In a disappointing ruling on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an abortion clinic regulation law in Texas and jeopardized the future of similar laws in Pennsylvania and dozens of other states.
Just hours after the Supreme Court announcement, a pro-abortion Pennsylvania legislator announced his plans to try to repeal the Pennsylvania regulations, according to Lancaster Online. State Sen. Daylin Leach, D-Montgomery, said he plans to introduce a bill in the “near future” to repeal the 2011 state abortion clinic regulations.
Similar to the now-overturned Texas law, the Pennsylvania law requires abortion facilities to meet the same basic health and safety standards that other outpatient surgical facilities do. It also requires annual and unannounced state inspections of abortion facilities. The regulations were based on grand jury recommendations in the gruesome Kermit Gosnell abortion case in Philadelphia.
The “house of horrors” abortion case is what prompted states across the country to pass abortion facility regulations. Prosecutors in the case said Gosnell got away with his shoddy, murderous abortion practice for decades because of the lack of government oversight. According to authorities investigating the case, hair and nail salons were subject to greater scrutiny than abortion clinics in Pennsylvania.
Even some Pennsylvania politicians who identify as pro-choice supported the 2011 regulations because they saw the need to protect women and babies from such atrocities.
But Planned Parenthood, which openly fought against the regulations in Pennsylvania and Texas, celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Texas law.
“Women deserve access to health care without barriers or political roadblocks — and the Supreme Court just upheld that basic right,” said Sari Stevens, executive director of Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates. Stevens’ abortion group has endorsed Leach several times, including during his re-election campaign this spring.
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The Women’s Law Project, another pro-abortion group in Pennsylvania, claimed the regulations are unnecessary because Gosnell was a rogue abortion provider.
“Delaying or denying ready access to safe, affordable abortion services as a result of medically-unnecessary governmental regulation is dangerous precisely because it creates the very environment in which unscrupulous criminals like Kermit Gosnell can operate,” the group said in a statement to the newspaper.
Gosnell is not an outlying, though. The Texas law resulted in more than half of its abortion facilities closing because they could not or would not meet the basic health and safety regulations. In Pennsylvania, several abortion facilities also closed because they could not ensure adequate protection for women.
LifeNews also has reported other horrific abortion clinic cases similar to Gosnell’s in Texas, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia and numerous other states.
Investigators discovered filthy conditions inside Gosnell’s Philadelphia abortion facility, including blood and urine stains and unsanitary medical equipment that some women contracted venereal diseases from.
During court trials, Gosnell’s staff admitted that women often gave birth to late-term babies alive and then they killed the babies by snipping the backs of their necks with scissors. Court documents revealed how Gosnell allowed a 15-year-old to perform complex medical procedures, putting patients’ lives at risk.
Part of the new regulations that require things such as wider hallways and larger doorways came in direct response to the tragic death of one of Gosnell’s patients, an immigrant woman named Karnamaya Mongar.
According to authorities, Mongar died on November 20, 2009, after receiving shoddy care at the abortion facility, including an overdose of anesthetics. According to the grand jury report:
[T]here might have been some slim hope of reviving Mrs. Mongar. The paramedics were able to generate a weak pulse. But, because of the cluttered hallways and the padlocked emergency door, it took them over twenty minutes just to find a way to get her out of the building.
She wasn’t the only one. When Gosnell’s clinic was raided three months later:
Ambulances were summoned to pick up the waiting patients, but… emergency personnel… discovered they could not maneuver stretchers through the building’s narrow hallways to reach the patients….
Access from procedure rooms to the outside by wheelchair or stretcher was impossible, as was evident the night Karnamaya Mongar died….
Clinics must have doors, elevators, and other passages adequate to allow stretcher-borne patients to be carried to a street-level exit. Gosnell’s clinic, with its narrow, twisted passageways, could not accommodate a stretcher at all.
Gosnell currently is serving three consecutive life sentences in prison for murdering three newborn babies, contributing to Mongar’s death and committing hundreds of other crimes inside his filthy “house of horrors” abortion clinic.
