Indiana Health Dept. Sits On Records Showing Two Babies Born Alive After Abortions, Three Women Dead
BY: JOY PULLMANN | APRIL 27, 2023
JOY PULLMANN
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Indiana abortion records The Federalist obtained this week indicate that in 2022 three women died after abortion procedures and two babies were born alive after chemical abortions. They also suggest Indiana abortionists failed to report four abortions on girls aged 15 and younger, as legally required. One of the minors not referred for a state abuse investigation after her abortion, a violation of state law, was just 13 years old, the records say.
The Indiana Department of Health receives legally mandated Terminated Pregnancy Reports on each abortion committed in the state. More than 100 of these from January to November 2022 indicate that abortion facilities in the state may have committed crimes and health violations, according to recordkeeping from Voices for Life, a Hoosier pro-life organization.
IDH has shut down no abortion facilities since January 2022, however, even facilities where records show women died after abortions. As for the 22 abortionists named in these numerous recent reports indicating potential medical malfeasance, “I am not aware of any doctors who have lost their licenses,” Voices for Life Executive Director Melanie Garcia Lyon told The Federalist Wednesday.
IDH communications personnel did not respond to any questions about these records from The Federalist.
GOP to Reward Incompetent Health Agency
Indiana’s Republican governor and Republican-dominated legislature are poised to increase taxpayer funding for the health department by 2,000 percent this week, from $7 million a year to more than $150 million. IDH also pushed Indiana families into lockdown and covid testing chaos across two school years despite early-available evidence children were at low risk from Covid-19 exposure.
Gov. Eric Holcomb is now using the damage his lengthy Covid shutdowns caused, including mental distress, obesity, and academic catastrophe, to amp up funding for the shutdowns’ top enabler and enforcer in Indiana. That enforcer also happens to be low-energy in investigating abortion businesses whose services have resulted in Hoosier women’s deaths.
Voices for Life and their national partner Students for Life collect these records and file complaints about apparent violations with IDH and the state attorney general’s office, Garcia Lyon told The Federalist. Forty percent of the potential violations the group found from January to November 2022, Garcia Lyon said, were from Planned Parenthood locations.
After receiving such complaints, the office of Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita investigates, then submits a summary or a complaint to Indiana’s medical licensing board, said Rokita Press Secretary Kelly Stevenson. The board hears complaints and decides whether to sanction the investigated abortionist or facility. Indiana’s governor oversees that board and appoints its seven members.
On Saturday in Indianapolis, Students for Life and Voices for Life will highlight the state-reported health and safety violations related to an abortion facility that may move across the border to Illinois. That’s the Clinic for Women, currently in Indianapolis.
In September, Indiana banned abortions, except for very small babies who are the claimed results of rape and incest. The law is currently suspended by two injunctions pending litigation. Garcia Lyon noted that the law “still allows for abortion at hospitals. And the same people making these violations often do abortions in hospitals already. [So] code violations will still be relevant once the law goes into place, because it’s still the same people, just moving places.”
Records: 15-Year-Old Girl’s Womb Evacuated By Infamous Abortionist
One of the abortion reports, dated April 21, 2022, shows a chemical abortion on a 15-year-old girl performed by abortionist Deborah Nucatola in Bloomington, Ind. at a Planned Parenthood. Nucatola was infamously recorded on a 2015 undercover video discussing how to “crush” a child to death during an abortion to leave his organs intact for sale.
The state report suggests this abortion was not reported, as legally required, to the state Department of Child Services for investigation as the potential result of child rape. The space on the form for the date of reporting this abortion to IDH is blank. Legally, the form states, the abortion should have been disclosed to DCS within three days of the child’s death.
Debora Nucatola_PP Bloomington 4.21.22 Unreported Abortion on Minor (1) by The Federalist on Scribdhttps://www.scribd.com/embeds/640915572/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-IfmOusQhz4pGVSMM0Ko3
One of the four underage girls whose 2022 abortions weren’t reported to child services, as legally required, was 13 years old when her child was aborted, according to state records. That surgical abortion on a seven-week-old baby was performed at a Planned Parenthood branch in Indianapolis by abortionist Cassandra Cashman, the record states.
DCS also failed to answer any Federalist questions about these reports.
Records: 3 Women Died After Indiana Abortions in 2022
According to three TPRs from 2022, three women died in Indiana after abortions at facilities overseen by the Indiana Department of Health. At the Indianapolis Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Hospital, a 31-year-old married woman died after an abortion on June 25, 2022, says one TPR.
The record says she was given abortion pills when her baby was 21 weeks of gestation, an age at which babies can survive outside the womb in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The baby was diagnosed via ultrasound with a chromosomal anomaly, says the record, which IDH received on July 22, 2022. The physician committing this abortion was listed as Amy Caldwell in the report.
Caldwell was also the abortionist listed on the April 24, 2022 report of another Hoosier woman who died after an abortion at Planned Parenthood-Georgetown in Indianapolis. The 29-year-old unmarried woman was given abortion drugs to kill a 7-week-old baby, say the state records.
The third Hoosier woman to die after an abortion in 2022 undertook a surgical abortion in Bloomington, Indiana, by abortionist Rhiannon Amodeo, says another state record. The baby cut to pieces inside her was an estimated eight weeks old. His mother was 31 years old. The Indiana Department of Health received the report of this double death on November 23, 2022.
Caldwell is also listed as the physician on a January 7, 2022 report that says she delivered a baby alive during an abortion procedure. That baby was also potentially viable in a NICU: she was listed on the report as 20 weeks old when her mother and an abortionist ended her life.
Indiana Department of Health Blaming Data ‘Errors’ Since 2018
In March 2022, Hoosier pro-lifers said the Indiana Department of Health stopped releasing Terminated Pregnancy Reports for a South Bend facility after local conservative news highlighted TPRs indicating multiple illegal abortions at the Whole Women’s Health facility.
“Over the past four years, IDOH has taken zero action on reported abortions that indicate they were illegally performed,” wrote state Rep. Jake Teshka in a March 2022 letter to the agency about the incident.
More than 50 Indiana lawmakers wrote to Holcomb in 2021 complaining about the IDH’s history of alleged data errors and lackluster follow-up on abortion reports that indicate potential crimes. The letter noted that since at least 2018 the department has claimed several abortion reports that indicate criminal or health-violating activity were false, due to “computer error.”
“We submit complaints all the time about things that are reported on Terminated Pregnancy Reports, and the excuse nearly every time is, ‘Oh, it was an error. Oh, it was an error,’” Jackie Appleman, a Voices for Life board member, told a local newspaper in February after the department used the excuse again over reports of unlicensed abortions occurring in Indiana. “We’ve been getting this excuse back from the (Indiana) health department for the last, I don’t know, three or four years.”
The December 2021 letter from elected officials notes that despite multiple postabortion deaths of women and abortions performed at unlicensed facilities, Indiana abortionists have failed to lose their medical licenses and IDOH has failed to resolve investigations into such cases. The officials asked Holcomb to update them on “on all open cases relating to abortion clinics” and to investigate why complaints “are not examined and resolved.”
Holcomb responded in January 2022, providing no update on IDH investigations of abortion facilities nor announcing any investigation into why IDH fails to secure penalties for abortionists after procedures that lead to women’s deaths. One year later, he moved to reward the badly discredited IDH with hundreds of millions more taxpayer dollars. Holcomb’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Instead of demanding that IDH prove competence at stopping criminal and human rights violations under its purview before any expansion of its duties, the Indiana legislature is cooperating with Holcomb in rewarding IDH with a 2,000 percent increase in taxpayer funding.
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