The intersection between abortion law and constitutional law makes strange bedfellows. I discuss a new report with One America News Network’s Liz Wheeler.
Transcript:
Liz Wheeler
Our free and equal segment tonight, pro-abortion feminists like to tell us that abortion is safe. That dismembering the child growing inside the mother somehow poses no danger at all to women. Birth itself is more dangerous, they say. Well, we’ve seen this hypocrisy exposed after the Supreme Court rejected two Texas abortion laws that sought to increase the safety standards of abortion procedures and facilities. Both laws were determined to place an unconstitutional burden on women seeking abortions. Pro-abortion advocates claim there wasn’t enough evidence to support the alleged dangers in the abortion clinics. Well, now, we have proof. Americans United for Life compiled a list of over 1,400 confirmed health and safety violations from abortion clinics in 32 different states between 2008 and 2016.
With me now to break it down, Republican strategist, Gayle Trotter. Gayle, good to see you.
Gayle Trotter
Great to be with you, Liz.
LW
Gayle, this report is quite stunning, 1,400 health and safety violations in the space of eight years at abortion clinics. Tell me about this report.
GT
Right. Well, most people remember Dr. Kermit Gosnell in the charnel house that he ran that preyed on minority women and women in very difficult situations. At that time, when that was national news, you had pro-abortion advocates out advancing the opinion to the American public that Dr. Gosnell’s abortion mill was not representative of abortion providers across the country and that his abortion clinic was aberrational. But now we have this new report out that shows over 1,400 violations over an eight-year period of hundreds of abortion providers across the country. There are 39 Planned Parenthood clinics across the country that have had health and safety violations. Very serious health and safety violations. So this report puts out there the evidence that contradicts the pro-abortion advocates’ argument that abortion providers are all concerned about the safety and the health of women.
LW
Right. I think it’s worth noting, too, that these 1,400 health and safety violations, they’re what this report considers to be horrific. These are not run-of-the-mill, every day oversights. These are horrific abortion clinic conditions and they include failure to maintain sanitary conditions. I don’t even want to imagine what some of this is. That’s 130 clinics in 22 different states. Other failures include ensuring staff are trained. They don’t have properly trained staff in 82 clinics in 14 states. There is expired medication and expired medical supplies at 77 different clinics in 17 states. They failed to monitor the vital signs of the women who they’re performing abortions on in 30 clinics in 10 different states. Gayle, it is widespread. This is not an isolated incident. There is absolutely no way that pro-abortion advocates can argue that it was a one-time case. That this was because of restrictions placed by pro-life legislators in Congress. In some of these cases, women are actually dying.
GT
Right. It is widespread and the report notes that they don’t even have all the information. Just in their review of documents, they were able to find over 1,400 violations, but a lot of states don’t have the reporting. A lot of the clinics are not being investigated. That’s how Dr. Gosnell was able to get away with the terrible things that he did in his clinic, because they were not investigating it properly. If you remember the seminal case on abortion, Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court said that states could enact reasonable restrictions on abortion for the health and safety of women and yet we see that through the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, whenever states come forward with restrictions on abortion, they’re frequently struck down. Just like the ones that you referred to at the beginning of this discussion, the Texas laws that were recently struck down, five justices to three justices, aim to make abortion providers more like medical facilities and less like Dr. Gosnell’s charnel house. Yet the Supreme Court took it upon itself to strike down these laws that were passed by representatives of the State of Texas to promote the health of their citizens.
LW
Right. I don’t know what more proof the Supreme Court could need than a report like this, because they said the reason that they struck down these Texas laws was because they didn’t have proof that these dangers existed. They’re right here. They’re in front of us. Like you said at the beginning, Planned Parenthood themselves, their clinics were involved; 39 of their clinics in 15 different states made this list. Gayle, they were in the top 10 of the most egregious violations here. There was one clinic in Alabama, in Birmingham I think it was, who had their license suspended, because employees were caught selling abortion-inducing drugs in the parking lots.
GT
Which is just outrageous. It’s just outrageous. So it just shows when the Supreme Court decides to ignore the letter of the Constitution and not to apply the same type of principles to abortion law that they applied to all other types of law. Then they become a policy-making body instead of an arbiter of justice under the Constitution and it just shows how far that this Supreme Court is willing to go to bend the rule of law to accommodate abortion at all costs, at all ends, and to the absolute extreme. The abortion regime has shown that not only is it problematic for the health of women, but it also has negative impacts on the rule of law generally.
LW
Right. It’s not strict interpretation of the Constitution as is the role of the Justices on the Supreme Court; it’s judicial activism. It just seems to me that the hypocrisy is clear at this point that pro-abortion advocates who claim to champion women’s health; they want to take care of women, make sure that they are safe and healthy, at the same time subjecting them to these unsafe conditions. You can’t justify both. You can’t have it both ways. You can have one or the other. These unsafe conditions are exactly what they’re arguing will happen if pro-life laws, if abortion is restricted. It’s already happening. And where is it happening? In the abortion clinics themselves. Gayle, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about this. I really appreciate it.
