Florida Abortion Practitioner Stops Abortions at Daytona Beach Facility 
Email this article
Printer friendly page
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
September 4, 2006
Daytona Beach, FL (LifeNews.com) — A Florida abortion practitioner has indicated he has stopped doing abortions at his Daytona Beach medical facility. Randall Whitney has run one of the two abortion centers in Volusia County for more than 30 years but he quit doing abortions there just two days ago.
Whitney will no longer do abortions at the Family Planning Center but plans to continue doing abortions in Orlando. He’s been responsible for about half of the 1,000-,1500 abortions that occur annually in the area.
The Daytona Beach facility will continue to exist but only non-abortion reproductive health care will be offered and women seeking abortions will likely be referred to other centers.
Whitney told the Daytona Beach News Journal that he stopped doing abortions only because of disagreements with state officials on rules regulating how he ran his abortion business.
He told the newspaper that he expects a coming battle nationwide over making abortions illegal again.
"It’s going to be an ugly fight in this country," he said. "These Republican do-gooders and pro-lifers don’t have a clue."
The abortion practitioner told the Dayton Beach newspaper he has no regrets about the tens of thousands of abortions he’s done and the lives he’s taken or the women he’s injured.
"I sleep well," Whitney said. "I have no concerns about what might have been if a fetus lived."
Whitney was accused in June 2005 of violating the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act. That’s the measure that requires abortion centers to make sure that any unborn baby born alive during a failed abortion procedure receives proper medical care.
A 34-year-old woman said her child, known as Baby Rowan, curled up as if he were cold and grabbed her finger with his hand after she delivered him in a toilet at an abortion center in Orlando. Shortly after, the baby died.
In deposition testimony in the lawsuit, Whitney said that born-alive abortions do take place at the Florida facility and staff members make no effort to resuscitate the babies.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 2004, a suit was filed against Whitney and the Orlando Women’s Center abortion facility. The suit alleged that a woman, known as "C.H." in court records, agreed to have a second-trimester abortion at the facility in 2001
The staff said C.H. had a bad attitude and ordered her to leave the facility after the abortion, which apparently failed. She later gave birth at the Orlando Regional Medical Center to a girl with cerebral palsy and other disabilities.
Her attorney argued that, had C.H. been permitted to stay at the abortion center, the baby would have been born alive there.
