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| Dr. Carmen Landau |
Atkins visited SWO in 2017 to have an induced abortion. This would involve an abortionist injecting feticide into the preborn baby's heart, and then returning several days later to deliver the dead baby. Atkins was six months pregnant at the time.
Documents obtained last year by Abortion on Trial revealed that Atkins was given multiple doses of powerful medications and sedatives in the days leading up to her death. Staffers did not monitor her condition and continued to give her the drugs even after she started having difficulty breathing.
New documents obtained just last week by Abortion on Trial reveal even more, however. Carmen Landau and Shelley Sella, two abortionists who work at SWO, were conducting experiments on hundreds of women by administering the abortion drug mifepristone during a late-term abortion. Mifepristone is the first part of the two-pill abortion pill regimen, but that method of abortion is only used for early stages of pregnancy. Landau and Sella were attempting to incorporate the pill into their induced abortion method to find out if it would help them complete late-term abortions more quickly.
501 women participated in this study. Half of them were given mifepristone during their induction abortions, while the other half were not. All of these women were past 24 weeks pregnant, and 48 of them were minors. Atkins's death was included in the medical research article published after the study was completed.
The medical examiner for the research article said that Atkins died after suffering pulmonary thromboembolism, or blood clots in the lungs. Her autopsy report does not indicate any signs of pulmonary thromboembolism, and emails from University of New Mexico Hospital staff disagree with this cause of death.
“Everything about her course was consistent with septic abortion→ refractory septic cardiomyopathy [heart failure due to infection] → death,” emergency medician physician Trenton Wray wrote. Dr. Gary Hatch agreed, writing “Second review reveals no segmental or larger emboli. There just simply isn’t PE [pulmonary embolism]… There was no massive PE present at the time of scan. Period… I am also confident there was no segmental or greater PE.”
Sepsis is a known side effect of the abortion pill regimen. Both pills were given to Atkins before her death. The study concluded that there was "no perceived benefit" to using abortion pills during induction abortions.
