By Cheryl Sullenger
South Bend, IN – Police executed a search warrant on Ulrich G. Klopfer’s Women’s Pavilion abortion clinic in South Bend, Indiana, seizing documents and other property on Wednesday, March 19, 2014.
Police from the St. Joseph County Special Victims Unit participated in the raid. It is unknown exactly what kind of documents or other evidence the search warrant allowed police to take. According to news reports, the police apparently made copies of the seized documents and returned the originals to Klopfer on Thursday.
Klopfer has faced a complicated tangle of legal issues in recent months.
Klopfer’s troubles began when volunteers with Indiana Right to Life filed 1,200 complaints against him for not reporting child sex abuse and other information required by the State based on Termination of Pregnancy reports obtained by the pro-life group through a public records act request.
The complaints prompted St. Joseph County Prosecutor Mike Dvorak to ask the Police Special Victim’s Unit to conduct a criminal investigation into the abortionist’s activities. This week’s raid on Klopfer’s South Bend abortion clinic is part of that investigation.
“We are encouraged to see that the Klopfer case is progressing and that authorities are taking the accusations seriously,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman, who consulted with Indiana Right to Life on their investigation into Klopfer’s practices.
“Klopfer’s abortion businesses are shoddy operations that are endangering the public. We are looking forward to justice being done and the women of Indiana being permanently protected from his apparently substandard and illegal practices.”
The Indiana Right to Life complaints have already produced impressive results.
In January, Klopfer was criminally charged by Lake County, Indiana, prosecutors with failing to file a timely report, a Class B Misdemeanor that carries a penalty of up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.
The charge is related to an incident of statutory rape on a 13-year-old girl. Klopfer, who gave the girl an abortion at his Gary, Indiana, abortion clinic in September, 2012, filed the report nearly four months later than state statute requires, leaving the girl at risk of further sexual abuse.
Also in January, Klopfer was forced to close his Fort Wayne abortion clinic due to his inability to obtain a required hospital transfer agreement or an emergency care pact with another physician.
In addition, there is no record that Klopfer has the required back-up emergency agreement for his clinics in Gary and South Bend. Klopfer has indicated that he does have a back-up agreement, but refuses to reveal even to state authorities the identity of the physician that has agreed to provide emergency hospital care for his injured patients.
This has prompted the Indiana legislature to introduce a bill that would require abortionists to reveal the name of their back-up physicians so that authorities can exercise oversight.
Now, more details are coming to light about the nature of Klopfer’s clinic operations.
Because of this week’s raid on Klopfer’s South Bend abortion clinic, the South Bend Tribune obtained and published the results of state inspections that took place in 2010 and 2012 at Klopfer’s abortion clinics that reveal dozens of serious violations.
The violations included:
• Failure to comply with the 18 hour waiting period between the signing of consent forms and the abortion.
• Boxes of paper were found stored near a furnace, some papers within 1 inch of a heat source.
• Remains from an aborted baby stored in the same refrigerator as medications.
• Oxygen tanks and other emergency equipment lacking proper maintenance or just not working.
• Infection control lapses.
• Employees laundering soiled linens at home.
• A nitrous oxide tank discovered in 2010 with an expiration date of Dec. 3, 1989.
• General clutter and untidiness at his clinics that were “too numerous to list.”
“While the information revealed about the state of Klopfer’s clinics is shocking, our research into abortion industry practices indicates that these kinds of violations – and worse — are rampant throughout the abortion cartel nationwide,” said Newman. “Abortion clinics have been allowed to run amok over the lives and health of women for decades without set standards or oversight.”
However, in recent years, there have been significant strides taken by the pro-life supporters to expose these unsafe practices and pass legislation that is shutting down dangerous abortionists like Klopfer.
“The work of Indiana Right to Life in researching, exposing, and reporting abortion abuses in their state is a model we hope other pro-life groups will follow,” said Newman. “We know that when abortionists are brought to justice and abortion clinics close, women are protected and lives are saved.”
