Life Links 7/11/13

The New York Times has a long article on abortionist Stephen Brigham, his abortion caravans and how Maryland regulates abortion clinics.

Dr. Brigham, who was not licensed to practice in Maryland, had not even been required to notify the state health department when he set up the Elkton center to complete late-term abortions, after about the 14th week of pregnancy. He initiated the procedures in New Jersey, where he was not authorized to perform them, then led his startled patients to Maryland, where the abortions were completed......

As he had with dozens of other patients over the previous months, Dr. Brigham began the young woman's procedure at his clinic in Voorhees Township, N.J., initiating the cervical dilation of the woman, who was 21.5 weeks pregnant, and using a standard injection to kill the fetus.

The next morning, he led the puzzled patient, her mother and boyfriend, along with two other patients, in a car caravan 60 miles south, across Delaware, to the clinic in an unlabeled suite in Elkton. There, Dr. Brigham advised Dr. Nicola I. Riley, who had a Maryland license but limited experience in late-term abortions, as she administered anesthesia and began extracting the fetus. "It seemed like he was training her," the patient later testified.

Soon, Dr. Riley testified, she realized that she was tugging not on the fetus but on intestinal tissue, indicating a potentially life-threatening perforation of the patient's uterus and damaged bowel.

Illinois' Supreme Court will finally let the state's parental notification law take effect.  It was passed in 1995.  The law will be enforced in 35 days. 

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled Thursday to uphold a circuit court's earlier dismissal of the case challenging the parental notification law filed by a Granite City women's health clinic and a doctor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The decision means the state's parental notification law now has to be enforced - unless there's an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In its opinion, the court noted that the nation's high court has found parental notification laws to be constitutional.

"Those precedents were followed here to find no due process or equal protection violation in Illinois," the court wrote.            

PoltiFact Ohio gives Rachel Maddow a "pants on fire" rating for her recent comments about a prolife ultrasound law in Ohio.

In interpreting some of the budget's more-ambiguous abortion language, Maddow contended that the new regulations included a "mandatory vaginal probe at the insistence of the state."
.......
 In other words, not only are external methods such as transabdominal ultrasounds allowed under the new law; they are required. That sinks Maddow's claim of a "mandatory vaginal probe."

We reached out to MSNBC and asked representatives if Maddow had anything more to say, but we did not hear back from them.