Blaze News original: ‘Child still had a spine’: Late-term abortionist left woman maimed for life, lawyer says

Last week, an Indiana woman filed a lawsuit, alleging that an OB/GYN in Illinois botched a late-term abortion and left her permanently scarred.

Blaze News spoke with Jane Doe’s attorney, Richard Craig, to learn more about the incident and what Craig and his client hope to accomplish through the litigation.

Doe’s D&E: A ‘bad choice’ made worse

On April 1, 2023, Jane Doe walked into Equity Clinic in Champaign, Illinois, seeking an elective abortion. At that point, she was 22 weeks pregnant and was scheduled to undergo a procedure called a dilation and evacuation, which requires patients to visit the clinic on two consecutive days.

On April 2, Doe returned to the clinic, having experienced no issues the previous day, and Dr. Keith Reisinger-Kindle and other members of the Equity Clinic staff continued the procedure, removing the unborn child from Doe’s womb using a “combination of a 15 suction catheter and … a Sopher clamp under ultrasound guidance,” the lawsuit said.

Afterward, Kindle was required to account for all of the baby’s body parts — referred to as the “products of conception” in the patient’s chart — to make sure nothing remained in the woman’s uterus. The “products of conception were visibly inspected and found to be complete,” said a note regarding Doe generated by Kindle, according to court documents.

Medical staff performed a laparotomy that revealed ‘half of a deceased pre-born human being’ still inside her uterus.

Only Kindle could not possibly have done that, Craig told Blaze News.

The first sign that something was terribly wrong was the severe cramping. Doe called the clinic on April 3 to complain of “heavy cramping,” only to be told to take ibuprofen or Tylenol. When she called back five hours later, still in some pain and now having difficulty breathing and experiencing “a lot of pressure” in her rear end, she was instructed to take a laxative, the lawsuit said.

When she called back yet again the following day, having taken two laxatives that did not lead to a bowel movement, Doe was told to try an enema and perhaps consider going to an urgent care clinic or ER.

Thankfully, she took that advice and went to Community Hospital South in Indianapolis, where medical staff performed a laparotomy that revealed “half of a deceased pre-born human being” still inside her uterus, the lawsuit said.

The remains of the baby were removed from Doe’s uterus, and pieces of “fetal skull” were likewise removed from her intestines, the lawsuit claimed. Her uterus also required treatment for a perforation that allegedly occurred during the abortion.

Craig’s description of the abortion complications was even more gruesome. Rather than “half” of a baby still inside Doe, records showed it was “closer to two-thirds,” he told Blaze News.

“The child still had a spine and an upper torso.”

Because of the medical reports from the hospital, Craig reiterated that Kindle could not have “visibly inspected” all of the child’s body parts following the abortion and “found” them “to be complete” as noted in Doe’s chart.

“There’s no way that he inspected the uterus and determined that everything had been removed because there’s no way that he could have missed that.”

Kindle did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

A message left at Equity Clinic — which features an LGBTQ+ flag on its webpage and slams the term “late-term abortion” as an attempt to “shame people,” not necessarily women, who have abortions late into pregnancy — was not returned.

Abortion aftermath

Though Doe did recover from the allegedly botched abortion, she was apparently left permanently scarred. The lawsuit claimed that the incident resulted in “psychiatric damages and physical damages that will affect her ability to carry and deliver children for the rest of her life.”

Craig told Blaze News that Doe undoubtedly suffered permanent physical injury from the abortion and subsequent complications.

“It’s unclear whether she would ever be able to deliver except by C-section — and it’s unclear whether she’ll ever be able to deliver again at all,” he said.

‘He just wanted to get her off the phone.’

Craig also blames Kindle’s apparently dismissive treatment of Doe for her ongoing emotional injuries, and to illustrate, he pointed to an exchange Doe and Kindle had three days after the procedure.

On April 5, 2023, Doe called Kindle and asked him whether her unborn child had been a boy or a girl. Kindle’s alleged response was nothing short of “callous,” Craig claimed, since the child’s remains were already long since gone.

“Instead of telling her, ‘It didn’t occur to me to check. I don’t know, and I will never know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll go back, and I’ll look, and I’ll let you know if I find anything out,'” Craig claimed.

“He basically gave her an answer just to get her off the phone because he knew that there’s no way he would be able to tell whether it was a boy or a girl at that point. He should have leveled with her,” he continued.

“He just wanted to get her off the phone.”

Kindle was apparently equally as unhelpful when he spoke with a general surgeon from Community Hospital South who also called on April 5. The surgeon wanted to inform Kindle about the laparotomy on his patient and to inquire about what happened during the abortion procedure.

Kindle “refused to answer any questions or provide any information … about the Abortion procedure, claiming lack of consent” from Doe, the lawsuit said.

Doe and Craig are not the only ones dissatisfied with Kindle and his job performance both during and after Doe’s abortion.

An unnamed board-certified OB/GYN who has performed more than 1,000 first- and second-trimester surgical abortions reviewed Doe’s case and determined that “Kindle deviated from a reasonable standard of care” by causing a uterine perforation and then failing to notice and by “failing to adequately examine the fetal parts obtained during the suction D&E procedure,” the physician wrote in a sworn affidavit.

According to a glowing 2023 article about abortionists in the Chicago Tribune, Kindle has spent his entire adult life assisting and performing abortions. He also bragged about his bedside manners with scared abortion patients.

“I was holding their hand and wiping away their tears and being their emotional support,” Kindle recalled to the Tribune.

“And for a lot of our patients, having men in their lives fill that role is unheard of. That just fueled me. I was like, we need men — and particularly white men — to use their experience and their privilege and their place in the world to show folks that this is actually how we treat people and how we support people. Once you’re a part of that, you can’t do anything else,” he continued.

“The only reason I went to medical school was to be an abortion provider.”

Until recently, Kindle was a clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine in Dayton, Ohio, as well as the OB/GYN director of a women’s health clinic affiliated with the school. In fact, he parted ways with the university so recently that, as of Thursday morning, he remains listed on the school website among the OB/GYN faculty “leadership.”

Screenshot of Wright State University website

However, when Blaze News emailed Kindle at the Wright State address listed, we received a reply stating, “As you may have heard, I have submitted my resignation to Wright State University.” The reply also provided Kindle’s personal email address as well as his email address associated with Equity Clinic. Kindle did not respond to the emails sent to those addresses.

A representative of the OB/GYN division at Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Looking for ‘justice’

When speaking with Blaze News, attorney Richard Craig did not attempt to dodge the moral component of abortion or Jane Doe’s culpability in procuring one. In fact, that was one of the reasons he decided to keep her real name out of the lawsuit, to protect her from online “vitriol.”

“She’s a good person. … She made a bad choice,” Craig said regarding the abortion. “We all do. We’re all human beings.”

“I think she’d be the first to step up and say, ‘I made a bad choice.'”

‘Our society presents the process of abortion in a very sterile way.’

However, Doe is still a victim in this case, he averred.

“She is a good person that made a bad choice. She was harmed by a bad person who made a deliberate choice to do what he did,” he explained, referring to Kindle. “And when faced with the knowledge that he caused her real harm, he reacted in a very callous and disinterested way.”

Many pro-life advocates and groups agreed.

“This is far from healthcare. This is far from ‘pro-woman,'” wrote CatholicVote.

“Is this the kind of ‘healthcare’ women can expect from Illinois? This mother and her baby deserve justice,” added the American Association of Pro Life OBGYNs.

The lawsuit accuses Kindle of failing to inspect the baby’s body parts as required by protocol, causing and then failing to address Doe’s uterine perforation, failing to provide adequate post-abortive care, and overall carelessness and negligence. It is seeking an amount “in excess of the jurisdictional minimum” of $50,000.

“I’m hoping to achieve a semblance of justice for my client, who was gravely injured because of this,” Craig told Blaze News.

Additionally, Craig hopes that the lawsuit will warn other women, particularly young women, that abortions like the D&E Jane Doe underwent pose serious risks and to consider carrying their unborn child to term instead.

“Our society presents the process of abortion in a very sterile way and in a way that does not fully reflect just how … [much] the human body resists the effort,” Craig stated. “It’s not something that is easily accomplished.”

“I hope that many would ponder maybe it would be a better approach to stick it out as opposed to undergo this procedure.”

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