Ripping the veil off preferential government treatment of abortion clinics

A Washington Times news article, "Abortion clinics becoming endangered species: new state rules make business tough," highlights overdue and potentially lifesaving actions by states to finally bring abortion clinics up to the level of similar ambulatory surgery centers and to provide for emergency treatment of botched abortions.

The article quotes abortion advocates who protest that requiring these basic health measures will force abortion clinics to close. Such protests, of course, reveal a lot about the health and safety conditions at abortion clinics. 

Too often state governments have shielded abortion clinics for political and ideological reasons, as revealed in the infamous case of now-convicted murderer Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Women suffered and died and just-born babies suffered cruel deaths at his Philadelphia "house of horrors" clinic, so squalid that a Grand Jury report compared it to "a bad gas station restroom."

Gosnell operated his unsanitary clinic and committed his horrendous crimes with impunity because abortion ideology and politics had led to carving out special health and safety exemptions for abortion clinics. The Grand Jury report revealed that under pro-abortion Governor Tom Ridge, "high-level government officials" held back on inspecting abortion clinics like Gosnell's because of "a concern that if they did routine inspections, they may find that a lot of these facilities didn’t meet [health and safety standards]."

The threats to women's health and safety uncovered in Gosnell's and other abortion clinics around the country have ripped the veil off such preferential government treatment of abortion clinics and have prompted long-overdue regulation. Four decades after the Supreme Court ripped federalism asunder in its unilateral 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, states finally are taking steps to reclaim their proper role regarding an industry that somehow has been allowed to take the lives of over a million individuals every year in a country founded on the unalienable right to life.