An anti-abortion group has filed a medical licensing complaint against a second- and third-trimester abortion provider in Washington, D.C., alleging that the physician’s poor physical health is endangering his patients. 

The advocacy group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust is asking the D.C. Department of Health to suspend the license of Dr. Cesare Santangelo, an OB-GYN with a history of “endangering people’s lives,” according to the group’s complaint, which outlines his three settled medical malpractice lawsuits and dozens of other reports of patient complications and negative experiences.  

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Santangelo runs the Washington Surgi-Clinic, which provides elective abortions up to 28 weeks of gestation as well as abortions for fetal anomalies through the third trimester. The District of Columbia is one of the 10 jurisdictions in the United States without any gestational age restrictions on abortion. 

The new complaint against Santangelo documents that the physician, in recent months, has been seen with severe and debilitating physical conditions that make it difficult or impossible for him to provide a sufficient standard of care for later-in-pregnancy abortions that his clinic advertises. 

The Survivors group writes that Santangelo, in June, was seen unable to walk without assistance and had his arm in a cast when entering his clinic on a publicly listed surgery day. 

Later that month, a member of the Survivors team had an undercover conversation with a family member of Santangelo’s, who shared that the physician suffers from “severe neuropathy,” according to the complaint. 

The complaint calls it an “insult to the intelligence of the public that they are to believe Dr. Santangelo is somehow able to stand on his own while performing high risk surgical procedures,” and adds that there is likely “unlicensed activity” occurring at the clinic since the only doctor on staff “appears to be physically incapable of performing the procedures the clinic is offering.”

A receptionist at the Washington Surgi-Clinic declined the Washington Examiner’s request for comment. 

Santangelo has been subject to scrutiny from anti-abortion groups for more than a decade. 

In 2012, the anti-abortion group Live Action conducted an undercover investigation at Santangelo’s clinic and found that he practiced umbilical cord transection, or UCT, abortions. 

A UTC abortion involves cutting the fetus’s umbilical cord while it is inside the uterus, allowing the fetus to die, and then delivering the child whole. This is different from the more standard practice in a D&E abortion that involves extracting portions of the fetus. 

Live Action’s 2012 undercover reporting also documented that Santangelo “would not help” an infant delivered alive following an abortion and would instead let the child “expire.”

Santangelo’s clinic made headlines again in March 2022 when the group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, or PAAU, found more than 100 aborted babies from the facility in toxic waste containers. Five of the deceased babies, known in anti-abortion circles as the DC Five, were aborted at Santangelo’s clinic at an advanced enough gestational age to elicit allegations of infanticide. 

The complaint also cites several recent patient experiences at the clinic listed on Google Reviews as evidence of medical malpractice, including several reviews from patients who were later hospitalized due to infections because not all of the fetal remains were removed during the abortion procedure.

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“While the veracity of the Google reviews is unknown, the time frame of the significant and noticeable decline in Dr. Santangelo’s overall functioning was noticed by many concerned members of the public of the above published reviews,” reads the complaint.

The next steps in the investigation of Santangelo are unclear. A spokesperson for the D.C. The Health Department told the Washington Examiner that the agency “does not comment on ongoing investigations.”