As General Assembly sessions go, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s recently completed legislative session went with little drama and much compromise. Both Republicans and Democrats worked alongside each other, making numerous compromises and not falling into anarchy like Wisconsin. Yet the hot-button moral issues did get some airtime. In late February, not long before senators and delegates left Richmond for home, a bill was passed that will affect Virginia’s abortion clinics. As reported by the Washington Post, the General Assembly decided that “clinics where most of the state's early-term abortions are performed should be regulated as hospitals instead of as doctors' offices.”
The end result could mean 17 of the Commonwealth’s 21 abortion clinics will have to close down because of the new standards.
This decision, a move which Virginia pro-choice activists have been fighting pretty much since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, is one that should have come a long time ago and should be considered in other states.
The abortion industry has always been an industry that operated with little to no accountability, even as abortions performed dramatically increased after Roe. This absence of accountability has meant abortion clinics could act little better than the very “back-alleys” pro-choicers warned about should abortion remain illegal.
Just look at events unfolding in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia abortion provider Kermit Gosnell ran a major clinic that was seldom investigated by the government or Planned Parenthood. When it was finally peered into, government officials found what was dubbed a “house of horrors” in which newborns were being killed along with fetuses and at least one woman died from a botched procedure. Gosnell is currently awaiting trial and could face the death penalty.
As though the nightmarish scenes of the facility were not disturbing enough, Planned Parenthood spokesman Dayle Steinberg admitted to the Delaware County Daily Times that her organization had heard complaints over the years about Gosnell’s clinic. And they did nothing. Apparently, Planned Parenthood didn’t think it was worth mentioning to the Department of Health that an abortion clinic was not only violating state law by performing late term abortions but it was also violating every possible standard on how a medical facility should operate.
Yet none of this should be surprising. There is very little difference between a late term fetus and a newborn baby. In the eyes of groups like Planned Parenthood, the only difference is that one is protected by the law and the other is a choice. What Gosnell did was take the next logical step and conclude that a newborn had just as little rights as a late term fetus, who in turn has just as little rights as an early term fetus.
That is why the Virginia General Assembly’s bill to increase regulation of abortion clinics is needed. And if most of these facilities will close down as a result, well as we have seen with Gosnell that might not be a bad thing. For pro-choice groups to not recognize this is troubling on a moral level.
Breaking from the fold, former president of Catholics for Choice Frances Kissling wrote an opinion column in the Washington Post calling for her fellow pro-choicers to rethink what they are arguing: