How the US Supreme Court Aids and Abets Back Alley Abortionists Under the Guise of "Choice"

I sort of vaguely knew this, but it needs to be pointed out now in view of the discovery of the horrors in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia "House of Horrors" situation is likely just the tip of the iceberg.

From The Weekly Standard comes "The Supreme Court's Back Alley Runs Through Philadelphia"

Since the fall of 2009, officials have investigated the conditions in an abortion clinic run by Dr. Kermit B. Gosnell.

The Philadelphia District Attorney has charged Gosnell with murder for killing an abortion patient and seven babies after they were born. The grand jury report found, among other things, that there had been reports of the exceedingly vile practices at the clinic for nearly 20 years without any action being taken.Philadelphia’s clinic conditions and lackadaisical approach to regulating clinics are the direct result of the “fine print” in Roe.

Because the Justices who decided Roe foolishly believed that abortion had few risks and that doctors should have complete discretion to decide how to do abortions in the first trimester, they basically said that state and local officials can’t regulate in the first trimester, when 90 percent of abortions are done, and that they can try in the second trimester—if they dare.

But the Justices then empowered the federal courts and attorneys for abortion providers to thwart every effort by public health officials to regulate. Federal courts across the country spent the next decade implementing that edict, and by the end of the 1980s, the federal courts had struck down attempts by Chicago and many other cities to regulate clinics in the first trimester. As Edward F. King, the Deputy Director of the Chicago Medical Society told the Chicago Sun Times in 1978, “The courts very effectively knocked the Department of Health out of the picture.

We’re not even entitled to cross the threshold of these clinics.”

This is how the Justices have hobbled public health officials for the past 38 years in dealing with abortion clinic conditions, in Philadelphia and many other cities.

The Supreme Court compounded the problem in 1983 by extending its edict in Roe and invalidating regulations even in the early second trimester.

Roe also empowered any back-alley abortionist with an M.D. to go into court after January 22, 1973 to challenge clinic regulations as an “unconstitutional burden.”

In Chicago, for example, the federal appeals court struck down Chicago’s clinic regulations, and three years later, in November 1978, the Chicago Sun Times published a 12 part series on terrible abortion clinic conditions, based on an undercover investigation with the Better Government Association.

When Illinois tried to enact new regulations to deal with the findings of the Sun Times and the BGA, an abortion provider again challenged those regulations and got the federal courts to strike them down in the 1980s.

The Justices also empowered abortionists to challenge clinic regulations in court and to speak for women about the care that women want and need, as though the interests of abortionists and those of women are identical.

Is that true for any other area of medicine?

On top of all that, a federal law (the Civil Rights Attorneys Fees Act of 1976) has been interpreted by federal courts to require that the attorneys for the abortionists get their attorneys fees paid by state tax dollars when they get the clinic regulations struck down. That too inhibits public health officials from doing anything unless the most extreme conditions in clinics are discovered.

Some states have some clinic regulations and there is, of course, some political and administrative discretion in enforcing some clinic regulations. The Philadelphia grand jury concluded that

“...[t]he Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all…. With the change of administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions.”

Read the rest here. What a sick joke it is to argue that the abortion industry is necessary for women's "health."

Remember: they are not "pro-choice" they are "pro-murder."