What’s Wrong with the World

Lydia,

I really don't get your obsession with abortion. Yes, at some point in time it could be bad for our people but right now it is not.

Look at demographics. Right now abortion is eugenic. High IQ whites are extremely underrepresented in abortion. The most overrepresented groups are blacks and mestizos.

This is not something we should be opposing...as it is working in our favor.

Okay, I debated for a moment as to whether simply to delete the above odious comment or use it as an opportunity to issue a warning:

Look, you moral midget: Take that stuff and go and jump in the lake. And that's being polite. Do not _dare_ to refer to yourself and to me as "us" and "we" as though we somehow are on the same side. Abortion is the murder of infants. This law outlawed tearing infants into pieces and murdering them in all manner of ways. It is deeply insulting to me and to this site that you would for even a single nanosecond think that we here at What's Wrong With the World would support or be moved by your murderous eugenics. Take a hike. If I see another comment of that sort from you, or any attempt to defend your "position" (which does not deserve to be dignified by that term), I will delete it.

I hope that is understood.

Amen, Lydia (to the post and your reply to PP).

As a Texas resident, I can certainly hope for some enforcement. Although many of my friends (on Facebook) are certainly not fans of this law, I hope to see this kind of legislation be treated as appropriate and normal. People need to understand that these protections of the infant and fetus within the womb should be the norm, and they need to learn to defer to this cultural standard in the future.

Lydia,

I think it's been remarked by you before, or maybe I recently read it somewhere, but the pro-aborts who came out in force and made a hero of the odious Wendy Davis, really put to rest the formerly semi-respectable position among Democrats and liberals of "safe, legal, and rare." Whether such a position was ever held with conviction or not, laws like the one in Texas are a great opportunity to reveal to all just what the "Party of Death" really thinks about abortion.

Amen to Governor Perry and to everyone who worked hard to make the new Texas law a reality -- I can only pray to God it will save lives.

Now it's "Abortion without apology," as one sign read at the protests.

The Dem. Party just took "rare" out of their official party language, so...

Not that that word ever had any comprehensible rationale for it. Do we say that we want appendectomies to be "safe, legal, and rare"? Only in the sense that we hope people won't get appendicitis. But we leave the decision about necessity up to the medical profession and don't make a piety out of declaring that we want them to be rare. The "rare" term was always an illogical faux concession. Now, things are clarifying. I wonder if just a few people will turn to the light and become pro-life as a result of seeing what pro-abortion really means.

I wonder if just a few people will turn to the light and become pro-life as a result of seeing what pro-abortion really means

I hope so too. I think more "hail Satan" type rallies may push decent, fence sitting people over to the pro-life side, but I also think the brazen, "no apology" stance will rally the type of folks who argue for actual post-natal infanticide. My hope is that the pro-deathers will overplay their hand and alienate enough people to allow things to REALLY change. There have been studies showing that youth are more open to restricting abortion, even though they are more liberal on other issues (like SSM). Frankly, if we have to "choose" only one issue to win, life HAS to be the one.

For all the trouble we've gone through here in Austin recently, there do seem to be a few liberals who are appalled by the feces-and-urine, hail satan bunch, and by the fact that no 'responsible adult' liberals condemned the frothingly insane protestors; and maybe even a very small number who think holding abortion facilities to regular medical-office standards, or prohibiting abortion beyond viability, is not a bad thing. I don't have any idea whether these are lasting changes of heart and mind.

One person who has always been pro-choice now supports the ban on 20+ weeks abortion (while remaining rabidly pro-abortion for

This will turn out to have been a skirmish in a battle- a very short term victory. I hope all our blues will muster up again when the time comes.

Well, David, a friend on FB just this minute put up this quotation, which seems apt as a response to your point about a short term victory:

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.” T. S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes.

Regarding "safe, legal, and rare", it's been my opinion for some time that safe + legal cannot produce rare. I may be changing my mind on that because much of the pro-abort fury was directed at the safety standards in the Texas bill. The pro-abort projections are that those requirements will cause all but a handful of abortuaries in the state to close. If true, that ought to make abortion much rarer here in Texas, and so it would seem that safe actually may produce rare (or at least increased rarity) after all.

With respect to the orange-shirts in the gallery who thugged a thwarting of the Senate vote at the end of the first special session, and who showed up with excrement, urine, female sanitary products, and even bricks to bring into the gallery during the second special session (kudos to the person who tipped off DPS to this) - their attitude is far beneath any possible rational philosophical position. It reeks of a mindless brutality towards the innocent, and even a hatred of the innocents, that is redolent of a true diabolical origin. Something I had not completely put together until very recently after having read Fr. Malachi Martin's "Hostage to the Devil" and having watched a very good BBC documentary on Auschwitz.

Let me say what I mean. Fr. Martin's book begins with a description of a failed exorcism by a priest in Japanese-occupied China during WWII. At the end of the book he recounts his conversations with that priest, who identified the evil spirit in possession of the man in China as the one who fomented the murder of Abel by Cain, an evil spirit that has been active throughout human history. I got the sense of that while watching the documentary on Auschwitz. Institutionalized murder - brutal, uncompromising, merciless, insane, and diabolical. The SS men were "free" to sort the Jews coming off the trains to the left or the right. The small children always went to the left, a line which then proceeded to the crematoria, and they were dead within two hours of arrival. The SS men acted with absolute authority over the life and death of any child, by their "choice". This is very much the same as the orange shirts proclaimed as the authority and power women are entitled to regarding their own preborn children.

The upshot of my post is this. At the political level, we battle for the lives of the preborn innocents but we always really are in a spiritual battle for the minds and souls which Evil Spirit wishes to influence and control. Killing Jewish children for the presumed health of the Third Reich or killing preborn children for the presumed health of the American woman, while on the surface are seemingly disparate causes, it yet is the same diabolical face beneath the surface of both.

Alphonsus, you're doubtless right about safe, legal, and rare, even in TX now, because of the abortions prior to 20 weeks. This law won't make abortion rare in Texas, because it doesn't affect the ages of gestation at which the majority of surgical abortions take place. I'm not yelling at the crafters of the law; we have to start somewhere. But "rare" is an absolute term, and in terms of numbers, there will still be lots of abortions during the earlier weeks.

The pro-abort projections are that those requirements will cause all but a handful of abortuaries in the state to close. If true, that ought to make abortion much rarer here in Texas, and so it would seem that safe actually may produce rare (or at least increased rarity) after all.

I more than half expect that the claims by pro-aborts are trumped up, fictitious in the extreme. There is every likelihood that the clinics that don't yet meet the standards can be modified to meet the standards with a few tens of thousands of dollars, and that's not really all that much for preparing a place for procedures that will be performed with Obamacare dollars.

The use of "rare" serves the same illogical, contradictory, but rhetorically effective purpose as "personally opposed."

And yes, Tony is right--the pro-aborts always claim that abortions will be radically reduced and clinics forced to shutter their doors as a consequence of any restrictions whatsoever. Hysteria is just their style. That their hysteria fails to square with their simultaneous claims, in other contexts, that late-term abortions practically never happen anyway, is a mere logical inconvenience that does not appear to have negatively impacted their fund-raising (though I guess that's an impact that would be pretty hard to establish).

I am worried that these laws have little to do with reducing abortion and everything to do with providing certain sectors of the medical industry with an advantage. Here is what I suspect: abortion will be funded via Obamacare or whatever, and like everything else the government funds, prices will triple (at least). So, these regulations come from some lobbyists who are positioning their clients to basically take over the abortion industry. Even if federal and state funding for abortion isn't obviously forthcoming, they can still raise prices now based on the new regulations and then use the higher price in future rounds of political campaigning to make federal funding a reality.

Regulations tend to favor larger businesses. Walmart, for instance, can absorb costs that mom and pop stores can't, and, obviously, the folks who can afford lobbyists in Washington are playing at a whole different level than the people operating a corner store.

This is why the focus should always be on outlawing and/or ending abortion, not on regulation. We should be focusing on the sort of change that makes lobbyists lose their jobs, not changes that increase their importance.

August, I think it highly dubious that "behind" this were lobbyists for Wal-Mart-sized abortion mills. I think you have only to look at the history to see the solid pro-life support and the solid pro-abortion opposition.

Moreover, the law did not merely extra-regulate abortion clinics. It also actually outlawed some abortions.

And, finally, access really is important. If some abortion clinics close and abortion is more "centralized" to clinics funded by larger conglomerates or what-not, that is in fact going to deter some women from having them. It's going to mean more travel and more difficult access. From the perspective of actually preventing abortion, that's all to the good. If the equivalent of a "mom and pop abortion mill" just down the street in one's neighborhood (and what an odious comparison anyway!) is closed because it couldn't afford the regulations, maybe some women will just have the baby. It is sometimes that simple.

Here is a map published with PP data in the NYT showing the projected potential closures of abortuaries in Texas. Many of those, I note, are PP facilities.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/26/us/politics/clinics-in-jeopardy.html?_r=0

Now, without delving into the validity of the projections, I just say if they are correct then geographically at least half the state of Texas will be free of these facilities. Even accounting for some scare factor in the projections, there most certainly will be a reduction as a result of the architectural and physician requirements in the new law.

Note the distances involved (using the 100 mile scaler) in getting from El Paso (an abortion hot spot where in 2011 "baby parts" were found in a faciltiy's parking lot), for example, to anywhere a projected abortuary might be open to the east. Maybe the distance will cause them to head to Mexico as used to be done in Texas before Roe v Wade. Well...

My Texas city was freed from a Planned Parenthood clinic in late 2012 as a result of state Title 20 funding cuts. It did so-called medical abortions using RU-486. Many here in the pro-life movement, however, believe the annual 40 Days for Life and prayer campaigns had not a little something to do with the extermination of PP from our city. So I say, it is not just a legal battle. It also is a spiritual one. And anything that possibly will impede the profound evil of killing children in the womb is a good and welcome thing even if it is not a fully complete thing at the time.

"A proposed state law requiring all abortion clinics to be licensed as ambulatory surgery centers could force 37 of Texas’ 42 abortion clinics to close or make costly renovations to meet standards."

When the statistic is REFERRED TO, the qualifier "or make costly renovations" is NEVER included. It's always just "forced to close". This is, of course, calculated, not mere short-cut speech.

"Costly" is a relative term, and my guess is that most can achieve the required changes with less than 100,000. Here are the "facilities" related regulations for ambulatory surgery centers:

§135.10. Facilities and Environment. (a) The ambulatory surgical center (ASC) shall have the necessary personnel, equipment, and procedures to handle medical emergencies that may arise in connection with services sought or provided. At a minimum, the ASC shall provide:

(1) periodic instruction of all personnel in the proper use of safety, emergency, and fire-extinguishing equipment;
(2) procedures, including adequate surveillance techniques, that minimize sources and transmission of infections;
(3) a comprehensive emergency plan to address internal and external emergencies, including:
(A) a provision for the safe evacuation of patients during an internal emergency, especially patients who have difficulty walking;
(B) a provision for the most efficient use of available facilities and services during an external emergency; and
(C) a requirement for at least four drills a year of the internal emergency plan.
(b) Hazards that might lead to slipping, falling, electrical shock, burns, poisoning, or other trauma shall be eliminated.
(c) Facilities shall be clean and properly maintained.
(d) An emergency call system shall be provided and readily accessible to staff and patients in all areas of the facility.
(e) All equipment, including emergency equipment, shall be properly maintained and periodically tested.
(f) There shall be a system for the proper identification, management, handling, transport, treatment, and disposition of hazardous materials and wastes whether solid, liquid, or gas.
(1) This system shall include, but is not limited to, infectious, radioactive, chemical, and physical hazards.
(2) The system shall provide for the protection of patients, staff, and the environment.
(g) An ambulatory surgical center shall meet the requirements set forth by the department in §§1.131 et seq. of this title (relating to Definition, Treatment, and Disposition of Special Waste from Health Care-Related Facilities).
(h) Sufficient space, equipment, and supplies shall be provided to perform the volume of work with optimal accuracy, precision, efficiency, and safety in the laboratory and x-ray. The ASC shall furnish equipment for basic diagnostic purposes, depending on the extent of services

Even the non-facilities rules are mostly basic common sense. If you are going to provide anesthesia,

(1) Anesthesia services provided in the ambulatory surgical center (ASC) shall be limited to those that are approved by the governing body, which may include the following... (2) The anesthesia department shall be under the medical direction of a physician approved by the governing body upon the recommendation of the ASC medical staff. (3) The medical staff shall develop written policies and practice guidelines for the anesthesia service,...

(8) Patients who remain in the facility for extended observation following discharge from the postanesthesia care unit shall be evaluated immediately prior to leaving the facility by a physician, the person administering the anesthesia, or a registered nurse acting in accordance with physician’s orders and written policies, procedures, and criteria developed by the medical staff.

These are just STANDARD common sense rules, not some incredibly burdensome program. The only significant imposition (for anesthesia) is this:

(10) Emergency equipment and supplies appropriate for the type of anesthesia services provided shall be maintained and accessible to staff at all times. (A) Functioning equipment and supplies which are required for all facilities include: (i) suctioning equipment, including a source of suction and suction catheters in appropriate sizes for the population being served;[SUCTIONING EQUIPMENT!! - what a burden for an abortionist!] (ii) source of compressed oxygen; (iii) basic airway management equipment, including oral and nasal airways, face masks, and self-inflating breathing bag valve set; (iv) blood pressure monitoring equipment; and (v) emergency medications specified by the medical staff and appropriate to the type of surgical procedures and anesthesia services provided by the facility. (B) In addition to the equipment and supplies required under subparagraph (A) of this paragraph, facilities which provide moderate sedation/analgesia, deep sedation/analgesia, regional analgesia and/or general anesthesia shall provide the following: (i) intravenous equipment, including catheters, tubing, fluids, dressing supplies, and appropriately sized needles and syringes; (ii)

If you have a colonoscopy done, the "center" has to abide by the same regime, and a colonoscopy isn't any more invasive a procedure than a surgical abortion. And all sorts of places have sprung up to do these.

What about the surgery rules? Well, they are about what you would expect from common sense. For example:

(D) Preventive maintenance of all sterilizers shall be completed according to manufacturer’s recommendations on a scheduled basis. A preventive maintenance record shall be maintained for each sterilizer. These records shall be retained at least one year and shall be available for review to the facility within two hours of request by the department.

Wow, imagine that, you have to maintain sterilizers and RECORD the fact. That's about the most burdensome aspect of the whole business, the center will have to have formal policies about care and operations, and will have to (a) train people to follow them, and (b) record their compliance.

And this is a level of thoughtfulness we don't want medical facilities to live within, because ... what, women receiving abortion are not worthy of care and thoughtfulness? Show me a liberal Ph.D. feminist who would knowingly take her daughter to a facility that rejected the above sorts of guidelines (if they were optional) over one that elected to employ such guidelines out of a sense of "best practice" integrity. It just wouldn't happen.

I certainly hope that clinics _do_ close as a result of these regulations.

As for heading to Mexico, perhaps some will, but I think more won't. I'm alive today because my birth mother, who considered it in the 1960's, decided after talking to her girlfriends that she didn't want to head to Mexico (from California) for an abortion.

I was using Walmart as an example of a corporation that welcomes government regulation because regulation helps it compete unfairly against its competition. I do not think we shall see Walmart sized abortion mills. Indeed, I think the people behind this are either already qualified under the new law, or have the funds to buy and/or renovate clinics to be qualified. I suspect what they intend to profit off of is RU486 or its equivalent. If they get to hand out a pill and charge for surgery, they will be happy campers. If the price goes up significantly, they could provide free transportation and still make out like bandits.

A reduction in abortions, due solely to these regulations, would probably be temporary as everyone adjusts to the new rules.
Even if the reduction is more or less permanent, the industry is likely to become further entrenched. They become less visible, and the horror stories that tend to change people's minds begin to dissappear- precisely because they aren't doing that anymore, and aren't allowing the creep show guys to operate. It becomes corporate, discreet, and a solid money source for D.C. So, in the end, we probably lose.

August, frankly, you are just w-r-o-n-g that "the people behind this" law are abortionists and not pro-lifers. I'm sorry, but that's just false to facts. It also smacks of conspiracy mongering on a pretty grand scale. Gee, who knew? The pro-life activists risking getting human waste products thrown at them are really just unknowing tools of the abortion establishment? Er-no.

As for RU-486, there is no way it is going to replace surgical abortion and especially not late-term surgical abortion. The late-term abortions this law is most likely to prevent are things like post-diagnosis of Down Syndrome (or dwarfism or cleft palate or a number of other otherwise not fatal disabilities) and young women who were in denial or who tried to hide their pregnancy but are otherwise healthy. None of those would have any connection to the use of RU-486. Whatever may happen on the early end of gestation, there will always be some people who are trying to get late-term abortions, and in many cases for reasons that do not fall under the exceptions to this law. Btw, I don't believe it has an incest exception, which is good. I remember one late-term abortion from my own state of Michigan. The girl and her brother had had an incestuous relationship. I believe she was something like 12-14 and he was in his later teens. The parents only found out about it in her third trimester, presumably because she was hiding it and may not even have understood that she was pregnant. Allegedly abortions were illegal at that point in Michigan, so they took her to Tiller the Killer in Kansas, who had a sweetheart deal with the local prosecutors to look the other way, and the child was aborted. That's the kind of situation this law is directed at.

You know, maybe we have it wrong here and we should be instead pushing for abortion offices to be zoned very far away from hospitals. In fact, I'd say they should be zoned in with strip clubs and places like that on the other side of town (or the "wrong side of the train tracks") precisely to make going there scarier and more dangerous for the patients. Sure, you can have your abortion. Better have your glock and a fast driver with you in case something bad happens... >:)

And in the event someone who is "pro-life" wants to make some holier than thou comment about how we ought to be soooooo concerned about the patients' safety, I'd say that if they are going to contract out a murder on their unborn child they at least should do it on the right side of town.

The idea is to move them out of rural areas and smaller towns, to get (if possible) swathes of entire counties to be abortion-clinic free. Even taking your idea with absolute straight-faced seriousness, I think requiring them to be within x miles of a hospital is going to close more of them. There are towns that have a red-light district of some sort or other even if they don't have a hospital. Also, requiring the so-called "doctors" to have admitting privileges at the hospitals is a stroke of genius, because I'm pretty sure that there are still hospitals that block abortionists from having admitting privileges, which makes it a no-win situation for the abortionists. Or else, if they don't block abortionists qua abortionists, so many abortionists have other things against them (e.g., legitimate patient complaints, investigations by the health dept., etc.) that the hospitals can sometimes refuse them admitting privileges on that basis.

Lydia, this may interest you based on your most recent post. My guess is that the PP faciltities in Lufkin and Huntsville were feeder facilties for the abortuary in Bryan, TX due to proximity. The 2012 public funding cuts to PP by the state are putting serious financial strain on PP. The new law has stacked onto that, and so in the very near future PP will self-eradicate from a significant area of Texas. More to come, no doubt...

http://www.ppaction.org/site/PageNavigator/tx_pphset_Statement_healthcentersclosing_MElaneyLinton_071813.html?__utma=1.1944109843.1373998873.1373999649.1374200392.3&__utmb=1.3.10.1374200392&__utmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1374200392.3.3.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=gulf%20coast%20planned%20parenthood&__utmv=-&__utmk=226606237

One can derive a prediction from my suggestions, so it is relatively easy to wait and see if the industry consolidates. Lobbyists have a perverse incentive because if the issue goes away, the job goes away, so it is not in their self-interest to be effective. It is in their interest to manufacture these sorts of "wins" because they've got to argue for raises like everybody else. Yes, I know this is a pretty pessimistic take on government action, but I've seen similar things happen in agriculture, foreign policy, gay marriage- you name it. There is always some bootlegger making money off the legislation, while the pious baptist is in front making a moral case for whatever the legislation is.

Even if the industry consolidates, it does not follow that abortions are not prevented and/or punished. So if abortions are in fact prevented (or punished), a goal of the "pious Baptists" has been fulfilled. Therefore, your prediction, even if fulfilled, scarcely serves to justify the conclusion that the abortion lobby itself was behind this bill to ban late-term abortions.