A group of Missouri pro-lifers are calling on the state to investigate and close a St. Louis Planned Parenthood after documents revealed frequent ambulance responses to the abortion facility, Ozarks First reports.
The St. Louis Planned Parenthood is the only currently operating abortion facility in the state.
Missouri state Reps. Mike Moon and Diane Franklin and a group of pro-lifers held rallies and press conferences on Monday outside of several Planned Parenthood locations to expose the more than 60 documented ambulance responses to the St. Louis facility since 2009. They urged state officials to investigate the matter and revoke the abortion facility’s license to protect women’s safety.
“The primary concern comes down to safety of the women,” Moon said.
He said the St. Louis abortion facility has been calling 911 once every six weeks on average since 2009, the News-Leader reports. The Coalition for Life St. Louis also provided a report from the St. Louis Fire Department that lists its emergency responses to the abortion clinic from 2009 to 2016.
Operation Rescue, which obtained the report through the Freedom of Information Act, reported there were 50 Urgent Priority 1 emergencies on the list, which could indicate life-threatening conditions. Some of the emergency problems included abdominal pain, fainting, hemorrhage and pregnancy-related bleeding, all of which could have to do with botched abortions.
Here’s more from the Columbia Daily Tribune:
Requirements in Missouri that doctors who perform abortions have hospital admitting privileges and that abortion clinics be licensed as ambulatory surgical centers — similar to a Texas law the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled unconstitutional — are medical safety standards, Franklin said.
“A woman who has chosen an abortion for her baby should have the assurance that the clinical standards are verified,” she told a group of about 30 supporters over shouts of “Lies, lies, lies,” from about 10 nearby counterprotesters. “Medical standards are important,” she said.
… Bonnie Lee, a retired nurse, offered details about the ambulance calls to the St. Louis clinic, but the group did not know what services the women sought at the clinic or how the women were injured. The redacted reports they obtained, Lee said, show the organization is negligent. Lee said 40 percent were calls of women hemorrhaging, and other calls were for suicidal people and abdominal pain. The group obtainted the records through a lawsuit, Lee said.
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On Oct. 19, pro-lifers observed a woman being taken out of the facility on a stretcher and placed into an ambulance, Operation Rescue reported to LifeNews.
The group continued: “An inspection done on the facility in January, 2013, revealed filthy conditions including rusty surgical tables, suction abortion machines, IV stands, and other equipment and ‘copious amounts of dust’ everywhere. Other violations included poor or non-existent infection control protocols and expired, improperly handed drugs.”
Operation Rescue President Troy Newman previously said the St. Louis Planned Parenthood may be the “most dangerous abortion facility in the country.”
“It is troubling to think what might be going on inside that facility that would require hospitalizing one woman after another,” Newman said. “The fact that Planned Parenthood is not only injuring women, but lacks the facilities to manage the regular stream of life-threatening botched abortions is an indication that something is very wrong there.”
Local Planned Parenthood leaders denied any wrong-doing and shifted the blame onto pro-lifers.
“This is nothing new. The speakers of these so-called press conferences are consistent in their attempts to shame and stigmatize abortion using baseless attacks to further their own message,” Laura McQuade, president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, told Ozarks First.
