Update 3/23/23: Whole Women’s Health officially opened its new Albuquerque facility on Thursday, March 23. Per KUNM, the property’s Lomas Blvd. NW location is just a short drive from the airport, as the abortion business hopes to target women traveling to take advantage of the state’s lenient abortion laws. The facility is currently offering abortions up to 18 weeks gestation, though it hopes to expand to offer even later-term 24-week abortions in the future.
12/12/22: An abortion chain with an abysmal history of health and safety violations is expanding to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
According to a Facebook post from the pro-life group Abortion on Trial (AOT), Stirrups, LLC – better known as Whole Woman’s Health – intends to open a new abortion facility in the city of Albuquerque. AOT’s attorney obtained a copy of the abortion company’s real estate contract and posted it to Facebook. The contract shows it has entered into an agreement to acquire the property at 718 Lomas Blvd NW, valued at $760,000, for which the abortion business has agreed to a down payment of $190,000.
The expansion of abortion in Albuquerque comes as some cities in the southeast of New Mexico have enacted, or are considering adopting, local ordinances effectively protecting all preborn lives — an initiative in line with a growing number of municipalities throughout the nation. The city of Hobbs (pop. 40,508) – the seventh largest in the state – became one of the country’s most recent cities to enact a measure that will effectively make the city an abortion-free community. The city of Clovis had been considering a similar ordinance, but for now, that measure appears to have been halted, according to AOT.
Whole Woman’s Health, founded in 2003, has operated abortion facilities in several states, and has a history of failing basic health inspections and endangering women. In 2016, Live Action News compiled a list of Whole Woman’s Health’s most egregious health and safety violations dating back to 2007 and spanning dozens of serious problems across multiple facilities.
As Live Action News reported again in 2019, the abortion chain continued to have serious problems, including:
- failure to disinfect and sterilize instruments between patients
- expired medical supplies on emergency carts
- failure to provide a sanitary environment
- suction machines with rusty spots likely to cause infections
- failure to properly train staff responsible for the sterilization of critical surgical instruments
- failure to certify patient care personnel in basic life support.
Yet the organization’s own dangerous shortcomings do not seem to concern Whole Woman’s Health’s leadership, which instead is more focused on attacking pro-lifers and expressing outrage for developments like the purchase of one of its former facilities by a pro-life pregnancy resource center in the Rio Grande Valley. The abortion chain – which claims to want women “to live their best lives” – has been repeatedly cited at multiple locations for failing to schedule required follow-up appointments and failing to make sufficient efforts to contact patients who missed follow-up appointments.
According to the group’s website, Abortion on Trial describes itself as “a group of professionals providing women with resources after abortion injury while simultaneously exposing abortion providers through court case evidence.” Holding the conviction that “women deserve better than the reproductive injustice so frequently seen today,” the group seeks “to hold abortion providers accountable to America’s existing laws and standards.”
