Posted on 02/06/2009 11:38:26 PM PST by malkee
TAMPA, Fla. -- The Board of Medicine revoked the license of a Florida doctor on Friday accused of medical malpractice in a botched abortion in which a live baby was delivered, but ended up dead in a cardboard box.
The board found Dr. Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique in violation of Florida statutes by committing medical malpractice, delegating responsibility to unlicensed personnel, and failing to keep an accurate medical record.
Renelique and his attorney declined to comment after the hearing.
The Department of Health said Renelique was scheduled to perform an abortion on a teenager who was 23 weeks pregnant in 2006. Sycloria Williams had been given drugs in advance to dilate her cervix.
According to the complaint, she gave birth at a Hialeah clinic after waiting hours for Renelique to arrive. The complaint said one of the clinic owners put the baby in a bag that was thrown away.
Police found the infant’s decomposing remains a week later.
A medical examiner determined the cause of death was extreme prematurity, the complaint states.
At Friday’s hearing, Renelique told the board of his lifelong quest to be a doctor. He said there are generations of physicians in his family, and that he decided to follow the same path after seeing his father treat patients.
Renelique described saving a woman’s life during the second year of his medical residency in Haiti. He later left his home country to work and train in the United States. It was never his intention to do abortions, he said.
“That was not part of my goals when I came to Florida,” he said. “But I had to do it to survive.”
Though the proceeding was solely to determine whether Renelique should be disciplined, the physician revealed more details about what happened on the summer day when Williams came in for an abortion.
Renelique said he met the patient a day before the procedure.
According to the Department of Health, Renelique gave Williams laminaria, a drug that dilates the cervix. He said he told her to come in the next day at 10 a.m. “for safety,” and planned to later examine her before the abortion.
Renelique said that as he was en route to the clinic, he was called to treat another patient who was bleeding.
When he arrived to treat Williams, she was bleeding, but no one told him she’d already delivered, Renelique said. He began the procedure, and realized there was no fetus. A sonogram detected nothing.
“That’s when one of the employees came to me and said, ‘Dr. Renelique, what are you looking for?” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’m looking for a fetus.’ And she said, ‘What fetus?”‘
The employee then told him that Williams had already delivered.
The clinic owners made $1200 for snuffing the baby in a plastic bag. The doctors involved in disciplining Dr. Renelique need to be concerned with more than just his taking several hours to respond to his pager.
“But I had to do it to survive.”
Does the matter of *infant* survival ever enter this low-life’s mind?
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Medved focused on this item Friday. A woman caller, who sounded like a lawyer, said this case was "tricky."
It's always "tricky" when your moral compass spins like a top. These type of people have no bearings, no compass, no life.
I don't know how they can live with themselves, but then, again, conscience is not an issue.
Thanks for the heads-up on that. Wish I'd caught the show, I'd love to hear the podcast.
“Medved focused on this item Friday. A woman caller, who sounded like a lawyer, said this case was “tricky.” It's always “tricky” when your moral compass spins like a top.”
That about sums it up. It's tricky in a sense that homicide by abortion is legal and a slippery slope to infanticide and euthanasia. From the standpoint of reality and the appeal to basic human decency, however, this case exposes abortion for what it truly is. The abortionists can't hide behind their traditional “it's-just-a-blob-of-cells” argument nor can they pretend that they murdered the baby out of compassion, as they like to do.
This case is powerful because it lifts the curtain and forces us to see what transpires in an abortion clinic. The abortion industry is protected by the silence of the victims, and we rarely hear about what goes on in places where children are routinely killed. The stories that occasionally leak out reveal abortion clinics for what they really are.
We shouldn't focus on the legal aspects of this case. Murdering unborn children is legal. What we should focus on the facts of this case, which clearly demonstrate why elective abortion should not be legal.
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