News
Featured Image
 Shutterstock.com

Thousands of women’s personal records from a Houston-area abortion facility were found in a local warehouse, discarded by an employee of the now-shuttered abortion business.

The files dating between 1992 and 2012 were discovered at the warehouse after the property owner’s dog had torn some of them up and dragged them outside, in another patient record accountability incident underscoring the disparity in oversight between medical clinics and abortion providers.

The records “detailed very private procedures” and contained “sensitive information such as abortion details and social security numbers,” with many including attached ultrasounds, according to reports by the Houston ABC affiliate.

Warehouse owner Esmerelda Cedillo first came across the records in February of last year and made numerous attempts to contact the abortion facility employee, an estranged relative of hers who’d abandoned the records, the news station reported, but no one ever came to retrieve the files. Cedillo had also discovered containers of opioid drugs along with the women’s records.

Months later, the day after a December 30, 2014, news broadcast on the abortion record discovery, Cedillo was contacted by a law firm stating it had been hired as the records’ custodians by the folded abortion business.

“All of a sudden when it aired, I got the call first thing this morning,” Cedillo told ABC.

Cedillo wanted the files taken off of her hands, but didn’t consider throwing them away out of respect for the thousands of women whose information is contained in them.

She said she put herself in the women’s shoes.

“That's why I'm like, I don't want this to just get thrown out there,” she said.

A lawyer from the legal firm was sent to the warehouse later that day to get the records.

Susan Cardwell of the Cardwell and Chang law office said the doctors “trusted a former employee to safeguard the records,” and that “the employee said the files had been destroyed and doctors were surprised to learn they still existed.”

The files came from the abortion provider doing business as Cunningham Clinic, KNS Clinic, and Women's Clinic, in at least two Houston-area locations, she said.

The attorney picking up the files told the news station the records were in the process of being shredded several years ago, but “ended up” at the warehouse and “didn't make it to their destination.” Files more than 7 years old will probably be shredded and later ones will “be sorted through and returned to the patients.”

An abortion facility neglecting proper care with personal records comes as no surprise to Monica Miller, director of Citizens for a Pro-life Society, and one of a group of prolife supporters who recovered the bodies of hundreds of aborted children along with their mothers’ information from the dumpster of a Chicago abortionist in the late 1980’s so the aborted children could have a proper burial. Miller is a veteran of the pro-life movement, having documented the abortion industry in photographs for years.

“As someone who discovered hundreds of intact whole patient records in the dumpster of the Woman Care clinic here in Michigan I am not at all surprised to learn that the Houston abortion center improperly stored patient records that at least potentially could have fallen into the hands of those who had no right to see them,” Miller told LifeSiteNews. 

In 1988 when Miller and others found the remains of the aborted Illinois babies who had been thrown out with their mothers’ names on the same bags in which they were contained, instead of taking issue with the facility, Miller said the National Organization for Women accused her group of threatening to expose the mothers’ names.

“Which was an unjust and patently absurd accusation,” she told LifeSiteNews. “We buried the names of those mothers along with their children.”

Miller also noted that if the records in the Houston warehouse had involved a dentist’s office, finding them there would likely not have attracted the attention the abortion records has.

“It shows that abortion, compared to other medical procedures, continues to remain controversial and sensitive,” said Miller. “Everyone knows there's a difference. Abortion involves killing and affects women in a special way contrary to other medical procedures.”