A late-term abortion business in Washington state has been evicted from the corporate office suite where it was located in Tukwila, south of Seattle, after falling behind on paying rent.
Jonathan Bloedow of the blog Abortion in Washington obtained court records related to the eviction of Cedar River Clinics, which advertises abortions up to 26 weeks into pregnancy, and had rented office space since 2003 on Interurban Avenue. The records pertain to a lawsuit the owner of the corporate office suite filed against the abortion business.
“On or about August 7, 2010, a three-day notice to pay $16,633.21 or vacate was served upon defendant,” reads the lawsuit. “As of this date, defendant has failed to cure said default or vacate the Premises.”
Bloedow says the lawsuit demands twice the amount of rental money owed as well as attorney fees to collect the rent. He indicates Cedar Rivers did eventually hire an attorney to defend itself but appears to have not mounted much of a legal defense. In fact, the only major document related to the lawsuit coming from the abortion center concerns a change of attorney notice.
“Lawyers for the landlord told us that the matter was resolved by Cedar River finally vacating the premises in September 2010, a month after the suit was filed,” Bloedow says. “After Cedar River vacated the property, the landlord, Fairway Center, dropped the suit. What’s not clear in all this is whether Cedar River could not afford to keep the lights on at this facility, or if they were simply stealing a few months of free rent before a planned departure.”
“We contacted Cedar River’s acting attorney in the case for comment, but she deferred to Beverly Whipple, the founder and Executive Director. We caught up with Ms. Whipple today by phone, but she said and then repeated that she did not want to answer any questions about the eviction,” Bloedow added.
Despite the lawsuits and apparent financial troubles, Bloedow indicates the abortion center’s most recent financial records show it had, as of 2008, $1.2 million in net assets and revenue of $4.6 million, including about $700,000 in real estate holdings.
“As we have previously reported, making that much money off 6,000 abortion clients a year (which they have claimed publicly), is an average revenue of about $750. That is about triple what most of their competitors are able to generate, so it would be surprising if they suddenly hit on hard times,” Bloedow said.
Cedar River has also been the subject of significant controversy — outside the fact that it does late-term abortions.
It was forced to close its flagship abortion center in Yakima after 30 years of doing abortions. That was the abortion center that did a secret abortion on a teenager years ago.
In 2005, a social worker affiliated with an Alaska hospital arranged a secret abortion for a 15 year-old teenager at the Cedar Women’s Clinic paid for at government expense. The parents of the teen filed suit against the Providence Alaska Medical Center after learning that an employee there took their daughter for the abortion without their knowledge or consent.
The family became alarmed when their daughter didn’t return home from school one afternoon in March 2003. They only learned about their daughter’s whereabouts when an older daughter informed them. The teen knew her parents would not approve of the pregnancy but told her boyfriend’s mother she did not want to have an abortion.
Fifteen weeks into the pregnancy, the teen went to Providence for prenatal care. There, the social worker asked her to return alone later in the day. Then, the worker suggested the abortion and made arrangements with Cedar River Clinic abortion facility. The social worker also arranged for a state-funded insurance program for poor children, Denali KidCare, to pay for the abortion. The teen’s parents desperately called police when they found their daughter missing. Her family told officials, upon learning of the secret abortion, that they would gladly have helped their daughter raise the baby.
Also, in a report the Abortion in Washington blog posted, Cedar Rivers’ chief abortion practitioner, Robert Kothenbeutel, rendered a woman permanently infertile from a botched late-term abortion after she was taken by ambulance to a local emergency room, where she had to have a hysterectomy.
