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Do Women Deserve the Highest Standards of Medical Care? Not If You Ask Planned Parenthood.
“At Planned Parenthood, we work every day to make sure women receive the high quality health care they need in a safe, respectful environment — including abortion care. Ensuring the health and safety of our patients is central to our mission and fundamental to every person who works at Planned Parenthood.”
So said one Planned Parenthood executive in a cut-and-paste comment last year, the kind you’ll see – nearly or perfectly verbatim – from the abortion giant’s various affiliates across the country. Indeed, another affiliate (after parroting the exact quote above) boasts of its “rigorous medical standards and guidelines” and “rigorous standards and training for staff as well as emergency plans in place, because women’s safety is our first priority.”
Admirable aspirations, signifying a commitment to patient care that transcends all other concerns and animates the very soul of the organization, right? Hardly. This is Planned Parenthood. And the mask slips again.
The U.S Supreme Court announced Nov. 13 that it would hear Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, a case out of Texas which will be the first major abortion case before the high court in nearly a decade.
At issue is a Texas law known as House Bill 2 which requires abortion facilities to meet the same health and safety standards as ambulatory surgical centers. For example, hallways at abortion businesses must be wide enough to maneuver a gurney, should women in medical distress need to be moved through the facility.
The law also includes a provision that protects women against cut-and-run abortionists by requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. As it stands, if a woman is the victim of a botched abortion or needs hospital care as a result of one of numerous potential post-abortion complications, the abortionist without admitting privileges washes his hands of the patient and leaves her to seek care with another medical staff in another medical facility which receives the woman sight unseen and unfamiliar with necessary details of her progress to this urgent state. A knowledge gap like this can be a matter of life and death.
Alliance Defending Freedom, along with several other pro-life groups, filed a brief with the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit explaining that the “focus of the constitutionality [of the law] is on the treatment of women . . . . Texas, as many other States, has clearly recognized the risks associated with both surgical and medication abortions and has taken steps to regulate these abortions to minimize these known and potential risks and to protect women’s health and safety. Texas now is (and should continue to be) permitted to do so.”
In its opinion, the Fifth Circuit agreed, writing that the evidence demonstrates that “the State truly intends that women only receive an abortion in facilities that can provide the highest quality of care and safety—the stated legitimate purpose of HB 2.”
You’d think that Planned Parenthood, for all its talk of “women’s safety” and “rigorous medical standards,” would be the sponsors of this law and vigorous advocates of its affirmation in federal court.
Again, this is Planned Parenthood. Instead of celebrating the Texas legislature’s common sense move to make sure that women seeking abortions aren’t entering another Kermit Gosnell house of horrors, Planned Parenthood and its allies pressed play on its favorite talking points mix tape: “Cut off access”…“hurt women”…“#undueburden”…“attack”…“draconian law” (not sure they know what “draconian” means)…“forcing these women to carry their pregnancies to term against their will”… and so on.
Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion-industrial complex have insisted, all the way up to the Supreme Court, that abortionists should not be held to the same standards as everyone else . . . and that the women who enter their doors don’t really deserve the highest level of care.
Let’s hope that when the Supreme Court hears the case in the spring and decides it by the beginning of summer it rules that states can protect women, even over the protests of the abortion industry.
Planned Parenthood, for its millions in marketing and meticulous corporate message control, is having a harder time passing itself off as the tender-hearted, indispensable women’s health champion. Its opposition to a common sense law that says all women deserve the highest standard of safety and care (even in an abortion clinic where no one is truly safe and cared-for), and that holds abortion businesses to the same standards as other medical clinics again exposes the irreconcilability of Planned Parenthood’s words and actions.
Published in Law
I wouldn’t bet on the SCOTUS being friendly to the Texas law. They managed to find “animus” toward gays in wishing to defend the millennial old definition of marriage. I wouldn’t be surprised if they found “animus” to “women’s right to choose” in HB 2.
It’s been apparent for a long time that “Safe, legal, and rare,” was 2/3 false.
Even if the Supreme Court doesn’t uphold the Texas law, this is still bad for Planned Parenthood. It makes them look very bad, and it can only chip away at their support: their refusal to put women’s safety first shows them for who they really are.
I agree, but most people have always known PP is all about producing dead babies on demand. It’s just some people are okay with that.
I think you vastly underestimate the degree of denial and cognitive dissonance that many who support abortion operate with; shining a light on Planned Parenthood could very well create a huge chink in the abortion industry’s armor.
I pray you’re right.
We are an on-demand society now. It just like Starbucks and Redbox. Swipe your credit card, abort a baby, minus a processing fee of an arm and a leg.
Proponents of PP need to check Their Birth privilege.
Actually, some polls suggest that young people are becoming more pro-life, not less so. There is hope, and as for those who do support abortion, I believe that most of them are tragically deluded, but not evil.
As for the supporters of abortion who really are evil, I have hope for them too. Many of the greatest pro-life advocates are people who used to be abortionists. People can change; people change all the time.
Stipulating that I don’t trust a word Planned Parenthood says and that I think they’re a wicked, manipulative, extremist organization* … I can’t shake the feeling that this is less about safety than about running them out of town under.
Dr. Gosnell’s case illustrated that a monster with a medical license could avoid any regulatory scrutiny if he performed abortions. To the extent there’s a general problem here, it seems that the solution isn’t so much new regulation, but enforcing what we already have in place.
Even if we do need to increase regulations on abortion facilities, wouldn’t it stand to reason that there would be a tiered system depending on the kind of abortions done? That is, a facility that prescribes RU-486 would need less regulation than one that performs late-term abortions?
Perhaps such language is contained in the bills and I’m ignorant of it, but — if so — I appear to have also missed hearing their defenders point them out.
@TomMeyer,
I’m sure someone here knows better, but I’m guessing for the average surgical or chemical abortion PP is a one stop shop. The complications which may arise from anesthesia, bleeding, adverse drug reaction just make it common sense to have hospital admitting privileges. My kids’ oral surgeon advertised as much, and he was only removing her wisdom teeth.
Perhaps. Again, I don’t pretend to know the “medicine” — scare quotes required when discussing abortion — involved, but the rhetoric and arguments behind the supporters of these bills does inclines me to think that this is a back-door way to regulate abortion out of existence rather than a good faith effort to increase safety. If so, I’d understand that, but it still strikes me as dishonest if that’s what’s happening.
Then again, I obviously don’t trust a word Planned Parenthood says.
Understand your thinking on this Tom. However, these are reasonable and overdue correctives applied to an industry that had long been able to avoid the kinds of regulations and oversight by which everyone else is bound. It was exposed pretty shockingly in the Gosnell case that abortion clinics are inspected less frequently than White Castle, even in the face of numerous complaints about the horrific conditions.
Bottom line: if they comply, they survive. If they don’t, they are shut down. As much profit…errrrr “excess revenue”…as Planned Parenthood turns (3/4 of a billion over the last decade), it should be no problem for them to comply, and even to kick some coin over to non-PP Texas abortion centers if it’s really that important. If they are “run out of town,” it’s on them. If women’s health and safety is really paramount, they should work to make that so by following the law instead of insisting on second- or third-rate standards all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Greg, I don’t know you’re wrong — you may well be right — but I’ve yet to see a convincing case that the regulations proposed here actually fit the implic goal of safety. Again, Gosnell’s clinic wasn’t the hellhole it was because of a lack of regulation, but a lack of enforcement of almost any kind.
The fact that PP asserts that treating their
abattoirsclinics the same as any other surgical center would make them unable to operate speaks volumes.While I cannot speak to the intent behind the Texas statute, the law as written seems eminently defensible.
Let’s reverse the Left’s logic. Why are dedicated abortion clinics the only type of ambulatory surgery center exempted from otherwise universal safety requirements? There is nothing intrinsically less risky about abortion relative to other surgical interventions. In fact, a stroll through any old cemetery reveals the shocking number of young women who succumbed to complications of childbirth prior to the advent of modern obstetrical care.
Yet Planned Parenthood demands special, bottom line-enhancing treatment.
If this is indeed the case — and if the regulations are otherwise sensible — then I have absolutely no objection to the Texas bill and would, indeed, happily support it.
What I object to is the impression I’ve gotten that it and others specifically target abortionists with onerous “safety” regulations in order to run them out of town. If that impression is wrong, then I sense there’s a lot of work to do to correct it.
“if a woman is the victim of a botched abortion or needs hospital care as a result of one of numerous potential post-abortion complications, the abortionist without admitting privileges washes his hands of the patient and leaves her to seek care with another medical staff in another medical facility which receives the woman sight unseen and unfamiliar with necessary details of her progress to this urgent state. A knowledge gap like this can be a matter of life and death.”
Very true. I have seen this happen in Delaware, Pennsylvania, CT and Massachusetts. The Texas law is not anti-abortion clinic; indeed, by setting common sense standards, it permits safer running of such a charnel house.
Having had three early term miscarriages (8 weeks) and the accompanying D&E procedures, two of them in hospital and one in the OB/Gyn’s office, it is shocking to me that anyone would treat these procedures as nothing more than a dental cleaning.
Yes, it’s out-patient surgery. It’s still a big deal, even for an otherwise healthy young woman, and it’s apparent the abortion industry has every incentive to undersell the physical trauma and potential risks involved. If they really wanted to protect women’s health, these laws would be non-issues. My understanding is, there’s nothing in them that isn’t already required of other out-patient surgery centers.
PP is in the business of guaranteeing dead babies, not women’s health. That’s why they fight these laws.