We’ve written numerous times about California’s AB 154 which pro-abortion Gov. Jerry Brown has not yet signed into law. A genuinely awful idea, under it physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and nurse midwives will perform first-trimester aspiration abortions. (Unlike the vague suggestion in a supportive Los Angeles Times editorial, these non-physicians already are allowed to administer chemical abortifacients.)
A major part of the rationale is that there is a shortage of abortionists. But when Carol Hogan, director of pastoral projects and communications for the California Catholic Conference , drily observes that in truth California “does not have” an access problem, she is merely stating the facts.
California has a right to “privacy” in its Constitution, which pro-abortionists have used to expand their agenda and thwart pro-life attempts to rein abortion in.
And in a very supportive article written by Nina Martin for ProPublica (“California poised to broaden access to abortions”), we learn
“As a result, unlike the vast majority of other states, California pays for abortions for low-income women and lets teenage girls end their pregnancies without having to tell their parents first. It has about 500 providers scattered throughout the state. These providers accounted for 18 percent of all the abortions performed in the U.S. in 2008, the Guttmacher Institute says.”
But California is big, Martin tells us, so there’s never enough “providers,” especially in rural areas.
We’ve also explained the other huge flaws in the law and the role of the University of California-San Francisco is greasing the skids for the law with a bogus study. While not sharing our negative view of USCF’s role, Martin concedes
“Indeed, AB 154 would have gone nowhere but for a recent study out of the University of California–San Francisco that ranks as one of the largest examinations of abortion complication rates ever conducted.’
It’s really one of those “you can’t make this stuff up.” In explaining how the study came to be, Martin tells us that (supposedly) even pro-abortionists were reluctant to allow non-physicians to perform first-trimester abortions. Martin writes
“Enter Tracy Weitz, an associate professor in the ob/gyn department at UCSF. A social scientist by training, she heads the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health project at the school’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, one of the very few programs in the U.S. doing clinical research on abortion and contraception.
“Weitz and her team discovered a little-known mechanism in California law that lets health care professionals conduct pilot projects—for example, studying whether dental hygienists can be trained to safely fill cavities. After a two-year approval process, the researchers quietly embarked on a study the likes of which has never been done in this country.”
Fill cavities, abort babies, what’s the diff? Next thing you know there’s a pilot project and after five years (surprise, surprise) “researchers found very little difference in the rate of complications between first-trimester vacuum aspirations performed by experienced doctors and those done by skilled non-physicians.” (As I say, that’s nonsense. See “California bill advances to allow non-physicians to perform certain first-trimester abortion”)
What we haven’t talked about is another law which has the goal of making it easier for abortion clinic to do what they want without those pesky inspectors. (It was the absence of inspection that allowed abortionist Kermit Gosnell to murder unborn babies and maim women for 17 years.)
According to Martin, another bill, AB 980, “would hold abortion clinics to the same building standards as other primary care facilities, instead of the stricter rules that some cities and counties would like to impose.”
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
Those “stricter rules” are intended to make abortion clinics safer, but they are unneeded, according to abortion advocates. Abortion is so, so very safe.
Martin is quite right when she contrasts the passage of protective laws elsewhere with California, where the state
“is going in the opposite direction, with two bills that could lead to the one of the biggest expansions of access to abortion in the United States since the FDA approved mifepristone, aka the abortion pill, in 2000.”
For the one-hundred thousandth time, we are reminded, elections have consequences!
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in his National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
