While singing the praises of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Texas law that required abortion centers to be held to the same standard as other ambulatory surgical centers, abortion activists have been busy bemoaning the horrible state of abortion in Texas. The problem for them is that many of the abortion facilities in Texas closed; however, the pro-abortion extremists ignored the reasons why the clinics were forced to close. And for these extremists, for whom abortion is the most important thing ever, less abortion equals a tragedy of epic proportions.
The latest is an article written by Irin Carmon for NBC News, where Carmon discusses how more women in Texas are ostensibly having second-trimester abortions… and somehow, this is framed as a bad thing.
Citing research from Daniel Grossman, who worked on the debunked Texas self-abortion study, the article attempts to make the case that more women having second trimester abortions shows that the law, HB 2, needed to be overturned:
A preliminary review of statistics released by the Department of State Health Services in Texas shows that even as the total number of abortions dropped in 2014, the first full year the law was in effect, there was a 27 percent increase in abortions after 12 weeks, from 4,814 procedures in 2013 to 6,117 in 2014.
“Although second-trimester abortion is very safe, it is associated with a higher risk of complications compared to early abortion, and it’s more expensive for women,” said University of California San Francisco professor Daniel Grossman, who shared his analysis exclusively with NBC News. Grossman’s research, part of the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP), was repeatedly cited by the court’s majority in proclaiming two parts of Texas’ abortion law an unconstitutional “undue burden” on women.
… Grossman said the increase in later abortions jibed with prior TxPEP studies that showed that closing clinics forced women to wait longer to have an abortion. “In our research, we documented cases of women who were delayed into the second trimester because it took them time to find an open clinic or to arrange transportation to a more distant clinic, while others were delayed because of the long wait times to even get an appointment,” he said.
Here’s a question: why is this a problem? Oh sure, there’s a lot of faux-posturing about how terrible it is that women have to spend more money to get an abortion now, but it’s not like the abortion industry has ever cared about that. Abortion advocates have bragged about pushing women into debt so they could get abortions. They encourage women to rack up credit card bills or take out payday loans. Why is the cost suddenly now an issue? Because it fits into their narrative, of course. That’s why. In ordinary circumstances, abortion advocates would think nothing of women losing thousands of dollars so an abortionist could kill their preborn babies.
Further, abortion advocates frequently tout the safety of second-trimester abortions. You’ve likely heard the refrain that abortion is safer than childbirth. They fall all over themselves to convince women that abortion is, at any time, perfectly safe. When pro-lifers point out the risks of abortion, it’s dismissed as fearmongering. But yet again, here we have abortion advocates suddenly pretending to be worried about women’s safety when it suits their needs.
Interestingly, the article refuses to acknowledge the real reason abortion centers in Texas have been closing: Planned Parenthood. That’s right: the abortion industry darling itself is driving other, smaller, abortion facilities out of business. Planned Parenthood has been opening mega-clinics that can often see more than 17,000 patients in a year (the Houston mega-clinic aims to see over 30,000), versus around 5,000 a year for your average abortion center. The smaller facilities can’t compete, and they go out of business. So where is the outcry towards Planned Parenthood?
For the abortion facilities that didn’t get driven out of business by Planned Parenthood and yet still closed, it was for a far more nefarious reason: they refused to abide by health and safety standards. Whole Woman’s Health, the plaintiff in the suit that brought the Supreme Court decision, has been found to have a long history of health violations, including rusty spots on suction machines, infection control issues, and the potential for rodents to enter the facility. (This was from an inspection done in 2013.) Whole Woman’s Health is, in fact, the perfect example of why higher clinical standards are needed. But rather than meet these higher standards — and actually give women a safe, clean, and sanitary facility — these abortionists would rather shut their doors. And this is somehow considered to be pro-woman?
The simple fact of the matter is, abortion advocates are grasping at straws to come up with reasons to attack the now-overturned law in Texas. Doing so was bad for women, and now abortion activists are having to contort themselves into knots to justify themselves.
Where previously, second-trimester abortions were safe and no different from getting a first-trimester abortion, they’re now horrible tragedies that serve as an example of why HB 2 needed to be overturned. Where the abortion industry used to insist on safety for women undergoing abortions, safety now takes a backseat to getting as many abortions as possible.
The reality couldn’t be clearer now: for these pro-abortion extremists, there is nothing they won’t do or say to ensure that abortion is as widespread and common as possible.
