Life Links 5/12/11

Why am I not surprised? After the dust over Kermit Gosnell and his deplorable clinic has settled, pro-choicers like Morgan Zalot have stopped lamenting about how Gosnell was allowed to stay in business and are now opposing legislation (which would treat abortion clinics as ambulatory facilities) designed to prevent clinics like Gosnell's. To attack the legislation, they're using the exact same "you can't limit abortion access" argument pro-choicers used back in the day which allowed Gosnell's clinic to go decades without inspections.

Also, unsurprisingly, abortion advocates are throwing out obviously made-up estimates for how much complying with the new law would cost.

The bottom line for opponents of the bill is that it increases the cost of abortions. Frietsche claims that cost would increase by as much as $1,000 and cost each clinic as much as $1 million, which would force most — and possibly all — of Pennsylvania's 22 clinics to shut down.

Those sound like very round numbers, huh?

Stevens, of Planned Parenthood Advocates, says assertions about clinics potentially shutting down "aren't hypothetical" and points to a bill passed in 2004 in Texas that imposed similar regulations on abortion clinics. Of 20 clinics statewide, she says, none could initially comply. Eventually, a few managed to become certified outpatient facilities — but not without raising the cost of an abortion by as much as $1,000.

I'm not sure which law Stevens is referring to. On NARAL's legislative page for Texas there are a variety of TRAP laws mentioned. None of them were enacted or amended in 2004. There are more than 20 abortion clinics in Texas.

So somehow, according to Sari Stevens of Planned Parenthood, Texas passed a law in 2004 (which NARAL doesn't have a record of) and this law supposedly was so onerous that it dropped the number of abortion providers in Texas from 20 (I'm sure there were more than that in 2004) to "a few." Since then, apparently more than 20 clinics have started up.

Exhibit #4,365,395 in why you should never trust a word out of Planned Parenthood rep.'s mouth.


A Democratic legislator in Iowa has drafted a proposal to keep abortionist LeRoy Carhart out of Council Bluffs but still allow post-20 week abortions.

Bolkcom said his proposal would use the certificate-of-need process to ensure that a new abortion facility that performs abortions after 20 weeks is near an Iowa hospital that is capable of providing an appropriate level of perinatal care to protect the life or health of the woman and the fetus.

There is no hospital in Council Bluffs that meets the standard established by his proposal, Bolkcom said.

The BBC has a video about the faces of unborn children develop.