(Sarah Terzo – Substack) Two abortion businesses in Montana filed a legal challenge against a law requiring abortion facilities to be licensed and meet certain health and safety standards. The two facilities, one of which has a malpractice lawsuit against it (which I’ll write about in my next article), are All Families Healthcare and Blue Mountain Clinic.
The two facilities sought to extend an injunction against the law while the lawsuit they filed continues to work its way through the courts. Unfortunately, a District Court judge sided with the abortion clinics and blocked the law.
The injunction will remain in place until the lawsuit is resolved. The law will go into effect only if the clinics ultimately lose the lawsuit. Montana State Senator Theresa Manzella, who supports the bill, said:
Ever since I’ve been involved with the legislature, the opposition has referred to abortions as healthcare. So that’s what this bill does. It aligns abortion clinics with healthcare facilities. That simply makes sense in my mind.
Provisions of the Law
First, it stipulates that the health department must inspect abortion facilities once a year. If there is a complaint against an abortion business, it can be inspected in response to the complaint.
The facility would have to disclose to the state if its owner, one of its abortionists, or any other staff member has previously worked for an abortion facility that was shut down because of violations of patient health and safety.
Abortion facilities would also have to report if any of their employees has a previous felony conviction.
In addition, the Board of Health could set requirements on:
· sanitation standards;
· staff qualifications;
· necessary emergency equipment;
· providing emergency care;
· monitoring patients after the administration of anesthesia;
· providing follow-up care for patient complications;
· quality assurance;
· infection control;
· the architecture or layout of an abortion clinic (such as making sure hallways are wide enough to allow stretchers for injured patients).
The facility must also provide patients with a hotline telephone number to assist women who are coerced into an abortion or who are victims of sex trafficking, and staff members would need to undergo annual training by law enforcement on how to identify and help patients who were victims of sex trafficking.
One would think these would be reasonable regulations that any healthcare facility doing surgery should follow.
A Pro-Abortion Judge on Causing “Harm”
The law even allows facilities that only commit first-trimester abortions to apply for waivers to bypass some of the restrictions.
Yet Judge Christopher Abbott said the licensing requirements somehow “violate patients’ rights to equal protection.”
He emphasized the “harm” the law would cause if it were to be enforced, and how it would inflict a “constitutional injury on providers and their patients.”
It’s hard to understand how having the state of Montana inspect clinics and making sure clinics adhere to basic standards on cleanliness, safety, and infection control would “inflict injury” on abortion patients.
And how is helping women escape sex trafficking “harming” them?
The Alleged Safety of Abortions
Abbott went on to say, “Abortion has a similar or lower risk than vasectomy, an outpatient procedure commonly performed in a doctor’s office.”
However, we have no way of knowing this, because the vast majority of states don’t require reporting of complications, the CDC doesn’t track them, and even in states that do include statistics on complications in their annual reports (which is a minority), they rely solely on complications that are voluntarily reported by the abortion providers themselves. There isn’t much incentive for abortionists to do this.
So there are few records or statistics, and those we have are unreliable. Therefore, we don’t know how many people are injured in abortion facilities each year. We have no way of knowing how common botched abortions are.
Abbott’s decision further claimed that the risks of complications from abortion pills “are similar to the risks for aspirin or antibiotics or Viagra.”
This is completely untrue. National Right to Life addressed this claim earlier this year. Live Action News also discussed a study by pro-abortion researchers which found that 6% of women who took the abortion pill ended up in the emergency room or urgent care with complications.
This is a far higher complication rate than taking an aspirin. And it only includes women who went to the emergency room— not those who followed up with their own doctors or even went back to the clinic.
Abortion Clinics vs. Tattoo Parlors
In Montana, tattoo parlors are required to be inspected once a year. They, along with places that conduct ear piercings, are judged on 35 items related to cleanliness, such as hand washing hygiene and sterilization of equipment.
Yet tattoo parlors in Montana haven’t gotten together to sue the state over the inspections and requirements, stating that they are “harmful” to their businesses and those getting tattoos.
Instead, they accept the state oversight as a reasonable effort to keep their patrons safe.
Pro-Abortion Propaganda
The two abortion facilities and their lawyers are getting pro-choice people to rally around them by claiming that if the bill goes into effect, they will have to shut down.
It’s hard to see why this would be the case unless conditions in the facilities are so heinous that they are incapable of following even the most basic safety standards.
For example, attorneys for the facilities wrote:
All Families and Blue Mountain do not and cannot meet certain requirements in the [rules] scheme… [I]mpending enforcement of the scheme would end or significantly curtail access to abortion and violate the Montana Constitution.
If being inspected once a year would mean a clinic doing surgery would have to close its doors, that would be a major red flag. But none of the pro-abortion supporters of these facilities seem to be aware of what the clinics are actually saying….
Read entire article at Sarah Terzo’s Substack.
Editor’s Note: This article was published at Sarah Terzo’s Substack and is reprinted here with permission.
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