Two Senate Democrats who prevented the Senate from adopting a resolution calling for hearings on abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell and problems with other abortion clinics are getting an earful from pro-lifers.
As LifeNews reported, Senator Rich Blumenthall of Connecticut opposed the Gosnell hearings resolution and spoke on the Senate floor yesterday in opposition. He did so along with pro-abortion Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, who sough to downplay the significance of the abortion-infanticides that occurred at Gosnell’s clinic.
Today, Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee president Penny Nance blasted the Democrats and issued support for Senator Mike Lee’s (R- Utah) sense of the Senate resolution to protect women and children from abusive, unsanitary, and illegal abortion practices.
“Women are being brutally killed and maimed in unlicensed, unregulated, and uninspected women’s health clinics. These clinics are strategically placed in underprivileged areas and prey on America’s minorities. Our women need to be protected,” Nance told LifeNews.
“This issue is highlighted by the Philadelphia murder trial of Kermit Gosnell, an abortion doctor currently on trial for first and third degree murder. His abortion practice has been publicized as one of the most atrocious human rights stories of the 21st Century,” Nance continued.
The head of the pro-life women’s group told LifeNews, “If there was ever a time to put party politics aside, it is now. It is to advocate and support women’s health by regulating unsafe and unsanitary abortion clinics. ”
“An abortion is an invasive surgical procedure, and many women are left alone to deal with complications that arise after an abortion. CWALAC urges Congress to require the physician doing the abortion procedure to notify the patient of a hospital where the patient can receive follow-up care,” Nance said. “Physicians performing these procedures should also be required to have admitting privileges at a hospital that is in close proximity to the clinic in which he or she is working.”
“Doing the wrong thing – allowing current programs that are ineffective and make the problem worse – is a grave injustice to those vulnerable women whom we are charged with protecting,” she concluded.
“It is difficult to imagine why anyone would object to a non-binding resolution calling on Congress to investigate these alleged disturbing, horrific, and illegal abortion practices committed by Kermit Gosnell and others,” said Senator Lee, who filed the resolution on Monday evening.
Lee added: “With numerous reports of similar instances surfacing around the country, the need for greater regulatory oversight of these so-called clinics is so plainly obvious it strains the limits of disbelief to think all members of the Senate would not agree. The resolution is simply an affirmation that we as a country – a moral and compassionate society – have an interest in acting to save the lives of innocent women and children, and to prevent these kinds of heinous acts from happening to anyone again.”
The Susan B. Anthony List is one group calling for hearings on Gosnell.
“The abortion lobby claims that the Gosnell clinic is an outlier, but the footage released this morning by Live Action reveals once more that the abortion industry treats women and children as mere pieces of meat,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, President of SBA List. “Leroy Carhart, the most visible and ‘celebrated’ of America’s late-term abortionists jokes about using pick axes and drill bits to pull apart the body of a child capable of surviving outside the womb. How is this different from the atrocities that occurred at Kermit Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia? Congress must address the multi-state breakdown of oversight in the abortion industry as well as the barbarism of abortions performed on children capable of feeling pain and surviving outside the womb.”
She told LifeNews: “Congress must address its role in protecting the human rights of children late in pregnancy. The few, mere inches that separate a child in the womb from a child outside the womb should never determine whether its intentional ‘demise’ is permitted by law. Americans overwhelmingly oppose late-term abortions and the law should follow their instinctive resistance to this dehumanizing and degrading practice.”
Lee previously released a letter along with 10 of his GOP colleagues introducing a resolution calling for the Senate to hold hearings on abortion facility regulations.
“Congress and States should gather information about and correct abusive, unsanitary, and illegal abortion practices and the interstate referral of women and girls to facilities engaged in dangerous or illegal second- and third-trimester procedures,” the resolution states.
“The lack of oversight at abortion facilities puts women’s lives at risk and leads to the kind of unconscionable practices we have seen recently,” Lee said in a statement on the resolution. “The Senate should formally recognize that this is a problem in our country and we have a responsibility to investigate the causes, review the effects of certain public policies, and determine what we can do to prevent any woman from being subjected to these reprehensible practices again.”
“Congress has the responsibility to investigate and conduct hearings on abortions performed near, at, or after viability in the United States, public policies regarding such, and evaluate the extent to which such abortions involve violations of the natural right to life of infants who are born alive or are capable of being born alive, and therefore are entitled to equal protection under the law,” the resolution says. “The facts of the Gosnell case are disturbing and heartbreaking,” Lee said. “It should be a wake-up call to all Americans.”
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The senators who joined Lee include Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, Sen. Mike Johanns of Nebraska, and Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas.
No Democrats signed on to the resolution.
The resolution has the support of pro-life blogger Jill Stanek, who said she sees no reason why abortion backers would oppose it.
“What abortion supporter interested in “safe” abortions could possibly oppose investigating and outing unsafe abortion clinics nationwide? We shall soon see,” she said.
Stanek continued: “The resolution also addresses an issue that is long overdue, to “evaluate the extent to which such abortions involved violations of the natural right to life of infants who are born alive or are capable of being born alive.” The Born Alive Infants Protection Act was passed in 2002, but there has never been any follow-up to determine whether the law was being violated. Since then, incidents have been reported of abortion survivors who were left to die, such as the baby who was born alive in a toilet in an Orlando, Florida, abortion clinic in 2005, and who clinic workers abandoned to die despite pleas from his mother; or the baby who was zipped still alive in a biohazard bag and thrown on the roof of a Hialeah, Florida, abortion clinic in 2006.”
Stanek is also happy the resolution addresses the issue of fetal pain, interstate trafficking for abortions, the woeful lack of abortion reporting among the states, unenforced abortion clinic regulations, and mentions as an example of unsafe abortion clinics the “meat market” that is Planned Parenthood of Delaware.
