Abortion Clinic Standards

Recently the motel I was staying at dropped a USA Today on my door. One of the sidebars on the cover stated, “Court may face abortion rematch: Justices to decide whether to address state restrictions.”

In the article itself the first paragraph discussed how long it had been since the court took up an issue on abortion. The second small paragraph mentioned that both this instance and the last were during presidential elections. And then in paragraph three, it finally gave the gist of what was going on.

Quoting the article, the court may choose to “hear a challenge to tough new limits placed on abortion clinics and doctors in Texas.” Notice the word tough and the word limit. This implies to me limitations that some kind of unreasonable restrictions, but that wasn’t what I found in the article.

The effects of the law were discussed in two parts, the first of which is the new requirements and the second is the result on clinics. The two new requirements are that the doctors must have admitting privileges, for patients who have complications, to a local hospital and that the clinics must measure up to outpatient surgery centers.

What this article communicates to me is that clinics are currently staffed by hacks who do not care enough to have recourse to with deal the difficulties that arise from their procedures and the facilities they do these procedures in are substandard. I would not describe these laws as tough, but as common sense. Anyone opposing them would fit my description of taking advantage of and endangering women. But in today’s climate the idea that abortion clinics be made safer for the women who visit them is filed away as part of a war on women.

The second effect of the law discussed is that it would leave the state with only 10 clinics. The article didn’t say how many clinics will be forced to close, but they implied it was enough to restrict access. They didn’t seem to consider the possibility that these clinics would raise their standards.

How did abortion become such a sacred cow that the clinics need to be protected more than the women who enter them? When abortion was first becoming legal, one of the arguments was to get rid of dirty back alley locations staffed by ill trained workers. Now that abortion is legal the arguments are somehow in favor of these conditions.

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Abortion Industry Priorities

One of the battles taking place in the courts is whether or not abortion clinics need to be held to the same standards of medical cooperation, safety and cleanliness as other surgical centers. It boggles my imagination that the industry which successfully portrays itself as the protectors of women and women’s rights would not always be in favor of the highest level of protection for their clients.

How many of us remember that one of the arguments commonly quoted in the old days, in favor of legalizing abortion, was to avoid having women visit illegal and unsanitary back alley clinics? Why is this industry that is supposed to save women from dirty back alleys now campaigning for the right to practice their medicine in the same unregulated ways?

The answer is that the abortion industry is more about profit than about women, their rights or their safety. If this were not true than the laws currently being challenged would never have been necessary. Instead every abortion provider would have been in cooperation so as to allow them to admit any patients that had complications in a nearby hospital. If they really cared more for women than for their dollars, they would not be advocating saving money, and profits, by operating in less safe and less sterile conditions.

Priorities are seldom revealed by words. Words can be twisted. Priorities are revealed by actions.

Rights in Conflict

The local news this morning is raising a fuss about a new bill in Arizona awaiting the Governor’s decision whether to sign it or veto it. Arizona’s SB1062 as endorsed by the Center for Arizona Policy is an attempt to restore religious freedom in certain cases. You can learn more about the law, and its intents by following the link. But perhaps more importantly you can see a history of how two different rights have come to be in conflict with each other since 1990.

Now I started off by saying they were raising a fuss. I use this term because at no point did they try to explain what the bill will do, or what the specific wording of the bill was. Other stations might have done so, but I would feel better about the press if they had led with this information. Instead they almost exclusively spoke of the possible economic impact. Bad policy is made when all we care about is whether or not it makes money. We should always care more about the right and wrong of issues than its economic impact.

SB1062 is an example of how different rights have come into conflict with each other in America. The trend is religious freedom is losing importance in America. When rights come in conflict with each other it is now the likely loser. Our heritage of religious freedom and diversity is disappearing fast because we are demanding that the individual conscience conform to cultural norms.