A 29-year-old woman has died as a result of a 33-week abortion conducted by late-term abortion specialist Dr. LeRoy Carhart.
Jennifer Morbelli, a kindergarten teacher from White Plains, New York, travelled to Carhart’s abortion facility, the Germantown Reproductive Health Center (GRHC), in Germantown, Maryland to begin the four-day procedure on Sunday, Feb. 3. The reason for the abortion was a fetal abnormality.
Over the next three days, witnesses who saw Morbelli return to the facility for the next stages of her abortion said she seemed “pale and weak.” On Feb. 7 at 5 a.m., Morbelli was short of breath and in great pain. She and her family were unable to contact Carhart. Morbelli was taken in a private vehicle to Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville, Maryland, where she died the same morning after slipping into a “Code Blue” condition six times. The medical examiner’s office pronounced the causes of death to be “amniotic fluid embolism following termination of pregnancy” (where amniotic fluid enters the patient’s bloodstream) and “disseminated intravascular coagulation” (the formation of small blood clots that use up clotting agents, possibly leading to severe bleeding).
On the same day that Morbelli died, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) announced online that it had issued a licence to Carhart to carry out abortions even though it did not inspect his abortuary.
The Montgomery County Police Department has launched an investigation into the fatality. On Feb. 28, 17 members of the Maryland House of Delegates sent a letter to the DHMH asking about the agency’s abortuary licensing regulations. The Maryland Board of Physicians is conducting a preliminary investigation of Carhart because of the death of Morbelli.
On Feb. 11, pro-life groups held a vigil and press conference at the GHRC organized by the Maryland Coalition for Life (MDCFL). In his remarks, Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, advised pro-lifers to petition the hospital, building and land owners, and regulatory bodies to take action against Carhart and his facility, as well as urge lawmakers to pass a bill protecting unborn children who feel pain. “Another woman has been killed by so-called ‘safe and legal’ abortion,” said Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life. “It happens constantly, in fact, but the abortion industry usually succeeds in covering it up. And even when they don’t, the rest of us succeed in keeping it relatively quiet. That has to change today.”
This is not the first time that Carhart was involved in the death of a patient. In 2005, while working at George Tiller’s late-term abortion facility in Wichita, Kansas, he was responsible for the third trimester abortion of Christin Gilbert, a 19-year-old with Down syndrome who got pregnant after being raped. She died, according to the autopsy report, from abortion complications.
Carhart was the plaintiff in two late-term abortion cases that went to the Supreme Court and he was one of the late-term abortionists lauded at the Sundance Film Festival screening of the documentary, After Tiller. He moved to Germantown after state pro-life legislation forced him to shut down his facility, the Abortion and Contraception Clinic of Nebraska.
Carhart also conducted other irregularities and illegalities. In his application to practice medicine in Maryland, he provided a different name for his former abortuary in Bellevue, Nebraska and omitted listing his work at other abortion facilities. In November 2012, the MDCFL filed a complaint over the illegal dumping of medical and biohazardous waste, as well as medical records, occurring at the GHRC; only on Feb.12 did the Environmental Crimes Unit of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office tell MDCFL that it would be investigating. As well, pro-life nurse and blogger Jill Stanek reported that pro-lifers found documents Carhart gave his patients that advised them to call and go to the abortion facility instead of the ER in case of an emergency.
The media has been largely silent about the death of Morbelli. Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post, though, used it as an opportunity to attack pro-lifers for violating the victim’s privacy. She was outraged that pro-life groups, including Operation Rescue and Maryland Coalition for Life, revealed information about Morbelli’s death that they received from an anonymous source. “The protesters are exploiting this woman’s death and making other women think that their privacy is never truly protected when they seek an abortion,” she wrote. But pro-lifers disagree. “Secrecy acts to protect abortionists and shield them from accountability. This only creates conditions where incompetent abortionists can kill again,” commented Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy advisor for Operation Rescue, to LifeSiteNews.
There have already been multiple abortion-related emergencies in this year alone. On March 4, Operation Rescue published two 911 recordings due to abortion complications at Planned Parenthood facilities in Wilmington, Delaware on Feb. 8 and 16 for separate incidents. The patients had to be transported to the hospital: one was unconscious and not breathing sufficiently, while the other had heavy bleeding. On March 5, an ambulance took another patient, this time from Planned Parenthood’s Stapleton facility in Denver, to the hospital. Two medical emergencies also happened at Southwestern Women’s Options late-term abortion facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Feb. 7 and March 1 as a result of abortions conducted by Tiller associates. The latest CDC statistics indicate that in 2008, 12 women died because of induced abortion-related complications.
