The mother began to hemorrhage and to have trouble breathing, but Tucker, who was doing as many as 150 abortions a week in two different states, had to catch a plane for his next appointment. His patient died three days later of an infection and embolism caused by his failure to remove all the amniotic fluid. At the time the judgment was rendered, Tucker had already lost his license to practice in Mississippi as a result of a different case and was under investigation for killing a baby who had been born alive during an abortion. Amshoff spoke to FFL from his office in Louisville. In most surgical procedures, there is extensive surgeon-patient contact prior to the actual operation.
Abortion is different because there is much less contact.
As a result, a lot of safeguards of the informed-consent process are missing. In other clinics, there is an assembly-line mentality. Truly effective informed consent needs to analyze risk tailored to the person who's contemplating the surgery, and that means you need to look at the risks at the woman's gestational stage of pregnancy. To present a woman with statistics on morbidity and mortality based on all abortions is grossly misleading when the patient falls into the subset of abortion patients who have a far greater likelihood of serious complication. Also, a risk assessment that doesn't adequately take into account the woman's individual health background and reproductive history is deficient.