By Dave Andrusko
Abortionist Ulrich Klopfer
The office of Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller today filed administrative licensing complaints with the Indiana Medical Licensing Board against four abortionists for violations of abortion record-keeping and advice and consent laws. The most prominent is familiar to readers of NRL News Today: Ulrich Klopfer of South Bend, Indiana.
In a release distributed this morning, the Attorney General’s office said that Klopfer stands accused of
“consistently submitting incomplete, inaccurate and late documentation of the abortion procedures he performs. His alleged violations total 1,833, and are based on complaints brought to the AG’s Office by the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency. Additionally, Klopfer faces criminal misdemeanor charges in Lake and St. Joseph counties for similar alleged violations involving abortions performed on 13-year-old patients.”
The latter charge refers to Indiana law which requires abortionists to submit reports on abortions provided to girls younger than 14 within three days.
As NRL News Today reported, Klopfer admitted to failing to report abortions provided to girls under 14 in the time allotted. However Klopfer insisted that he’d just made an “honest mistake” in “failing to report two abortions he performed on girls younger than 14 from Gary in 2012 and South Bend in 2013,” according to Amanda Gray of the South Bend Tribune. Klopfer also insisted to Gray that “state records showing that he took six months to report a Feb. 7 abortion of a young teen in Fort Wayne are in error.”
But Zoeller said, “The pending criminal charges brought by county prosecutors along with the sheer volume of unexplained violations by this licenseholder merits review by the Medical Licensing Board to determine whether disciplinary action is warranted for the noncompliance.”
The Attorney General’s office explained that while Klopfer filed “pregnancy-termination reports” with ISDH [Indiana State Department of Health] on 1,818 abortions he performed between July 2012 and November 2013, “all 1,818 reports were incomplete and incorrect in some way,” according to the complaint. “Each report contained on average four omissions or errors involving medical and statistical information that must be reported to ISDH for statistical purposes.”
As NRL News Today also reported, Klopfer is taking a “hiatus” from performing abortions in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, because he had lost his backup physician. Indiana law requires that abortionists have admitting privileges in a local hospital or have “an agreement with a physician who has admitting privileges at a hospital in the county or contiguous county in case of post-operative complications.”
In this case, Klopfer’s backup was a pro-life doctor, Dr. Geoffrey Cly, who agreed in 2010 in order to protect women receiving abortions from Klopfer. However Cly resigned, effective January 1, 2013, citing Klopfer’s failure to file timely reports about abortions on girls 13 and under.
Klopfer is scheduled to go to trial in January 26, 2015 in Lake County for failing to report on time an abortion of a girl under 14. The next hearing date in St. Joseph County for a similar offense is not scheduled until August 1, 2015. In the latter case, Klopfer is charged with delaying reporting an abortion on a 13-year-old girl in South Bend, Indiana, for six months.