LA Times and the "Unfair" Missouri Law [Jay]

Ok, I’m irritated enough to write again. Thank you for all of your prayers and well wishes.

What rileth thee so greatly you may ask? Why the LA Times and this ridiculous article by Stephanie Simon about Missouri’s laws concerning the minimal standards that abortion facilities must meet to perform abortions.

Here is the first paragraph:

“A first-trimester surgical abortion takes about two minutes. After, patients at the Planned Parenthood clinic here walk down a dimly lighted hall to a small, spare recovery room, where they rest in recliners, a box of tissues by each chair. Most are cleared to go home after 15 minutes.”

Right away we know we are on a winner here. Two minutes?!! How does she think abortions work? You walk through the door and a trained professional medical doctor whacks you over the head with an abortion club and the lump of cells that we call “Notababy” falls right out of you. Then go take a chill on the lounge with your tissues and we will send you home soon.

I was under the impression that this was a medical procedure performed by educated medical professionals that required certain safety precautions be in place to protect the patient. I was also under the impression that the government routinely regulated the construction and clinical standards of medical facilities. When I worked in the HVAC industry, the regulated standards of air quality in hospitals and medical facilities was very high and depending on what procedure happened in any given room, varied from zone to zone. This is life in the big city for medical professionals. This is not some new fangled fancy law that the clever pro-life legislators have dreamed up. It is the inclusion of abortion providers in a previously existing standard. So when Simon writes:

“They have enacted the most far-reaching regulations in the nation -- dictating the physical layout, staffing and record-keeping policies of any facility that performs five or more abortions a month, including private doctors' offices that regularly prescribe the abortion pill.”

She is overreaching a bit on how draconian the laws are. And as much as I love to hear abortions compared with vasectomies as is done later in the article it is not lost on me that the poor pitiful put upon organization of Planned Parenthood has a few dollars to spare if they wish to rescue these facilities.

As for Peter Brownlie’s imbecilic confusion as to why giving women pills that will kill the unborn life and cause her body to go into contractions and expel the remains from her womb would cause his facility to come under the new restrictions, well he ought to be closed for sheer stupidity. Simon’s insulting line about how it is “just like a miscarriage” shows a callousness that must be intentional. Yeah, Stephanie, why not sell them over the counter while we are at it? There is nothing more natural in the world than medically induced miscarriages that have in the past led to several complications including death. Why would we want to regulate that?

This Family Research Council blog right here by Andrew Schlafly does a good job at doing a point by point breakdown of this article. My question for Stephanie Simon goes right back to the beginning of this article. The second paragraph is this:

"Thousands of women have safely ended pregnancies at this clinic since it opened in 1987. Conservative lawmakers in Missouri say abortion patients deserve better."

Ms. Simon’s article and beef is based on the defense that abortion is a terribly safe procedure. The women getting abortions in these clinics face little serious risk to their health and this move is an obvious ploy to close abortion clinics, make it more difficult for women to get abortions, and will not make any woman safer.

Even if I stipulated the truth of her opinion on the incredible safety and brevity of first trimester abortions, so what? You can make abortion as risk free as you want for women and it is still deadly to the unborn human being. Why are those of us who want to see an end to abortion required to play fair in her eyes. You want to act like doctors then you get treated like doctors. You want to hide behind your enlightened position that you understand this better than the rest of us because of your training, then Missouri is taking you at your word. If you are experts at this outpatient surgery then super, you are now being graded like every other expert.

If taking them at their word and forcing them to meet the standards of professionalism that others are already meeting puts them out of business then super. They can cry all that they want, but in the end they can not have it both ways. Unless some judge rescues them, of course. But that never happens...oh,wait.

*CORRECTION: I originally mistakenly attributed the rebuttal of the LA Times article to the blogger at FRC, Joe Carter, that posted the Schlafly response.