sister Raquel was charged in the same complaint with five felony counts of aiding or abetting the practice of medicine without certification.

It is not the first time that abortionists with the chain have ran afoul of the law and medical establishment. In 2004, Phillip Rand, then in his 80s, committed a vaginal suction procedure, despite having determined that his patient, identified only as Angela P., was 20 weeks pregnant; she given no anesthesia or painkillers. Yet, according to the National Abortion Federation, vacuum aspiration procedures are normally used up to the 14th week, after which a more complicated procedure, known as dilation and evacuation, is standard. Vicki Saporta, president of the NAF told the Times, “A suction abortion is not appropriate at 20 weeks.”

By the time paramedics arrived, the patient was lying in a pool of her own blood, her pulse racing and her blood pressure dangerously low. A medical board found Rand’s negligence ‘barbaric’ and a ‘severe departure’ from a reasonable standard of care.

Before this incident, the Times reported, Rand was involved in 40 malpractice suits, numerous botched abortions and several medical license suspensions.

Operation Rescue president Troy Newman, who helped expose the dangerous abortion practices at the abortion chain, said, “Bugarin has had a heck of a time keeping abortionists over the years and has always hired the very bottom of the barrel. It looks like when she couldn’t get one of her quack abortionists in the office, she did the job herself,” referring to the latest charges.

Other abortionists at Bugarin’s chain identified by the paper include Nicholas Braemer, who lost his medical license after numerous botched abortions, one of which resulted in a woman’s death – he was later accused “at least three times of violating the probation terms”; Laurence Reich, who lost his license after a second conviction of sexually molesting his abortion patients; Mohammed Dia who was forced to surrender his license after charges of malpractice and billing fraud – he once admitted to bringing a bleeding patient to a hospital after perforating her uterus and leaving part of the fetus in her body; Glenn Edward Miller, an admitted alcoholic who was placed on probation in 2005 after doing obstetrical procedures while under the influence of alcohol; George Dalton Flanigan, who was put on probation for five years for delivering a dead baby using a vacuum procedure, after refusing to perform a cesarean section.

Miller and Rand also settled a malpractice suit for performing an abortion on a non-pregnant woman at a non-Bugarin clinic. The procedure ruptured the woman’s uterus.