LeRoy Carhart, the practitioner who does late abortions and has begun doing them in Maryland after a new Nebraska law forced him to do the abortions elsewhere, has not closed his Nebraska abortion center.
In a news story today, the web site Politico followed the numerous stories LifeNews.com has presented over the last several months about how the Nebraska fetal pain law forced Carhart to stop doing abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Although Carhart has been hired by a Germantown, Maryland abortion business to do abortions there, the Abortion and Contraception Clinic he runs in Bellevue, Nebraska continues to do abortions.
Politico reported today that the “law has caused Carhart to close his Omaha practice and reopen it in Iowa and Maryland” and that “Carhart, chased out of Nebraska by its ban on late-term abortion, has begun practicing in Council Bluffs, Iowa.”
LifeNews.com contacted two pro-life advocates who have closely monitored the man who has been the subject of two Supreme Court cases over partial-birth abortions and they say Carhart’s abortion center continues. They say the details of the news story are not correct.
“It remains to be seen how much ‘business’ he will have in Council Bluffs, across the river from Nebraska, as he still has not opened a facility there,” Julie Schmit-Albin, the director of Nebraska Right to Life, told LifeNews.com.
In fact, the Council Bluffs city council already voted to make one parcel of land it recently sold abortion-free and it will look into other ways to prevent or delay Carhart opening up shop in the eastern Omaha suburb.
Troy Newman, of Operation Rescue, a national pro-life group dedicated to holding the abortion industry accountable, tells LifeNews.com the Nebraska facility is definitely open but has scaled back abortions to every other weekend.
“He has no other doctors to work for him and he is gone every week Monday-Friday in Maryland and Indiana,” Newman said of Carhart.
While Carhart’s abortion center in Bellevue has not closed, Newman says Carhart is losing his abortion clientele to the Planned Parenthood abortion business, which operates one abortion center in Omaha and recently opened a new one.
“They are not closed but Planned Parenthood is putting major pressure on them and stealing the abortion business in the area,” he said.
Schmit-Albin says she believes Carhart is leaving his Bellevue abortion center open to “save face” with the public after the new fetal pain law essentially put him out of business.
“To completely close Bellevue would reveal what we have suspected for some time, that the large bulk of Carhart’s ‘business’ is later abortions, beyond 20 weeks,” she said. “We said for years that Carhart couldn’t possibly be doing late abortions in Wichita and then coming back to Nebraska and staying largely within the bounds of our outdated post-viability law.”
“Since the law had no teeth, we knew Carhart could pretty much do abortions at any gestation in Nebraska. That has been borne out by the passage of LB 1103,” she explained. “We anticipate much less activity in Bellevue, if any, and a major increase in Carhart flying to Maryland and Indiana.”
