Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Even abortion proponents agree that in spite of having the most pro-abortion president in U.S. history, the impact of the rash of pro-life lawmakers swept into office during the 2010 midterms is having an historic impact on the abortion industry.
In an op-ed published by The New York Times this weekend, Dorothy Samuels, former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, bemoans the fact that “abortion forces who refuse to accept the law of the land” are making abortion more difficult than ever to obtain.
As she correctly points out, the battleground is taking place in state capitals where an increased number of governors and state legislatures “controlled by abortion opponents . . . keep concocting new schemes to make terminating a pregnancy a right on paper only.”
She includes two graphics that illustrate how much damage has been done to the abortion industry just since the midterms took place. A total of 61 new laws restricting abortion were passed in the first eight months of this year, which is nearly triple the number passed in all of 2010 and more than double that of the previous record of 28 set in 1997.
“Although some of this year’s statutes have already been preliminarily enjoined by courts as unconstitutional,” Samuels writes, “others will be left to stand as constraints on women’s reproductive freedom.”
She goes on to explain the map of the U.S. where states shown in the darkest shade have enacted five of what she calls “the most harmful restrictions,” such as mandatory waiting periods which are actually designed to prevent women from being rushed into having an abortion that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
She calls the second restriction, the requirement of counseling sessions “demeaning” and claims they lack any real medical justification. But who ever heard of someone undergoing a surgical procedure without being advised of the exact nature of the operation and what could go wrong? My dentist gives me more information about oral surgery than a woman gets in an abortion clinic. Why? Politics. What other reason could there be for denying women sufficient information to make a fully informed choice?
Samuels goes on to the next restriction, parental consent or notification laws, which she says pose “a particular hardship for teenagers from troubled homes, including incest victims.” She’s right. Just ask Planned Parenthood where undercover stings in several states have found clinic staff routinely neglecting to report cases of statutory rape. In many cases, victims caught up in troubled situations were sent back to the same abuser only because clinic workers failed to obey mandatory reporting laws. An even bigger oversight from Samuels is her neglect to mention that many of the new parental consent and/or notification laws were put in place because of these cases – not due to the antics of “fanatical anti-abortion” forces who are out to strip women of their rights as she seems to be implying.
Perhaps the most egregious claim made in Samuels article is that many of the new rules regarding clinic regulation are “onerous.” She presents new rules such as those governing the width of hallways as frivolous, which they certainly appear to be unless you explain why such a rule was put in place -to allow better access to emergency equipment. She also neglects to mention that in many cases, such as in the state of Virginia, new abortion clinic regulations are the exact same regulations in place for cosmetic and oral surgery centers. Why shouldn’t women seeking an abortion get the same quality of care as those receiving a face lift or root canal? Is it too much to ask that a doctor stay on the premises until a patient is discharged, that all medical personnel on the premises be licensed, and that facilities and equipment meet the same sanitary standards as other clinics?
Even more baffling is how Ms. Samuels could call these laws onerous after the discovery of Kermit Gosnell’s “house of horrors” in West Philadelphia last year which is what prompted the passage of so many new state laws regarding abortion clinic regulation. Gosnell, who was charged with eight counts of murder, operated a filthy clinic where aborted fetuses were kept in jars on the premises and women were treated by unlicensed medical personnel, a situation not discovered until a woman died from a botched abortion only because state inspectors were not conducting required clinics inspections.
Samuels correctly says that the chart doesn’t tell the whole story about the problems being faced by the abortion industry. “It fails to capture other negative developments, like the big decline in the number of abortion providers. In 1982, there were 2,908 providers nationwide. As of 2008, there were only 1,793. In 97 percent of the counties that are outside metropolitan areas there are no abortion providers at all.” What she doesn’t explain is that the number of doctors willing to do abortions has always been low. The most recent survey found that only 14 percent of medical doctors want anything to do with abortion or the clinics that perform them, which some doctors refer to as “chop shops.” This is a doctor’s personal choice and it should be respected as such.
She goes on to say “abortion is one of the safest and most common of medical procedures, one that about one-third of American women undergo during their lifetime.” However, this can hardly be true if so many of these clinics are able to use politics to escape the kind of regulation Americans have come to expect of medical facilities that perform less invasive procedures.
“One clear lesson of this year’s skyrocketing number of new state laws is that those who care about keeping the procedure safe, legal and accessible need to raise their voices as loudly and effectively as those on the other side,” she writes.
I beg to differ. It’s not a matter of which side is speaking more effectively – but which side is more willing to tell the whole story.
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