The abortion business that employed Kermit Gosnell, the horrifying abortion practitioner facing charges of murder in the deaths of a woman from a botched abortion and seven babies he killed via abortion-infanticides, may have falsified records to Delaware officials.
The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion agency that colleges abortion records and data, has disclosed that a Delaware abortion center has admitted to greatly underreporting the number of abortions it does each year — including in statistics that it provided to Delaware’s Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS).
One pro-life advocate says the evidence she’s gathered points to the scandal-plagued Atlantic Women’s Medical Services, recently linked to indicted abortionist Kermit Gosnell and also recently suspended by a national trade group for abortion businesses.
The discrepancy comes as DHSS, in its “Delaware Vital Statistics Annual Report 2008″ lists Delaware’s total number of abortions at 4,603. That’s 65 percent less than the 7,070 abortions Guttmacher says were done in Delaware in the same year.
In an attempt to discover the reason for the enormous discrepancy, Ellen Barrosse, president of the Delaware-based pro-life group A Rose and a Prayer, spoke with Rachel Jones, Senior Research Associate for the Guttmacher Institute. Jones confirmed her researchers received data from every abortion business in Delaware. Jones revealed that, for 2007 and 2008, one abortion center supplied numbers substantially higher than the number it had given in previous years.
“When asked to explain the sudden and dramatic increase, the provider indicated that it had not been reporting all the abortions done at the facility, and that the actual number of abortions had not increased at all,” Barrosse said. “That’s an additional 2,467 abortions per year, or over 200 additional abortions per month.”
Jones declined to identify the abortion business, which makes Barrosse curious.
“The fact that abortions procured by Delaware residents increased by only 530, while abortions procured by out-of-state residents increased by almost 2,000, suggests that the provider that falsified its records is in New Castle County, which is nearer to large population centers in other states. There are only two providers in New Castle County—Planned Parenthood of Delaware and Atlantic Women’s Medical Services,” she said. “Just across the state line from Pennsylvania, which requires that minors receive parental consent for abortions, Delaware has long officially reported out-of-state abortions at approximately 25% of the total for the state. The new numbers provided by Guttmacher indicate that 46%—almost half—of all abortions done in Delaware are performed on out-of-state women—many of whom may be minors evading parental consent laws in their home states.”
“Unfortunately, because the Guttmacher statistics for Delaware do not include age data and because the state data are clearly flawed, we do not know how many of those who seek abortions here are young girls trying to avoid their parents’ involvement,” she added.
Jones told Barrosse that a female staff member of DHSS spoke to her to try to uncover the reason for the large discrepancy between Guttmacher’s numbers and DHSS’s. Jones said she provided the same information to the caller as she did to Barrosse but DHSS has yet to update its numbers to reflect the information it received.
Barrossee said she is asking Attorney General Beau Biden to immediately investigate what appears to be a clear case of providing false information to a state agency by an abortion provider.
Barrosse stated that “Attorney General Biden needs to use his subpoena power to find out why DHSS was provided with materially false and misleading information and whether this was done to obscure from the General Assembly and the community at large what has been going on in New Castle County’s abortion clinics.”
“For too long abortion providers have been allowed to practice without regulation or safeguards, and it now appears that the scope of their operations has been hidden by false reports to government authorities, as well. Delawareans need to know the whole truth behind our state’s abortion industry,” she said.
The concerns are doubled when further evidence provided by another group is considered.
James Haley Jr., an attorney with Delaware Right to Life, previously said there is “probable cause” in the wide-ranging grand jury report highlighting the problems at Gosnell’s Pennsylvania abortion center that warranted close scrutiny in Delaware.
Haley noted Gosnell apparently defrauded a Delaware-based group that funds abortions for poor women by changing the address of Pennsylvania residents getting abortions to Delaware locations. That could have inflated the numbers Atlantic reported to Guttmacher — both in terms of the total number of abortions and the number of out-of-state women supposedly getting abortions in Delaware but actually getting them in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
