The Accurate Title of Senator Blumenthal’s Radical Pro-Abortion Bill: The Kermit Gosnell Enabling Act of 2014
Rarely have I seen an abortion bill more monstrous, more extreme, than fake Vietnam veteran Senator Richard Blumenthal’s Orwellian-titled “Women’s Health Protection Act of 2013.” Thomas Messner at the Charlotte Lozier Institute has done an admirable job breaking down the bill’s deficiencies, and I don’t want to repeat his work, but it’s important to focus on a few, key provisions.
Make no mistake, this bill would radically expand federal power over abortion regulations and radically harm women’s health — all for the sake of killing more children.
The bill would strike down any state laws that contain the following requirements:
A requirement or limitation concerning the physical plant, equipment, staffing, or hospital transfer arrangements of facilities where abortions are performed, or the credentials or hospital privileges or status of personnel at such facilities, that is not imposed on facilities or the personnel of facilities where medically comparable procedures are performed.
And:
A limitation on an abortion provider’s ability to delegate tasks, other than a limitation generally applicable to providers of medically comparable procedures.
And:
A limitation on an abortion provider’s ability to provide abortion services via telemedicine, other than a limitation generally applicable to the provision of medical services via telemedicine.
Adding those provisions together, the fake Vietnam veteran Blumenthal bill would create a federal statutory right to operate an abortion mill without the presence of qualified physicians with appropriate hospital admitting privileges, without the kinds of facilities necessary to render proper emergency aid to women in distress, and would even allow abortions performed by, say, nurse practitioners with nominal supervision via Skype. Kermit Gosnell could make some serious coin under this system.
The bill just gets worse and worse. Let’s take its definition of viability:
The term “viability” means the point in a pregnancy at which, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care professional, based on the particular facts of the case before her or him, there is a reasonable likelihood of sustained fetal survival outside the uterus with or without artificial support.
Translation: Viability is in the eye of the beholder, with the subjective judgment even of a non-doctor (who has a direct financial interest in terminating the pregnancy) trumping all other considerations.
Lest anyone doubt this bill’s absolute pro-abortion priorities, it helpfully explains:
Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize any government to interfere with a woman’s ability to terminate her pregnancy, to diminish or in any way negatively affect a woman’s constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy, or to displace any other remedy for violations of the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.
This is a bill designed to increase the number of abortions and enrich the abortion industry. It has no other realistic purpose or object. It would leave hair salons and tattoo parlors subject to more regulation than abortion mills. If it passes, more babies will die and more women will die, and Planned Parenthood and the legislative left will laugh all the way to the bank.
It is a moral indictment of the Left that it would proudly support this bill. May their descendants one day look back in shame at their support for such monstrous injustice. And may our pro-life legislators be as proudly and aggressively for life as fake Vietnam veteran Blumenthal and his allies are proudly and aggressively for death.