Woman not allowed to stay at clinic died after abortion

A WOMAN died after having a late stage abortion when clinic staff wouldn’t let her stay the night because they wanted to go home, an inquest heard yesterday.

Aisha Chithira, 31, travelled to England from Ireland to have a termination at a Marie Stopes clinic in Ealing, west London, on Jan 21 2012.

She suffered a tear to her uterus during the “blind” procedure performed under anaesthetic, as a surgeon struggled to remove a 22-week-old foetus from a womb that had not fully dilated, West London Coroner’s Court heard.

Afterwards she vomited in a stairwell and complained of feeling unwell to her husband, but was helped into a taxi to a cousin’s home in Slough by staff at the clinic. They had told her she could not stay overnight.

One of the nurses denied they had pressured her to leave because they had wanted to go home, the inquest heard. Ryan Chithira said he received a call from his wife at around 7.30pm as he cared for their daughter in Ireland.

“Aisha told me she had finished having the procedure and was going to get a taxi back to Slough,” a statement read to the court said. “She just said ‘I cannot speak, I’m feeling too weak to speak’ and then she ended the call.” He said she didn’t reply after that.

She suffered catastrophic internal bleeding and died the same night.

Dr Adedayo Adedeji, who performed the procedure, and nurses Gemma Pullen and Margaret Miller were charged with manslaughter by gross negligence and a health and safety breach but the case was dropped in 2016.

Mrs Chithira had a history of noncancerous growths around the womb which made the procedure more complex. She had decided to have an abortion after miscarrying twins and then having her baby delivered by C-section, making her worry that another birth was too risky. The hearing continues.