According to reports, on Feb. 7th, 29-year old Jennifer Morbelli died due to complications from a late-term abortion performed by Dr. LeRoy Carhart, an abortion doctor celebrated by the left and embraced by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

At a press conference held on Feb. 11th in Germantown, MD, it was reported Morbelli had learned there was some abnormality with her unborn child and chose to have an abortion 33 weeks into her pregnancy. (With modern technology, a child becomes viable outside the womb around 20 weeks.) 

The late-term abortion method used has four stages that take place over several days, and the Maryland Coalition for Life reports in a release that the mother’s death was “a direct result of complications experienced during a 3rd trimester abortion by LeRoy Carhart.”

Dr. Carhart is a folk hero to the abortion industry. He was the named plaintiff in both of the late-term abortion cases that have gone to the Supreme Court: Stenberg v. Carhart in 2000, and Gonzales v. Carhart in 2007. He worked with Dr. George Tiller, the partial-birth abortion doctor who was slain in 2009. Carhart was hailed by many abortion-rights supporters and got red-carpet treatment at the Sundance Film Festival showcasing the documentary After Tiller.

Because of Carhart’s national status, nearly 2,000 pro-life demonstrators reportedly attended a prayer event outside Carhart’s Germantown abortion clinic when it opened. He moved to this suburb of Washington, D.C. because pro-life legislation forced the closure of his Nebraska abortion clinic. The 2000 Supreme Court case bearing his name was his challenge to Nebraska’s then-recent law prohibiting partial-birth abortion.

Enter Kathleen Sebelius. When she was governor of Tiller’s home state of Kansas, Sebelius hosted Tiller and Carhart for dinner at the governor’s mansion. She wanted to honor them for the work they were doing, which largely consisted of late-term abortions on children who could all survive outside their mothers’ wombs, killed by a procedure so gruesome that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan–a pro-choice Democrat representing New York–condemned it as “infanticide.”

This is the same Sebelius who now, as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is the lead federal official for taking over the U.S. healthcare system with Obamacare. She is also the official who issued the HHS Mandate–the federal regulation requiring almost all employers in America with 50+ employees to cover abortion-related services, which is now slowly heading toward the Supreme Court for violating the religious freedoms of people of faith.

According to the pro-life group’s statement, Carhart’s late-term abortion procedure takes four days to complete, and Morbelli looked “pale and weak” on her return visits. At 5 AM on Feb. 7th, she was in intense pain; the family tried to contact Carhart to deal with his patient’s medical emergency, but he could not be reached. The family took Morbelli to nearby Shady Grove Hospital in Rockville, Maryland. She died later that morning from blood loss and hemorrhagic shock.

The statement concludes: “On the very same day that this woman died, the [Maryland] Department of Health and Mental Hygiene posted on their website that they issued a license to Carhart’s clinic to perform abortions…”

In 2005, Carhart was reportedly the physician for another woman–19 year-old Christin Gilbert–who died from a late-term abortion procedure.

Jennifer Morbelli will be buried with her daughter, named Madison. This unfortunate story should lead to renewed debate on late-term abortion and serve as a poignant reminder that there can be two victims of the procedure. If legislators won’t take measures allowed by the courts to protect the unborn, perhaps they can at least restrict procedures that can also kill their mothers.

Ken Klukowski is the legal columnist for Breitbart News.