Last Friday, Jan. 30, Southern California abortionist Bertha Bugarin was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for committing abortions without a medical license.

Bugarin, 49, once owned or operated a chain of 11 abortion mills stretching from Los Angeles County to Orange County to San Diego, according to business paperwork filed with the state. One by one, her staff abortionists lost their medical licenses or left her employ due to over a dozen lawsuits alleging personal injury, malpractice, sex crimes, Medi-Cal fraud, and wrongful death.

• Nicholas Braemer, a Torrance doctor who worked for Bugarin, admitted to the medical board in 1994 that he removed only one arm of a fetus during an abortion in 1987. The board put Braemer on probation for five years, but records show he violated probation terms at least three times. In 1999, the board accused Braemer of leaving a fetus’ cranium and placenta inside a patient. The woman spent a month hospitalized so her bowel could be repaired and multiple abscesses drained. Braemer surrendered his license in 2000 and confessed to gross negligence.

But the Bugarin story does not end here.

• Bugarin hired 83-year-old San Diego abortionist Phillip Rand as a virtual “cirucuit-rider” abortionist for her Clinica Medica Para la Mujer de Hoy (Medical Clinic for Women Today) chain. Rand had previously been sued over 40 times, disciplined again and again by the medical board throughout the years and with a $4 million judgment against him for botching a delivery. He finally surrendered his medical license 20 months after being arrested for botching a second-trimester abortion on a young lady in August 2003 – a situation the paramedic called “the worst post-partum patient situation at a medical clinic I have ever encountered,” when he found her “lying in a pool of her own blood.”

• Laurence Reich pleaded guilty to and was convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault on his patients in 2002. He was consequently stripped of his medical license but continued to perform abortions for Bugarin until 2007 when he was arrested, charged with three felonies and released on $60,000 bond.

• John Ramon Rivera, Jr. was caught and convicted of groping the genital area of a woman patient during a procedure while under the influence of ecstasy in 2002.

• Mohammed A. Hamed was on duty at the Clinica Medica in Santa Ana on Feb. 11, 2006, when an ambulance rushed one of his patients to the hospital. Witnesses said the patient was “awake and screaming.”

With such horrific doctors on her staff, Bugarin decided to take things into her own hands. Although she had no medical training, court documents recount that Bugarin dressed in a doctor’s white lab coat and performed abortions on 16 women who underwent the procedures with the understanding that they were in the care of a medical professional.

After a police raid on Bugarin’s clinic in August 2007, nine women came forward with sworn testimonies of incomplete abortions, surgery without any pain medication, medical complications requiring hospitalization, and even the live birth of a supposedly-aborted baby – the infant died three hours later – all at Bugarin’s hand.

Last year, Bugarin was convicted of seven felonies in Los Angeles County and nine felonies in San Diego County. She will stand for sentencing in San Diego tomorrow.

Nolan Jones has laid claim to current ownership of the four remaining Clinica Medica abortion mills. But Jones’ problems are no better. With malpractice judgments against him, hospital privileges revoked, his license suspended, and a medical board investigation against him for botched abortions, Jones’ debts have forced him to live out of his car or sleep at abortion mills in recent months.

Several of Bugarin’s abortionists are still at large, resurfacing in other neighborhoods. The remaining records in Bugarin’s case number BA328497 have been sealed.

What’s sad is that this is not an isolated case or problem. Dozens of abortionists across the country have sexually assaulted, physically maimed or even killed women who have come to them: in Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Texas, New York, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, and elsewhere. Some of them are being sued for their crimes.

This just goes to show that if you disrespect human life long enough – any form, including the unborn – you will eventually disrespect other humans and end up like Bugarin.

At least she’s where she belongs now. In jail.