Abortionists have long bemoaned their lack of respect within the medical community. One former abortionist wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post arguing that abortion needs to be embedded more into mainstream medicine — but she doesn’t acknowledge how the abortion industry fights the same regulations legitimate medical practitioners are held to.
Carole Joffe, author of the Washington Post piece, is currently a professor at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), a program within UCSF’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, which trains abortionists. She has also served on the board of the National Abortion Federation, with a program for the Abortion Care Network (a membership organization of independent abortionists), on the Advisory Board for Planned Parenthood of New York’s Clinician Training Initiatives, and as a member of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals (ARHP).
Clearly, this is not an unbiased outsider discussing a mere medical issue.
Abortionists not respected by medical community
Joffe complained that abortionists are, by and large, separate from the medical mainstream. “Nearly 50 years after legalization nationwide, the majority of obstetrician gynecologists and primary-care doctors do not provide abortions — even though 1 out of 4 American women will have an abortion in her lifetime,” she wrote, adding, “Only 4 percent of abortions take place in a hospital and only 1 percent of abortions take place in private doctors’ offices. The remaining 95 percent occur in free-standing clinics, which offer excellent care, but are largely isolated from other medical institutions.”
According to Joffe, even OB/GYNs who otherwise support abortion look down their noses at abortionists. “One third-generation OB/GYN told me, ‘In my family, the worst thing that could be said about anybody was that he was an abortionist.’ His relatives did not object morally to abortion, but rather they held the assumption that illegal abortion doctors were ‘losers,'” she wrote. “Even after Roe, a physician who supported freedom of choice, commenting on the small number of doctors doing abortions in New York City, remarked: ‘The rest of the staff regards these doctors with esteem not markedly higher than that previously reserved for the back street abortionist.'”
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Joffe has an abundance of thoughts about how wrong she thinks the medical community is for not embracing abortionists, but little to say about abortionists’ own failings, not withstanding the fact that unlike the rest of the medical community, they deliberately end human lives instead of saving them.
Fighting health regulations while claiming to provide “health care”
Time after time, the abortion industry fights against any safety regulations whatsoever, including those that other ambulatory surgical centers — health care facilities that provide same-day, outpatient surgeries — are held to. Working elevators and hallways wide enough to fit a gurney should not be controversial — but to the abortion industry, these are an attack on women’s reproductive freedom.
Yet in the real world, these issues have dangerous repercussions when women are injured during an abortion. At Preterm abortion facility in Ohio, a woman suffered a perforated uterus last year, and EMTs weren’t able to quickly and easily get the injured woman out of the facility. Because their elevator was defective, EMTs had to carry a collapsible wheelchair up to the third floor, carry the woman down three flights of stairs, and then finally transfer her to a gurney. In a serious emergency, the extra time this takes can mean the difference between life and death, as we tragically saw with Karnamaya Mongar.
Mongar died at the hands of abortionist and serial killer Kermit Gosnell. His unlicensed, untrained staffers gave her a dose of Demerol, and once she stopped breathing, Gosnell originally attempted CPR. He didn’t call 911, however, until after he rearranged her body to make it appear that she had undergone a safe, routine abortion procedure. When paramedics finally got there, they still were able to find a weak pulse, but it took so long to get her through the narrow, cluttered hallways and into the ambulance that they lost precious time, and Mongar died.
A similar situation has also happened numerous times at Planned Parenthood’s Manhattan facility, where numerous women have been injured. There, the elevator is too small to put a gurney into, again putting women at risk. Another Preterm patient, Lakisha Wilson, died after going into cardiac arrest after an abortion. Emergency responders could not save her because the elevator wasn’t working; this meant they couldn’t reach her in time, and once they finally did, they couldn’t put her on a gurney and intubate her.
The abortion industry constantly fights common-sense standards to which legitimate medical clinics are held, but then demands to be taken seriously as legitimate medical providers. But the reality is, they can’t have it both ways. Abortion facilities regularly fail inspections and are found in filthy, decrepit conditions, something that would never be acceptable if they weren’t abortion facilities. Doctors who don’t meet the standards and regulations of local licensing organizations are punished; with abortionists, often little is done.
Because abortionists are not held to the same standards to which legitimate doctors are held, and they take human lives for a living instead of attempting to save them, abortionists will continue to be viewed as the “lowest of the low.”
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