Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

If you listen to pro-abortion pundits, Kermit Gosnell’s House-of-Horrors clinic is an aberration. But when you listen to the facts, it’s a whole different story.

Americans United for Life (AUL), the first national public-interest law and policy organization dedicated to defending life, has been fighting for tighter abortion clinic regulations for years. The case against late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell has highlighted the dire need for more comprehensive and medically appropriate abortion clinic regulation in the US.

“How many women, girls and infants must die before abortion clinics are appropriately regulated and inspected?” asks AUL president and CEO, Dr. Charmaine Yoest in a recent blog post. “Today in America, veterinary clinics are better regulated than many of the nation’s abortion clinics.”

As she explains, Kermit Gosnell is not an aberration – not by a long-shot.

“In the last three years, at least 15 states have launched investigations into abortion clinics and individual abortion providers for substandard care – care that in some cases has resulted in women’s deaths.”

The good news is that progress is being made in this fight.

“Over just the last three years, eight states have enacted new comprehensive abortion clinic regulations or made significant improvements to existing regulations,” Dr. Yoest explains.

AUL has developed two pieces of model legislation requiring regular inspections of abortion clinics and strict adherence to medically appropriate standards of patient care:

• The “Abortion Patients’ Enhanced Safety Act,” which mandates that abortion clinics meet the same patient care standards as facilities performing other outpatient surgeries.

• The “Women’s Health Protection Act”, which mandates that abortion clinics meet minimum health and safety standards in a variety of areas including recordkeeping, staffing, sanitation, patient intake and testing, the abortion procedure itself, and post-operative care.

“Commonsense regulations must be a national priority,” Dr. Yoest writes. “Enacting medically appropriate and comprehensive abortion clinic regulations is a critical and sensible solution to the on-going problem of unsafe, legal ‘back-alley’ abortions, which is now better understood as a result of the horrific revelations in the Gosnell trial.”

As logical as these recommendations sound, the abortion industry actually refers to clinic regulations as TRAP laws – Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers – and claims they are aimed at restricting women’s access to abortion.

“TRAP laws may also allow unannounced state inspections, even when patients are present,” says the Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion activist organization. “These excessive and unnecessary government regulations – an ever-growing trend among state legislatures – increase the cost and scarcity of abortion services, harming women’s health and inhibiting their reproductive choices.”

Nothing could have harmed women’s health more than what was going on inside Gosnell’s seedy clinic full of blood-stained operating tables, unsanitary equipment and unlicensed staffers. When one patient, Karnamaya Mongar , 41, had to be rushed to a hospital after going into a coma, the fire department had to cut through the emergency exit door in order to access a ramp for the stretcher. Mongar would later die from an overdose of anesthesia administered by an unlicensed worker. Her life could have been saved if regulations were enforced that prevent the unlicensed from practicing medicine and if the clinic’s facilities were held to the same standards as other surgical clinics.

As Dr. Yoest points out, “These regulations are designed to safeguard against unsanitary conditions, inferior equipment, and the employment of unsuitable and untrained personnel.  They are also intended to put an end to substandard medical practices that injure and kill untold numbers of women each year.”

The bottom line is that “safe, legal abortion” is anything but safe. In fact, the ideologues who are controlling the abortion industry who use politics to avoid regulation are not only waging the real war on women, but they’ve turned the U.S. abortion industry into nothing more than America’s new “back alley.”

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