Thursday, June 15, 2006

Birmingham abortion clinic surrenders license after baby's death

From the article:


A Birmingham abortion clinic has surrendered its license amid allegations that a woman delivered a nearly full-term stillborn baby after a clinic staffer gave her an abortion-inducing drug and performed other medical treatments without a doctor present, health officials said Wednesday.


We have two victories here, my friends. One, an abortion clinic has shut down for the foreseeable future. Two, an abortion clinic has been held legally responsible for medical negligence.

The second point may be more far-reaching than the first. Progressives in America will always have an uphill battle when trying to enshrine a social service as a basic human right, especially when they're explicitly pushing one that's only appicable to half of all humans, like abortion. Well, half of all adults. You know what I mean. Anyway, from what I've seen in the lawsuits being brought against Planned Parenthood (see here, here, and here for starters), they've been carrying on as if this "social service" really were some transcendent phenomenon, too important or too ubiquitous to be infringed by the banalities of sanitation mandates, rape reporting, and the like.

Now there's a precedent for not looking the other way in the interest of protecting the idea of "choice" over the fact of it. Now there should be no secrets, no mistakes, no deceptions, to distract from the fact that in a time when appropriate medical (physical and psychological) care is easy to obtain, abortion has not made women safer and healthier than they were thirty-four years ago.

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