"It is like mass abortion!!"

We are going to continue with our series highlighting reviews by past customers of abortion clinics in Washington State. The following is an anonymous review of Cedar River Clinics, in Tacoma.

A Google User
6 years agoI had an appointment for termination and was kinda shocked when I arrived at the clinic. It is located in one of the really not so nice areas of Tacoma and as I stepped inside it got even worse. I was given a bunch of paperwork and was told to plan up to 6h in the clinic. Well now I know why. They do not care about you as a person, your feelings and emotions. It is like mass abortion!! The place is pretty run down, growded with tons of people waiting for their appointments and I do not even want to go into details about the sort of people sitting next to you in the waiting room. One lady was sitting there, telling me she was a little out of it cause you are not allowed to use street drugs 24h before the procedure. I was absolutely disgusted and scared!!! I decided to leave and made an appointment with a different clinic!!

The review elicited a response from Beverly Whipple, the clinic owner, a year later. Ms. Whipple didn't deny the woman's experience and instead declared how proud she was to have customers like those filling the waiting room.

Readers will remember that we've previously written about Cedar River. They were being sued for medical malpractice.

Beautiful Little Lamb Saved from Cedar River Abortion Mill

Of course, we love to get emails like the one reprinted below. It's a story we received this week about a beautiful child spared from the horror of abortion last year. Some people wanted her dismembered and set out as medical waste. Others braved the cold, the wind and rain, and public humiliation to see her live.

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Dear Pro-life friends,

Some of us who were praying at the Cedar River Abortion Center at Renton on Friday, April 1st, had a wonderful, joyful experience of having a lady drive by and hand over a picture of a beautiful baby girl. She said that some months back when she had driven in to the center for an abortion, someone praying outside handed her a picture (not sure what exactly it was) of a baby's feet. That touched her and made her choose life for her unborn child and the picture she gave us was the picture of her little daughter, Teana, who now is her joy.

Renton Abortion Clinic Being Sued for Botched 26-week Abortion

This blog has just learned that Washington State's most horrific abortion clinic is in the middle of another scandal. Cedar River Clinics is being sued for medical malpractice for a late-term abortion that almost killed the mother and left her unable to have children.

The doctor who performed the late-term abortion was Robert L. Kothenbeutel.

According to court documents, on December 13, 2007, Maria Diel of Pierce County came to Cedar River in Renton -- also known as the Feminist Women's Health Center -- to have her "25+ week" baby killed by the brutal abortion procedure known as dilation and evacuation. This is medical-speak for forcing the mother's cervix open enough so that the 'doctor' can go in with a forceps and rip the baby's legs and arms off and pull them out. Here is one description of the procedure:

Dilation and Evacuation (D & E)
Similar to a D & C abortion, this method also necessitates the forced dilation of the cervix. Metal forceps with a sharp cutting edge are used to grasp and pull the baby from the womb. The entire body is removed piece by piece. Because the baby's skull has typically hardened to bone by this time it must sometimes be compressed or crushed in order to be removed from the uterus. As a result, women undergoing this procedure have a higher risk of cervical laceration. Ironically, even some abortionists find this procedure distasteful, as the process of using forceps to twist and tear the baby's body from the womb is undeniably traumatic.

Another description is from former late-term abortionist Dr. Tony Levatino, where he goes into detail about removing the baby's skull:

The toughest part of a D&E abortion is extracting the baby’s head. The head of a baby that age is about the size of a plum and is now free floating inside the uterine cavity. You can be pretty sure you have hold of it if the Sopher clamp is spread about as far as your fingers will allow. You will know you have it right when you crush down on the clamp and see a pure white gelatinous material issue from the cervix. That was the baby’s brains. You can then extract the skull pieces. If you have a really bad day like I often did, a little face may come out and stare back at you.

Because the baby is so developed at 25 weeks, and his or her bones are hard, and so much force is involved, it's quite easy to lacerate the mother's uterus, or other organs. It seems something very much like this happened when Dr. Kothenbeutel was dismembering Mrs. Diel's baby.

The court documents allege that:

"Dr. Kothenbeutel and Cedar River Clinics were ill equipped to handle Maria Diel's late term termination the termination was negligently performed. Maria Diel lost an excessive amount of blood and was taken from Cedar River Clinics by ambulance to Valley Medical Center where a hysterectomy was performed to save her life."

The case is still at an early stage, and further medical facts will be brought out at trial. The parties have agreed to arbitration, as opposed to a jury trial, so maximum damages are $1 million.

Alas, Mrs. Diel's attorneys will be hard pressed to prove that Kothenbeutel and Cedar River were 'ill equipped' to handle late-term abortions like this, because they have in fact committed hundreds, if not thousands.

According to a 2002 “study” published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, Dr. Kothenbeutel reported doing just under 200 Dilation & Evacuation abortions in just a 6 week period.

We will bring you further details as they emerge. Meanwhile, this story can't be comforting to future would-be clients of this abortion mill.

Is This Post Illegal?

This last Monday in a Kent courtroom, the Constitution prevailed over a shocking attempt to silence this blog by a prominent local doctor linked to the region's most controversial abortion clinics. This doctor is Chair of the Washington State delegation to the American Medical Association, and in that capacity represents all the doctors in the state.

She is also a colleague and associate of pro-life, Christian doctors, some of whom sit on the board of our local Care-Net pregnancy resource centers.

Her name -- this is the part that she wanted to make a crime -- is Dr. Julie Komarow.

As with many other doctors involved with the local abortion industry, we have written about Dr. Komarow before. We have pointed out that she recently worked at Cedar River Clinics, the most horrific, late-term abortion clinic in the state of Washington.

Cedar River is actually involved in an ongoing medical malpractice lawsuit involving a 26 week old baby, as we will reveal in an upcoming post. Cedar River was also involved in another recent lawsuit because of an abortion they did on an Alaskan minor who was transported from her home state without her parents' knowledge and brought to Cedar River for an abortion. We will soon be exposing the depth of the clinic and staff's involvement with that scandal also.

As if that was not enough, we've also posted the interim results of an ongoing investigation into Cedar River's very questionable financial reporting.

We Need a 'Pay Czar' to Cap Abortionist Salaries

With all this action these days from the White House to cap "excessive" salaries of CEOs, it's time to look at capping the salaries of abortion industry workers, like doctors, and executives.

It's time to get the money out of the abortion industry. There should never be a financial incentive to perform or sell an abortion. We have heard for years how the abortion industry is driven by profits and financial incentives. We can fix that.

Did you know that Planned Parenthood of Western Washington (PPWW) CEO Chris Charbonneau pulls down almost $260,000 a year. We've documented some of the outrageous salaries being made by abortion industry workers, especially the doctors that do the actual killing, here.

Looking at the most recent figures from Cedar River Clinics, the Western Washington abortion chain which are also the only non-hospital facilities that do horrific abortions right up to the 6th month of pregnancy, that are actually illegal in most Western European countries, we see that Dr. Charlie Browne made $217,175 in 2007.

That's a paltry sum compared to his colleague Dr. Robert Kothenbeutel, who took home almost $305,000. Amazingly, Cedar River also was employing two full-time anesthetists: Douglas L. Raber and Dennis O Johnston. Anesthesia is only used for surgical abortions, and then mostly for the grisly second trimester abortions Cedar River specializes in.

Raber managed to make $190,000, considerably higher than the average for his specialty.

One of the premises of the current obsession with scrutinizing how much money CEOs are making in this country is a recognition of how money can "incentivize" an unethical and aggressive approach to sales of things which should not be aggressively sold.

Everyone -- abortion providers conspicuously notwithstanding -- pays lip service to the idea that reducing the number of abortions is a Good Thing. From this it irresistibly follows that we should never allow there to be a financial incentive to sell abortion.

The way to do that is to cap the salaries abortion providers can make. There are numerous ways this can be done. We suggest that the Washington State Legislature pass a law that says that no doctor can make more than 10% of his income from the provision of abortion services.

The abortion industry can squawk all it wants claiming they're not in it for the money. But if you speak to those who have come out of that industry and blown the whistle, we find out the truth.

Carol Everett used to run a chain of abortion clinics in Texas. She has since gone very public about how the pursuit of profits drove them to sell as many abortions as possible.

A new movie, Blood Money, goes into great detail on this problem.

For the record, in 2007 we spoke with PPWW spokesman Brian Cutler and asked him if Planned Parenthood's doctors would be willing to back up his claim that they were not in this "for the money" by doing abortions "pro bono". Needless to say, he said they had declined.

While some in the medical profession will whine that "this is a legal medical service" and doctors "deserve to get paid for their services", the fact is that countless doctors donate their time and talents both here and abroad.

In many other Western European countries, and Canada, the notion that medicine should be "non-profit" has widespread acceptance. We are not arguing that we should adopt the same notion across all real medicine, just making the point that the government stepping in to a certain, specific area of the economy and eliminating financial incentives to sell something that should never be "sold" has plenty of precedent.

Yes, the time for abortion salary caps is now. The time for a Washington State Abortion Pay Czar is today. This cause should truly bring together Left and Right and unite us on some common ground.

DSHS Holds Regular Planning Meetings with Abortion Providers, Divulges Names of Citizen Watchdogs

Would you expect that if you file a request with the state government as to how much an organization is receiving in state funds that the government would disclose your name to the organization in question?

Well, if you're dealing with the Take Charge Family Planning program at the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), that's apparently what you should expect.

In 2008, we submitted a complaint to the Attorney General's office regarding the late-term abortion clinic chain known as Cedar River Clinics. In the response to that complaint, Cedar River director Beverly Whipple indicated that she knew this writer had requested information from DSHS about payments (tax dollars) to her organization.

There is no way Ms. Whipple should have known this.

We had filed a "Public Disclosure" request with DSHS to find out how much money DSHS had given to Cedar River in previous years in the form of Medicaid insurance payments.

(Cedar River Clinics does abortions up to 24 weeks, and even does secret abortions on teenage girls spirited out of other states without their parents' knowledge.)

While there may not be an absolute legal guarantee of privacy in such cases, most would expect that their name wouldn't be passed along to the organization under scrutiny. At least not without some sort of consequence.

We confronted a DSHS official about this. Her answers were woefully inadequate, and mostly incoherent.

One of her arguments was that it was good for organizations receiving government money to know that there are individuals keeping them accountable. She couldn't explain why that required the citizen's actual name from being disclosed.

She then suggested that the name might have been disclosed inadvertently at one of the "regular meetings" that this official, on behalf of DSHS, holds with the state's "family planning" agencies.

These meetings apparently include the Cedar River Clinic abortion chain, and the Planned Parenthood affiliates of Washington, including PP of Central Washington (which does what amount to coerced abortions), and PP of Spokane (which has been illegally overbilling Medicaid for years), and PP of Western Washington (which is doing 50% more abortions than it was just 3 years ago, while making millions of dollars in profits off emergency contraception).

We didn't know about these meetings, and this certainly didn't qualify as an excuse.

The bottom line was that this official seemed unperturbed by the privacy violation, and while she claimed she would "look into it", there have been no developments from "this investigation". And we don't expect any.

What we have learned is that the government (DSHS) admits to holding regular strategy meetings with the abortion industry to see how they can help each other, and these meetings include chit-chat, with private details, about members of the public who might be getting in their way. Ladies and gentlemen: welcome to the Land of Gregoire.

Seattle Area Late-Term Abortion Clinic in Financial Scandal?

This blog has spent a long time investigating the finances of Cedar River Clinics, which runs three late-term abortion clinics in Western Washington. Cedar River runs clinics which do abortions up to 24 weeks of pregnancy -- and those are just the ones they admit to! -- in Renton, Yakima, and Tacoma. While our investigation is still ongoing, it's now time to publicize what we know so far.

Cedar River, which also goes by the moniker of Feminist Women's Health Center, is registered as a non-profit, or 501(c)3. This means their tax returns are available, by law, for public scrutiny.

From those tax returns, we learn that they have annual revenues of just over $5 million per year. From documents accompanying their tax returns, we know that they have 5,700 abortion customers a year. According to a Yakima Herald article, they have more than 7,000 clients total per year. Previous IRS filings and reports put their client volume closer to 6,000. 7,000 unduplicated clients seems unlikely, given that unlike Planned Parenthood, Cedar River's business is almost exclusively abortion related. The higher figure would mean that somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 clients were there for birth control alone. That is unlikely. So we're going with 6,500 unduplicated clients per year.

Dividing the $5m revenue across 6,500 clients gives an average revenue per client of $770. This is the number to focus on. This number is extraordinarily high.

If you compare it to the now defunct Aradia abortion clinic in downtown Seattle, that clinic reported revenues per client near $350. (About $1 million in program service revenue, and just under 3,000 clients).

Planned Parenthood affiliates across the country provide a very valuable reference point. Laughably, but conveniently for these purposes, Planned Parenthood is also a 501(c)3 with public tax returns. Planned Parenthood of Western Washington is notoriously aggressive when it comes to revenue generation, but even they only report $200 revenue per client ($22 million over about 110,000 unduplicated clients), and that includes the $7 million in allegedly illegal profits from 340b Medicaid overbilling fraud! Other Planned Parenthood operations in Washington State show similar revenues per client.

So how does Cedar River come up with $770 in revenue per client? Are they just catering to the rich and famous? Clinic CEO Beverly Whipple claims that they are mostly serving the low-income and indigent, to the tune of 65% of the total clients.

We don't see any legitimate way to explain this figure.

What is more, this abortion chain claims that they are writing off almost half their would-be revenues due to unpaid bills. In other words, their revenues should be closer to $9.5 million. The $5 million in revenues is just the actually realized revenue. That would put the claimed revenue per client at about $1,450!

Of further interest is the fact that for several years, the way in which they were accounting for this on their annual tax returns to the IRS (known as 990s) was highly suspicious. They were actually claiming $9 million in revenue and a single line-item of negative revenue called "Contracts and Other Allowances" in the amount of $4 million.

When we contacted them about this, they said that "Other Allowances" was the amount they were writing off in unclaimed revenue, or unpaid bills. Experts we spoke to informed us that it's not illegal to operate this way, listing a "woulda-coulda-shoulda" idealized figure for your top-line revenue and then subtracting the difference between that and actual revenue, but it is unusual, and it's not clear what purpose it serves.

Additionally, Ms. Whipple told us they started doing this because they changed accountants. When I pointed out to her that the tax returns clearly listed the same Yakima accounting firm of Alegria & Company before and after they started reporting in this way, she had no comment.

Also of interest is a blantant mistake on their 2005 return which they corrected after we brought it to their attention: they accidentally listed the $5+ million writeoff under their management expenses rather than their operational expenses. This made it look like they were spending close to 60% of their expenses on management! Which would make them the worst
"charity" on earth. When we asked them about this, they admitted it was a mistake, and actually refiled their taxes to correct the mistake!

Also, in their most recent tax returns, since we started asking them about the reasons for listing $9 million in revenue and $4-5 million in "unpaid bills" as a single expense, they switched back to the more "natural" way of reporting their finances.

Last year we decided that all these financial shenanigans and unanswered questions deserved the attention of the authorities. We filed a complaint with the Washington State Attorney General's office Charities Division. Unfortunately, this just consisted of the AG's office forwarding a letter to Beverly Whipple.

Ms. Whipple's response was astonishing, and seemed to suggest a certain lack of fear of the authorities.

First, she said if we didn't "understand" the finances of non-profit health care she didn't "have the time to explain it" to us.

Second, she indicated she was aware that we had made inquiries into her finances through other branches of the state government. There is no legal way she should have had any knowledge of these inquries. It would seem that Ms. Whipple has friends in DSHS who are illegally tipping her off, with names.

Third, she issued a threat that she would characterize any further inquiries into her affairs as harassment. What wasn't clear was whether this threat was aimed at us or at the AG's office! But the AG's office said there was nothing further for them to do here!

We are going to continue to press this investigation. Does Ms. Whipple really want to meet us in court and go through a discovery process whereby all her secrets will be revealed? It is our intention to find out how they are making such large amounts of money per client, who in DSHS is feeding them information, and why they seem fearless of being prosecuted.

Stay Tuned!