Last year, the Fifth Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld a law requiring admitting privileges for the state’s abortion facilities. However, that ruling is still being challenged by the abortion industry, including Hope Medical Group in Shreveport.
Kathaleen Pittman, the facility director, spoke in an interview with NPR about the facility’s efforts to overturn the admitting privileges law. “The whole process of trying to obtain privileges is crazy,” she said. “It’s time-consuming. It could be a process of a few months to actually years. There are no guarantees.” Currently, there are two abortionists at the facility, but only one has been able to get privileges, and Pittman claims they have been trying for years to do so. “We have discovered that not all hospitals will just outright deny privileges,” she said. “They just won’t take any action, which is the same thing. But it’s not in writing. So what do you do?”
Yet while Pittman claims innocence, as if it’s an unjust system needlessly persecuting them, the reality isn’t quite that simple.
Hope Medical Group has been accused of engaging in criminal activity by the Louisiana Department of Justice. According to the Louisana Attorney General’s office, between 2013 and 2018, the facility committed at least 66 abortions on minor girls ages 11, 12, or 13 years old — indicating that these children were victims of rape, since they could not legally consent to sexual activity. Yet the facility had a disturbing pattern of not reporting the crimes.
Ultimately, the argument being made by Pittman and her fellow abortion defenders is that it is more important to have legal, unsafe abortion than it is to keep women safe. “There’s no constitutional right to an unsafe abortion in America,” Ben Clapper of Louisiana Right to Life told NPR. “And we think if ambulatory surgical centers have this set of rules when it comes to privileges, then abortion facilities should have the same set of rules. And if a physician can’t meet those rules, then the same practice should apply that they shouldn’t be able to operate in those arenas.”
Admitting privilege requirements are needed because of the abortion industry’s own unethical practices. As Secular Pro-Life explained, it’s because of the tendency of abortion facilities to hire “(literal) fly-by-night abortionists, who come into town for abortions, fly back to their homes out of state, and leave the local ER to deal with any complications that arise.” This is known as patient abandonment — but the abortion industry, as always, doesn’t want to be held to the same standards real health care providers are held to, all while trying to claim they are real health care providers. Women still die from abortions, even legal ones, and even more suffer awful complications. The least an abortion facility — which claims to care so much about women — can do is give them the ability to go somewhere safe after the deed is done.
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