As is often the case with other efforts to make abortion care more difficult to access, the reasons offered in support of specific TRAP requirements—which are usually marketed under the guise of protecting women’s health—do not stand up to close scrutiny.
Anti-choice campaigners have attempted to tar all abortion providers with the crimes of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. But a close reading of a state inspection report on a Cuyahoga Falls clinic shows that the problems identified there—while serious—were of a different order of magnitude to anything found at Gosnell’s clinic.
I asked several lawyer colleagues if they knew of other instances in which a whole occupational category was banned by law from volunteering in schools. They did not. Indeed, as far as I can tell, only sex offenders as a class are de facto banned from school grounds.
Since the early 1990s, public records show, Brigham’s patients have suffered emergency hysterectomies, severe bowel injuries, severed ureters, and sweeping lacerations to the uterus. Over a period of two decades, Brigham has been barred from practicing medicine in at least six states, sued by his landlords and business associates, and even served jail time for failing to pay taxes. And yet today, Brigham remains in control of a network of 15 abortion clinics in four states, and there appears little that most state authorities are able—or willing—to do about it.
AB 252 would require fetal remains to be handled through "burial, interment, entombment, cremation, incineration, or delivery to a medical or dental school anatomy department as an anatomical gift." But the bill's sponsor says telling patients about this process would place an "undue burden" on them.
After Trent Franks flubbed his lines, Marsha Blackburn was brought in to manage passage of the bill, which was designed as a challenge to Roe. The floor debate included one Republican's interpretation of a fetus' hand movements as "Be patient; I’ll be out soon."
Gosnell’s murders were already illegal under current law, so neither HR 1797, nor any other 20-week ban, would prevent another Gosnell. But anti-choice laws could push more women to obtain unsafe abortions.
Citing the Gosnell case and a lawsuit over an incomplete abortion performed in 2012, the state attorney general has sent inquiries to the state's two abortion clinics asking for a wide range of information about how they operate.
