There’s a recent post on The Abortioneers — a group blog whose contributors work in the abortion industry — titled “We Will Keep Our Clinics Open!” that provides an interesting glimpse into their mentality.
The author, Sparky, takes note of the number of abortion clinics across the country that, for one reason or another, have closed in recent years, and focuses particularly on those that have been ordered to close by state agencies:
Several clinics have closed after DHH inspections. This is challenging because when a clinic is shut down or its license is suspended, the fairness of DHH is always in question. A few months in Montgomery, Alabama, the Beacon Women’s Center had its licence suspended after a DHH inspection. More recently in Shreveport, Louisiana, the Hope Medical Group for Women was shut down after a DHH inspection.
In the case of the Alabama facility, its “numerous and serious violations” — those are the words used by the Alabama Department of Public Health — included expired drugs, lack of emergency medical equipment, and missing patient records.
In the case of Louisiana’s ironically named Hope Medical Group, it didn’t even perform physical exams on women before their abortions, and it didn’t have procedures in place regarding the administering of anesthesia — and, as Christina Dunigan has profusely documented, “anesthesia screw-ups can kill you.”
(Just yesterday, a Baton Rouge judge lifted Hope’s suspension, apparently agreeing with its lawyer, J.E. Cullens, who, during a hearing on the matter, said — presumably with a straight face — “This is a safe clinic.”)
Sparky goes on to say:
When clinics are closed because DHH finds problems, it is challenging. If DHH came into abortion clinics and advised staff on how to run better medical facilities, that would be great. For example, at my clinic we are constantly striving to improve our patient care and services. The problem is that in reality, very often DHH inspectors walk into abortion clinics with the intent of finding something wrong. [emphasis in the original]
Isn’t it an inspector’s job to find something wrong?
Sparky continues:
When I read a news story about a clinic being ordered to close, there is no way to know if the problems cited are problems that actually warranted (medically or otherwise) shutting the clinic down. In states like Alabama or Louisiana where the social environment is conservative, it’s very possible that both the DHH inspector and the person who wrote the news article are anti-choice. Really, I guess that is possible in Anywhere, USA.
The assumption that the recent closings of some abortion facilities are perhaps merely attributable to “anti-choice” bias on the part of health inspectors — and, even more laughably, that their bias is shared by the media — gives the lie to the notion that abortion clinics really care about women’s health and safety.
If the abortion industry really did care, first and foremost, about women’s health and well-being, their default response to well-documented charges of unprofessional and unsafe practices by some of its own would not be to claim victimhood.
Instead, this Abortioneer’s words communicate that what the abortion industry cares most about is protecting the abortion industry.
