A Colorado woman is suing the state’s Planned Parenthood franchise and one of its doctors whom she alleges forced her to go through with an abortion without proper anesthesia, and then left part of the baby in her body.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the pro-life legal advocacy group that is representing 40-year-old Ayanna Byer in the case, said that once inside Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinic in Colorado Springs, Byer changed her mind about having the procedure after realizing the facility was not going to provide the agreed-upon intravenous anesthesia for pain. Shockingly, the abortionist forged ahead with the procedure anyway, and two days later Byer ended up in a local emergency room, the victim of a botched abortion.
According to the lawsuit, filed in Colorado’s El Paso County District Court, Byer told the doctor that she did not want to go ahead with the procedure because the clinic staff had not been able to get an anesthesia I.V. into her vein. Although the abortionist assured her that an I.V. would be administered, he then turned on the vacuum machine and proceeded with abortion, telling Byer it was too late to stop.
Byer was fully awake throughout the procedure, and “was forced to feel the full pain of the procedure against her will and without the promised anesthesia,” related the ADF in its account of the case. “The abortionist stopped after seven minutes and sent Byer home with pain pills.” Two days later when she went to the emergency room, Byer discovered that part of the baby’s body had been left inside her.
In a statement for the lawsuit, the on-call emergency room doctor recalled that Byer “was septic with a high fever and elevated white count. She required an immediate high-risk surgery to remove the remaining tissue that had been left during the previous procedure done at Planned Parenthood.
The doctor said that because of Byer’s continued pain and heavy bleeding, “I was concerned that the patient might have had an ectopic pregnancy. I called Planned Parenthood the following day to inquire about pathology results, only to learn that no pathology is done on abortion patients. The doctor performing the abortion ‘looks’ at the tissue and makes a diagnosis.”
In his statement the doctor explained that no practicing physician “can maintain privileges to practice and perform surgery if they do not provide specific coverage for their patients in case of a complication. It is considered ‘abandonment’ of your patient. It is not acceptable to refer your patients to the Emergency Department and assume the on-call doctor will take care of any complications and assume all the risk associated with the complications.”
He added that it is considered “medically inappropriate for a physician to remove products of conception and not confirm the diagnosis with pathology. I know of no physician or hospital that would allow the removal of a specimen of this nature and assume what the diagnosis was by just ‘looking’ at it.”
Doug Romero, a Denver attorney who is representing Byer through ADF, said that “a woman’s life is more important than Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.” He added that what the abortion business did to Byer “is beyond the pale. They clearly put her through extraordinary cruelty and jeopardized her life. Their actions were intolerable.”
ADF Senior Counsel Michael J. Norton, a former U.S. Attorney who helped author an ADF report to the U.S. House of Representatives on alleged Planned Parenthood fraud, noted that the abortion giant receives more than $540 million per year in federal funding. “American tax dollars should be used responsibly and for the common good,” he said. “Planned Parenthood is irresponsible and only promotes its own self-interest. That was clearly seen most vividly in what they did to Ayanna.”
Dave Bohon covers faith, family, and cultural issues for The New American. He can be reached at [email protected].
