A pro-life group is asking Washington, D.C.’s medical board to suspend the license of a local doctor who has repeatedly been accused of harming women through abortion procedures.
Dr. Cesare Santangelo, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the Washington Surgi-Clinic, has a history of “endangering people’s lives,” the advocacy group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust alleged in a Monday complaint filed with D.C.’s Department of Health and its Board of Medicine. Among other allegations, the complaint cites three lawsuits Santangelo’s clinic has settled in recent years involving women who allegedly experienced severe bleeding and other issues after sloppy abortions, one of whom died.
Board Complaint by Hudson Crozier
Santangelo’s clinic previously made headlines when the group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) found more than 100 aborted babies from the facility in toxic waste containers in March 2022, including five that were large enough to spark allegations of infanticide. Federal and local authorities took no conclusive action against the clinic under former President Joe Biden, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) instead secured a prison sentence against the leading PAAU activist who reported the bodies, charging her for protesting at the clinic. President Donald Trump pardoned the PAAU leader in January.
A Washington Surgi-Clinic employee declined to provide contact information for Santangelo over the phone to the DCNF and hung up after learning the caller was a DCNF reporter. The clinic did not respond to a subsequent email from the DCNF.
One female patient in Santangelo’s care died in 2010 after her family said he tried to remove a miscarried baby from her body with a dilation and extraction (D&E) abortion procedure that left her with “massive uterine bleeding,” according to one of the lawsuits cited in the Monday complaint. An autopsy later revealed that fetal debris had traveled to the woman’s lungs.
A year later, Santangelo allegedly “lacerated and perforated” a woman’s uterus during a D&E and left the baby’s head “free-floating in the patient’s abdomen,” a lawsuit says. The woman suffered “uncontrolled hemorrhaging, loss of her uterus and childbearing capacity,” according to the suit.
Santangelo also falsely told the Maryland Board of Physicians that he had completed education credits needed to renew his medical license in 2019 when he’d actually completed less than half, according to a state audit referenced in the Survivors complaint.
The complaint also claims there is recent evidence that Santangelo’s own physical health is failing, citing video footage taken by Survivors. The footage, reviewed by the DCNF, shows a man whom the group identifies as Santangelo walking to the clinic with his arm in a cast and a cane.
“A doctor without full use of both arms possibly puts the patient at risk for complications” and may also violate D.C. law, Survivors alleged.
Santangelo has long been a focus of D.C.-based pro-life groups, including Live Action, which published undercover video footage of him in 2013 telling a woman that if a baby survived a botched abortion, “we would not help it.” Federal law requires doctors to treat any born-alive infant as fully human.
“Dr. Santangelo has a long and checkered past in relation to providing abortions in the Washington D.C. jurisdiction,” the complaint reads. “This past should be of great concern to the medical board as it shows a pattern of injuring patients, endangering people’s lives, and prematurely ending at least one.”
D.C.’s Health Regulation and Licensing Administration, which reviews complaints against physicians, did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
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