Remember just a decade or so ago when the mantra of the abortion industry was that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare?” It was even in the Democrat Party platform for a while.
It seemed part of an effort to brand abortionists like Planned Parenthood as reluctant facilitators of a necessary evil instead of owner/operators of a thriving billion dollar industry.
Those days are gone. Planned Parenthood is now the nation’s largest abortion provider, performing nearly 900 abortions per day , or just over 37 an hour—that’s an abortion every 95 seconds. Which means Planned Parenthood carries out 330,000 of the 1.2 million abortions in America annually.
Suffice it to say, a Planned Parenthood abortion every 95 seconds is not “rare.” And, as illustrated by Planned Parenthood’s resistance to even basic health inspections and regulation in Virginia, any pretense of concern about real safety is also out the window. All that matters to Planned Parenthood is that abortion be unrestricted, nevermind safety and rarity.
For example, last year the Board of Health issued emergency regulations, over the strenuous objection of Virginia Planned Parenthood, requiring health inspections of Virginia abortion clinics for the first time in two decades. As a result, initial announced inspections of abortion clinics were performed this year and the reports have been obtained by the Virginia Family Foundation via a Freedom of Information request.
As Victoria Cobb, President of VFF put it, “Some of this is just horrific.”
The Commissioner of Health reported that every one of the nine abortion clinics inspected had some deficiency.
These included the remains of unborn children and blood frozen to the bottom of freezers, sponges that were used to clean surgical implements for a full week without being changed—yes, the same sponge was used over and over and over for a week—and abortion clinic staff that admitted not knowing which instruments were clean and which were dirty. And the evidence keeps growing, 80 violations in just 9 clinics.
Again, these were not random inspections. The abortion clinics knew the inspectors were coming.
Yet on Friday, September 14, these same Virginia abortionists will be out in force in Richmond to try to stop the Board of Health from issuing final health and safety regulations.
Alliance Defending Freedom has sent a letter to members of the Board of Health urging them to enact regulations to ensure the health and safety of Virginia abortion clinics.
Abortion clinics will never be safe for the unborn children whose lives they take with alarming frequency. But shouldn’t they at least be safe for the women?
LifeNews Note: Casey Mattox is an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom.
