California Governor Jerry Brown has signed into law legislation to allow nurses to do abortions.Dave Andrusko of National Right to Life has more:
Under AB 154 (authored by California Assembly member Toni Atkins), physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and nurse midwives will perform first-trimester aspiration abortions. (These non-physicians already are allowed to administer chemical abortifacients.) The rationale, as always, is that there is not enough “access” to abortion. The cover story is that first-trimester abortion is so safe practically anyone can perform one.
“This bill is not about helping women, it is specifically designed to trivialize what an abortion is, and its risks,” said Anissa Smith, spokeswoman for the California Pro-Life Council, NRLC’s state affiliate “It is political payoff to a government-sponsored industry that preys on minors without parent knowledge or consent. Reducing the medical standards for abortion, both in the personnel and the sanitary conditions required, defies logic for those who say they care about women.”
Smith noted that the California Business and Professions Code prohibits abortions being done on animals unless the abortionist is a trained and certified veterinary surgeon. “As of today, a mother dog will have more dignity in the eyes of California law than a vulnerable young mother talked into an abortion by a Planned Parenthood staffer,” Smith said, adding, “Gov. Brown’s sponsorship and unquestioning support of the abortion industry is tragic.”
Assembly member Kristin Olsen said that the real issue was the health of women.
“I believe this is an ill-advised proposal that will actually lower the standard of care for women,” Olsen said. “For women, like all of us women who serve here in the Legislature. There’s no question performing an abortion can produce a host of complications for women, hemorrhaging, uterine perforation, and damage to pelvic organs. No matter where you stand on the issue of abortion, all of us should be concerned about the practical effects of allowing non-doctors to perform the procedure.”
Asked Assembly member Shannon Grove, “Why are we allowing this to be performed by anyone other than a surgeon?”
From the very beginning the constant mantra of supporters—echoed uncritically by the media—was that California needed to be the lone exception to the wave of states passing a tide of laws “restricting” abortion. This bizarre appeal to an inverted sense of vanity was touted as reason enough to pass the laws.
But the notion that there were not enough abortions in California runs up against the grim truth that while California makes up 12% of the nation’s population, 29% of all abortions already take place here.
AB 154 simply re-defines aspiration abortions as “non-surgical,” according to Margaret A. Bengs in an op-ed for the Daily News. Democratic Assemblyman Richard Pan’s companion measure—AB 980— “would exempt clinics performing these ‘nonsurgical’ abortions from the more stringent building code standards for surgery,” Bengs wrote.
Our two most recent posts are “Fill cavities, abort babies, what’s the difference?” and “California bill advances to allow non-physicians to perform certain first-trimester abortion.”
The former post is particularly helpful. It explains in detail the role of the University of California-San Francisco greased the skids for the law with a bogus study.
