And what a special fact-checking process it is! I especially enjoyed your inexplicable failure to find out the facts about the Ford Foundation’s grant process before publishing poor Miss Jennie’s latest post on the subject, as I pointed out in the comments. But no, I didn’t e-mail you directly, because it’s not my job to help you clean up your messes quietly.

Incidentally, a real news agency publishes a retraction when the article is irredeemably flawed, rather than just scrubbing it from the site and hoping everyone forgets about it.

Okay, I see now that I’ve been talking over your head. I should not have assumed that you would either know what the word ‘protocol’ means in this context, or think to look it up. So let me try again, hopefully in small words that you will understand.

First off, you should understand that the medical information that you find by Googling and looking at the Mayo Clinic or PP websites is simplified and targeted at an audience looking for general information. What you saw on the PP website was simply a thumbnail sketch, and probably not even the full information that would be given to a patient. But doctors and nurses, unlike bloggers, don’t get all their medical training from Googling. They go to school for years and read long books with big words in them, to learn much, much more about medical conditions and procedures than they would learn if they just stayed and home and surfed the web. And when they learn how to perform operations, they learn how to do it with the methods that experts believe produce the best results with the least risk, although no procedure is 100% risk free. And when they go out to do a procedure in practice, they generally do it according to what are sometimes called “protocols.” A protocol is a detailed set of guidelines, produced by experts in accordance with generally accepted medical practices, that tells practitioners what to do before, during, and after a surgery. Those guidelines will include what to do if at any point, the patient’s response deviates from the typical patient experience–things generally not found on a website targeted at an audience without medical training.

Next, you should understand what happens after a surgical procedure. Since no operation is risk-free and since patients respond differently to various drugs, each operation is followed by an “observation period,” in which nurses monitor patients to see how they are recovering and to watch for complications. That’s what PP’s website means about a one-hour recovery period: after one hour the patient will probably be well enough to go home if no complications are spotted during the recovery. But sometimes, the patient’s recovery is not identical to the typical recovery, and then the doctors and nurses have to decide what to do next. For example, the last time I had a procedure under general anesthesia, I couldn’t go home after the standard recovery period because I was throwing up. Does that mean they sent me to the emergency room right away? No, because if every patient who is not a textbook case goes to the emergency room, then the emergency rooms will be so crowded that it would compromise the care of people having actual emergencies. And so instead, I stayed in the observation room for another half-hour until I’d stopped throwing up and could go home. That was the normal protocol for that situation.

And so in Ms. Reaves’s case, we do not know if there was negligence unless we first know the professional clinical guidelines for post-abortion bleeding. We know that an hour seems to be the standard recovery period. So, do the generally accepted protocols say that the clinic should call an ambulance if bleeding has continued for a minute after that hour? If so, then it is a good bet that Planned Parenthood was negligent (though I repeat, as I have said above, that internal bleeding may not be externally visible the instant it starts). But if the standard protocol is to continue to monitor the patient and send her to the ER if the bleeding has not stopped in four hours, then the evidence we have is not sufficient to assume negligence.* ‘Negligent’ may be fun to say and write, but it also has a precise meaning, and if we want to be taken seriously, we should stick with precision over fun.

*Note that I said “assume.” We can’t assume negligence, but neither do we have enough evidence to be confident that it did not occur. Since patient medical records are not widely available for the entertainment of bloggers who are playing at being experts and settlements with families often include confidentiality clauses, we may never know with certainty. However, a real journalist does not operate by assuming guilt until innocence is proven, even if the journalist really, really dislikes the organization s/he is writing about.

I also would NOT believe everything the media says because just about every article says that the patient had the abortion at the 18 s Michigan location which is not true because they only offer the medication abortion there. The only pp in Chicago that does the abortion procedures is the one at 1200 n LaSalle