Queens Doctor Pleads Guilty To Botched Abortion That Killed Woman

FLUSHING, QUEENS -- A Queens physician accused of killing a woman in a botched abortion pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide just moments before jurors reached a verdict in his monthlong trial.

Robert Rho, 55, of Great Neck, copped the plea deal after he was charged in the death of 30-year-old Jaime Lee Morales. The six-months-pregnant Bronx woman bled to death the night Rho operated on her in his Flushing clinic, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.

"Sadly, a 30-year-old woman lost her life as a result of the surgery," Brown said. "The doctor has now accepted responsibility and admitted he failed to realize the damage he'd done and did not provide appropriate and timely medical care following the surgery."

Morales made an appointment for an abortion with Rho at his now-shuttered practice in Liberty Women's Health on the top floor of the four-story Charles Schwab building at 37-01 Main St. It was performed shortly after 1 p.m. on July 9, 2016.

During that procedure, prosecutors said the veteran gynecologist pierced Morales' uterine wall, tore her cervix and cut across her uterine artery - none of which are supposed to happen during a surgical abortion.

Morales then required a second surgery at the health facility immediately after she began bleeding "profusely" in the waiting room, Brown said. Afterward, "despite having collapsed and appearing disoriented," Rho allowed her to leave the clinic.

On the drive home, Morales "fell off the backseat" of her sister's car and became unconscious, prosecutors said. She was rushed to a Bronx hospital, where she was treated for vaginal bleeding and given six units of blood. She died that night.

Rho was arrested three months later in October 2016. He originally faced up to 15 years in prison on charges of second-degree manslaughter, but his last-minute plea deal to the lesser charge of negligence comes with a maximum of just four years in prison.

He will be sentenced in Queens Supreme Court on June 26.

Rho's attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, called the plea deal a "monumental victory," the New York Daily News reported. He argued Morales never told Rho of her medical conditions that made her more prone to intense bleeding, and that while the botched abortion was a tragedy, it was not a crime.

Morales' death was notable, in part, because deaths caused by legal abortions have become rare. The CDC's 2012 abortion mortality count found only four deaths out of 699,202 reported procedures that year.

It also made headlines because, since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973, abortion providers have seldom faced prosecution, BuzzFeed News reported. Most instead face medical malpractice suits, which Lichtman said should have been the case for Rho.

“This isn't somebody who's known as some kind of miscreant doctor who becomes a butcher,” Lichtman told the news outlet at Rho's pre-trial court hearing in November 2016. “He's well respected and credentialed.”

But BuzzFeed News also reported Rho has been sued before in his medical career: Three times for medical reasons, and twice for sexual harassment.

The New York State Department of Health's Office of Professional Medical Conduct suspended Rho’s license that November.

“It is true that a majority of obstetricians do get sued sometime in their career,” Michael Krauss, a George Mason University law professor who specializes in malpractice cases, told BuzzFeed News. “Three times is incontrovertibly more than average.”

(Lead photo via Google Maps)