Angela Sanchez told two of her four children to sit in the waiting room while she received a medical checkup. But Angela had not come to Alicia Ruiz Hanna’s Santa Ana, Calif., medical clinic for a checkup — she had come for an abortion.

Hanna posed as a doctor, performing up to 20 abortions without a doctor present.

When Angela was being prepped for the abortion procedure, Hanna injected her with an unknown drug that caused Angela to have seizures. Even though Angela needed additional medical treatment for the seizures, Hanna prevented a receptionist from calling 911. Hours later, Angela’s children saw Hanna trying to stuff their mother’s body into the trunk of a car. After Angela’s death, Hanna was convicted of second-degree murder.

Angela is only one of the many women who have received and continue to receive substandard care in California abortion facilities. Twenty-seven-year-old Sharon Hampton died at a Moreno Valley abortion clinic in 1996. A 23-year-old Mexican woman died in 1995 from a late-term abortion in a San Ysidro clinic.

Oftentimes, these women are Latina and come from low-income families. In many cases, when women are injured during the abortion procedure, abortion providers are reluctant to transport them to hospitals because they then come under scrutiny by doctors and the medical board.

Source: Los Angeles Times, 4/15/98

Reprinted from The American Feminist, Fall 1998

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