Alexis “Lexi” Arguello, 18, from Colorado, died on February 6th following a botched abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic. The clinic delayed emergency transport for the teenager to a local hospital from the Fort Collins facility.
The clinic, Operation Rescue claims in a press release, transferred Arguello ‘too late’ in order to protect itself and its profits from child murder.
Pro-Life group Operation Rescue is working to investigate and document the low medical standards used at Colorado’s clinics and nationwide.
The incident has reignited concerns about the safety of abortion procedures and the lack of oversight in the industry, prompting pro-life advocates to demand a full investigation.
“Our team has been gathering information on this death for weeks, slowly piecing together exactly what happened,” said Sarah Neely, Chief Operating Officer of Operation Rescue, to LifeNews.com.
“On March 12, however, testimony during a hearing with the Colorado Committee of Health and Human Services confirmed everything we have been investigating, including Planned Parenthood’s suspected failings.”
Arguello was at Planned Parenthood for a second-trimester abortion. These abortions are complicated because they often involve a viable child. Viability is considered the date at which the child might live outside the womb, and current viability is as early as 23 weeks, well within the second trimester.
Arguello was 22 weeks along, according to testimony before the Colorado legislature on March 12. By the time her grandparents were called to the hospital, the doctors were frantically fighting for the teen’s life.
The teen was reportedly suffering from an amniotic fluid embolism (AFE), a life-threatening complication. The complication is especially risky and potentially fatal in second and third-trimester abortions. Amniotic fluid enters the mother’s bloodstream, which causes serious and sudden reactions, including cardiac arrest and massive bleeding.
While the abortion industry claims that abortion procedures are safe, safer, they claim, than going through childbirth, the reporting of abortions is not standardized across the United States, which can lead to many deaths from abortion complications coded in the medical paperwork as a death from surgery or other medical malpractice.
There is also a strong incentive for Planned Parenthood to hide or underreport the medical complications that happen on-site, as it both protects the company from legal liability as well as protects abortion from government oversight and public scrutiny.
Operation Rescue’s Neely further told LifeNews: “Abortion clinics are not equipped for critical care. We request dozens and dozens of 911 calls every year, proving this fact. Planned Parenthood Fort Collins not only had zero ability to address this life-threatening complication, but testimony from Dr. Kasun shows they made Lexi’s situation even worse, callously trying to protect their clinic over saving this girl’s life.”
On March 11 the Colorado legislature had a hearing related to HB 25-1252, a bill that establishes the same regulations and reporting for Colorado abortion clinics that all other medical centers in the state follow.
By an 8-4 vote, the bill was ‘postponed indefinitely.’
Planned Parenthood is opposed to being treated by state regulators as a medical clinic.
The Public Affairs Manager for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, the affiliate that oversees Fort Collins, argued that Planned Parenthood did not need any regulation. She referred to Planned Parenthood as a “beacon of hope” and vowed that they “will always defend their patients.”
Arguello’s death is part of a disturbing pattern of similar cases of medical negligence at Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics, including:
- Tonya Reaves (2012) – A 24-year-old woman who died from excessive bleeding after a second-trimester abortion at a Chicago Planned Parenthood. Investigations later revealed a delay in calling 911, worsening her condition.
- Laura Hope Smith (2007) – A 22-year-old young woman died in Hyannis, Massachusetts after an abortion clinic refused to call a hospital to transfer her after she went into cardiac arrest. The abortionist was later jailed over their extreme medical negligence.
- Holly Patterson (2003) – An 18-year-old California woman who died from a fatal infection after taking the abortion pill prescribed by Planned Parenthood. The medication failed to fully terminate her pregnancy, leading to sepsis.
Eileen Smith spoke with The Gateway Pundit about this news, and remembering her daughter Laura Hope Smith who died from a legal abortion in 2007.
“It’s a tragedy, I understand and it’s just horrible it keeps going on without notice. I remember when Laura died, there are all these women organizations, and none of them contacted me. None of the people who say they’re pro-choice, they had no interest in Laura’s story. They’re really not pro-woman, they’re pro-abortion. It still shocks me that we can live in a culture that can throw away our babies like trash, and now we find out they’re selling and harvesting the body parts of the unborn. It’s amazing.”
“Laura’s never been forgotten. I know her life has impact, and she’s busy saving people from making the wrong choice to have an abortion. It was wonderful that Roe v. Wade was overturned, but it’s heartbreaking and never stops being heartbreaking. It’s a smear on our culture, and it’s destroying the fabric of our nation. It’s incomprehensible that it continues to go on. We want to save the whales and kill the babies.”
“She came into my life with a phone call and she left with a phone call. A family friend called and didn’t want her, she had been adopted. She came into our house skipping and smiling. She had been abused and we did a private adoption, because of a lot of abuse in the home. I had been her fourth mother. When she died, I got a call from her girlfriend that she was in the hospital. I called the hospital and the doctor told me she had expired. I was never expecting to bury her. It seemed unreal and still seems unreal. It changed everything in our life. Everything before her death seems carefree. It’s a club you can’t join and can’t quit when you lose a child like this, everything’s affected, centered around the worst time in our life.”
“I asked the Lord to give me something good to come out of this, and with the help of other prayers, in order to bear her loss, because I couldn’t bear it. I think helping other people to learn about her story and the awful atrocity of abortion and abortion clinics, and why it’s important, is what allows me to bear it.”
Systemic Failures in Abortion Oversight
Abortion providers routinely insist that their procedures are safe, yet cases like Lexi’s expose critical failures in regulation and oversight. Many abortion clinics are left unregulated by Democrat Governors or are left unregulated by Republican states unwilling to enforce standard medical rules on the clinics.
The most serious risks during abortion procedures include:
- Severe Hemorrhaging – Uncontrolled bleeding can quickly turn fatal if not promptly treated.
- Infection and Sepsis – Bacterial infections after abortion can rapidly spread if proper medical protocols are not followed.
- Incomplete Abortion – Retained fetal tissue can lead to infection and organ failure.
- Uterine Perforation or Internal Injury – Misuse of surgical instruments can cause life-threatening damage to reproductive organs.
- Incomplete Abortion: If not all pregnancy tissue is removed, a repeat procedure may be needed.
- Retained Blood Clots: Blood clots can form in the uterus, causing severe cramping and potentially requiring further treatment.
- Injury to the Cervix: The cervix can be cut or torn during the procedure.
- Anesthesia-Related Complications: As with any medical procedure involving anesthesia, complications can arise.
Without transparency from Planned Parenthood, it remains unclear which of these complications contributed to Lexi’s death. However, pro-life organizations argue that these cases reveal a systemic issue within the abortion industry—one that prioritizes procedure volume over patient safety.
The United States has 340 million residents. Data suggests there will be 3,618,267 births of children in the country from 2024.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2021, a total of 625,978 abortions were reported across 48 reporting areas in the U.S. However, the CDC’s data may be incomplete due to variations in state reporting practices. The Guttmacher Institute, which conducts comprehensive surveys of abortion providers, reported that in 2020, there were 930,160 abortions performed in the United States. 2020 marked the first year in which medication abortions accounted for over 50% of all abortions in the United States. This shift indicates that surgical abortions constituted the remaining percentage of procedures. Applying this distribution to the Guttmacher Institute’s 2020 data suggests that approximately 465,080 surgical abortions were performed that year.
In the United States, abortion procedures are primarily categorized into two methods: medication abortions and surgical abortions. Medication abortions involve the use of prescribed drugs to terminate a pregnancy, typically within the first 10 weeks of gestation. Surgical abortions, on the other hand, encompass procedures such as dilation and curettage (D&C) and dilation and evacuation (D&E), which are performed at various stages of pregnancy.
Planned Parenthood traces its origins to October 16, 1916, when Margaret Sanger, along with her sister Ethel Byrne and activist Fania Mindell, established the first birth control clinic in the United States, located in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
Their actions led to arrests and legal battles, which garnered national attention and gradually shifted public opinion on birth control. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, an organization dedicated to advocating for women’s reproductive rights.
This league underwent a rebranding in 1942, adopting the name Planned Parenthood Federation of America, under which it continues to operate today, offering a wide range of reproductive health services and education.
Sanger had vicious anti-child views, and in her 1920 book Woman and the New Race, she wrote: “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” Sanger today is widely criticized for advocating sterilization for the poor and vulnerable, as well as advocating for such policies to be used against African Americans.
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