Author: Richard Dur
There are two ways to leave an abortion clinic. (For the unborn child, there is no such choice.) One is through the front door. The other is in an ambulance.
The second is not an outcome the abortion industry likes to advertise.
It does not conform to the reassuring language of “reproductive healthcare,” the arguments about “access,” or the promises of “choice.”
It belongs to a less comfortable vocabulary: hemorrhage, emergency department, retained tissue, hospital transfer. And, occasionally, “severe harm”: permanent injury or death.
At Calgary’s Kensington Clinic, those words are not hypothetical. They appear repeatedly in government records recently obtained through access-to-information requests.
So do the names of hospitals where patients subsequently received care.
The records identify emergency departments and hospitals across Alberta. Foothills Medical Centre. Peter Lougheed Centre. Rockyview General Hospital. South Health Campus. Hospitals in Red Deer, Lethbridge, Drumheller and Fort McMurray.
A veritable provincial tour of emergency medicine.
Some patients were transferred directly from the clinic. Others arrived at a hospital on their own. And if some women reported a spontaneous miscarriage to the triage nurse rather than disclosing a recent induced abortion, the official figures may tell only part of the story.
Then there are the lawsuits, including those brought by two women who took Kensington Clinic and its abortionists to court, alleging serious injuries following their abortions.
And all of this matters to Alberta taxpayers.
They fund the abortions, the hospital treatments when complications arise and the legal consequences when publicly funded defendants face litigation. All flowing from abortions that, in most cases, were elective rather than medically necessary in the first place.
Surely somewhere in this arrangement, the taxpayer ought to be entitled to a few answers?
In July 2004, Nawal Basheer went to the Kensington Clinic for an abortion. According to her statement of claim, the clinic’s head nurse acknowledged that its ultrasound equipment was inadequate. The clinic assured Basheer that the abortion had been successful.
It hadn’t.
Nearly three months later, Basheer learned she was still pregnant. The first abortion had failed. The taxpayers would now fund another, this time at the Peter Lougheed Hospital.
Her statement of claim offered a revealing glimpse into the circumstances surrounding her abortion: missed university midterms (requiring private tutoring to make up for them), a second abortion (that conflicted with her religious convictions concerning the stage of pregnancy at which abortion is permissible) and a broken engagement with her fiancé.
Alleging serious physical and psychological harm, Basheer sought $250,000 in damages from Dr. Theodore Mitchell Busheikin, Dr. John L. Barrow, Kensington Clinic, Calgary Health Region, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta and then-Alberta health minister, Iris Evans.
Fifteen years later, another woman alleged serious injuries following an abortion at that same clinic.
Krista Cormier alleged that in June 2019, Kensington Clinic inserted an intrauterine contraceptive device despite the presence of “retained pregnancy tissue” following her abortion. Her lawsuit described hemorrhaging, emergency treatment and surgeries that included the removal of her uterus and both fallopian tubes — costing her fertility.
An abortion intended to end one pregnancy cost her the possibility of another. Cormier sued Dr. Bruce Allan and 492246 Alberta Ltd., the company operating as the Kensington Clinic. Court records identify claims for $950,000 and $100,000 in damages.
Two lawsuits over fifteen years might suggest serious complications are exceedingly rare. But lawsuits are not complication statistics. Were these isolated incidents, or merely two that reached Alberta’s courts and happened to come to light?
Newly released government records raise further questions.
Documents recently released through access-to-information requests by Acute Care Alberta (ACA), the provincial agency overseeing hospital and emergency care since 2025, reveal a history of patients requiring hospital treatment following an abortion at the Kensington Clinic. (See ACA disclosures: 2013–2025 and 2025–2026.)
These are not allegations from wild-eyed pro-life protesters. They are entries in the government’s own reporting system.
The records extend back to 2013 and include emergency department visits, hospital admissions and transfers. One September 2025 incident stands out.
A patient experienced hemorrhage following an aspiration abortion after an unsuccessful chemical abortion. She was transferred by ambulance to Foothills Medical Centre.
The government’s classification was unmistakable: “Severe Harm (critical incident).” The designation covers a range of serious outcomes, including death and significant injury, but the released record does not identify which of those outcomes occurred.
Other records describe patients requiring hospital care, severe bleeding following an abortion and treatment for retained pregnancy tissue.
Though the disclosures do not establish Kensington Clinic’s overall complication rate, they do establish that serious complications do occur.
Unlike physicians treating illness or injury, the overwhelming majority of an abortionist’s patients are young, strong and in good health: pregnant women. When a non-medically necessary, elective procedure results in serious injury, questions of medical judgment, patient safety and accountability become especially pressing.
What did the authorities know? What did they do? And where are the records documenting their response?
On November 4, 2026, Acute Care Alberta explained that its current reporting system was introduced in April 2023. Subject-matter experts, including a former Kensington Clinic executive director, confirmed that some older records were no longer available.
The records that might help explain how earlier incidents were reported, investigated and resolved are, at least in part, unavailable. Gone.
What makes the newly released records particularly troubling — to say nothing of the unavailable ones — is the contrast.
Inside the Kensington Clinic, women have alleged serious injuries, patients have required emergency hospital care, and the government acknowledges that some records no longer exist. Outside the Kensington Clinic, even peaceful attempts to warn women about the risks of abortion are prohibited in the name of protecting them.
For decades, abortion providers like the Kensington Clinic have sought restrictions on free speech outside abortion facilities.
In 2018, following lobbying by Alberta’s abortion providers, the province’s NDP government enacted the Protecting Choice for Women Accessing Health Care Act, establishing 50-metre access zones, or “bubble-zones,” where even “request[ing] that a patient refrain from accessing abortion services” is prohibited.
Those prohibitions remained in force throughout Jason Kenney’s premiership and remain in force under Danielle Smith.
But the law goes further. It also prohibits certain forms of observation of abortion facilities. Someone keeping an eye on activity from within the bubble zone, including ambulance arrivals and departures, could be breaking the law.
The province can tell a citizen where she may stand, what approaches are forbidden and what conduct may constitute unlawful observation. But ask what happened to a woman transported from the clinic to hospital with severe hemorrhaging, and the answers become considerably less clear.
Censorship conceals what observation might expose.
The government and the courts, doing the abortion industry’s bidding, have made it a legal priority to police the sidewalk outside abortion facilities. How effectively have those same authorities scrutinized what happens inside the walls of those facilities? The sidewalk, apparently, demands extraordinary vigilance. The medical incidents? We are still trying to obtain the paperwork.
And the irony becomes more difficult to ignore when one considers the justification offered for these restrictions: protecting women.
Which presents the greater danger to women seeking an abortion: someone standing on the sidewalk peacefully warning her of the harms of abortion, or the possibility of suffering that very harm inside the clinic, with the circumstances and outcome beyond public scrutiny?
How can a woman make an informed choice if she is denied information about the risks?
Alberta has spent years making certain that the public cannot get too close to the Kensington Clinic. Perhaps it is time the public found out what has been happening inside.
For more information about Alberta’s abortion bubble zone laws and efforts to repeal them, visit PopAlbertaBubbleZones.ca.