California Abortion Practitioner Loses License After Botched Abortion



The Medical Board of California has revoked the medical license of Philip Pierre-Louis, of San Bernardino for botching a woman's abortion so badly that she required nearly two weeks of medical care in a hospital.

Pierre-Louis was put on four years of probation and fined $5,000 in cost recovery by the Board on March 31, 1999 for gross negligence, incompetence, unprofessional conduct and failure to maintain adequate medical records. The action came when Pierre-Louis perforated a woman's uterus and removed three to five feet of her intestine when performing an abortion.

A doctor had to perform corrective surgery and deliver the deceased baby. The patient was placed in intensive care for nine days and had to remain in the hospital for 12 days, postoperatively.

In his Stipulated Settlement and Disciplinary Order stemming from that case, Pierre-Louis acknowledged that had the matter gone to a hearing, the Board would have been able to establish a factual basis for its charges, and he agreed to several probationary terms.

In its Petition to Revoke Probation, filed November 20, 2002, the Board charged Pierre-Louis with numerous violations of his probation, including failure to take and pass a remedial clinical program; failure to submit timely reports to the Board; failure to reimburse the Board for its investigative and probation monitoring costs; and failure to appear for interviews with Board staff, all of which he had agreed to do in his settlement.

The Board's Division of Medical Quality entered a Decision and Order on April 24, 2003. When it becomes effective on May 27, 2003, Pierre-Louis will no longer be able to practice medicine in California.

(This article courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email [email protected].)

Complaint Filed in Mistaken Abortion Procedure

Granite City, IL — An Illinois medical regulatory board has filed a formal complaint accusing a Granite City abortion practitioner of performing an abortion on a woman who was not pregnant.

The complaint against Yogendra Shah was filed by the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation on March 25, one day before the five-year statute of limitations on the case expired. The complaint alleges “gross negligence.”

Melanie Mills, 29, of St. Charles County, says Shah performed an abortion on her at the Hope Clinic for Women abortion facility in Granite City on March 26, 1998, without confirming that she was pregnant.

Shah's lawyer, Mark Levy, declined Thursday to comment about the state's complaint, which could result in a reprimand or even suspension or revocation of Shah's medical license.

Mills filed a suit against Shah last year in circuit court in Madison County seeking more than $50,000 for physical and emotional damages she said she had suffered during the time she had undergone an abortion. Mills said in an interview Thursday that she sought the abortion despite her pro-life stance because she was attending college at the time and raising two young sons with her husband.

After the abortion, she said, she suffered flashbacks, nightmares and severe depression.

Mills said she found out more than three years later from her gynecologist that the abortion facility's medical records showed she probably had a blighted ovum instead of a viable pregnancy at the time of her abortion. A blighted ovum is a fertilized egg that attaches to the uterine wall but does not develop further.

“I'd been going around for three years beating myself up for killing a baby,” Mills said. “All these head trips I went through, for no good reason.”

In an affidavit filed in the civil suit, Shah said he was told by Mills that she had tested positive on two pregnancy tests, one of them administered by another hospital. Mills said Thursday that her doctor had given her a pregnancy test six days before she sought an abortion at the Hope Clinic. She tested positive at the time, she said.

In the affidavit, Shah said he confirmed the pregnancy on the day of the abortion by performing an ultrasound that showed Mills was about six weeks pregnant.

Later tests showed that Mills probably had a blighted ovum that aborted on its own, Shah said in the affidavit, and that she would have required the same abortion procedure “to insure that the naturally occurring abortion was complete, clean and safe.”

The civil case is pending.

Shah is scheduled to appear June 30 before the Professional Regulation Department's medical disciplinary board in Chicago. A hearing date will be set then. The director of the Professional Regulation Department will determine what punishment, if any, is warranted, based on a recommendation from the medical disciplinary board.

Hope Clinic, located on the Illinois side of the Illinois-Missouri border, and just minutes from St. Louis, has been criticized often for luring teens for abortions without their parents notification. Illinois has no law requiring parents to be notified when an abortion is done on a teenage girl while Missouri's law mandates parental involvement.

(This article courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email [email protected].)

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