Eclipse From Reason How the abortion industry has remained almost unregulated for 44 years!
A Lesson in History
For years you have heard it said, “Abortion needs to be kept safe, legal and rare,” however with the recent news of murder indictments of a Philadelphia physician and his staff (multiple charges) gives more evidence to the fact that everything about this statement is false! The legalization of abortion 1961-73 as most lawmakers already know was manufactured by judicial activism.
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“The Reproductive Healthcare Movement” created false data and false testimonies to achieve a new unconstitutional legal precedent. One of the central legal arguments surrounding this act of social re-engineering has been medical safety for elective surgical abortion. (Both legal and illegal) Once again, history has proven this to be completely false! After 1967-73 most abortionists simply moved out from the back alley on to Main St. and little has changed to help make surgical abortion anymore safe since Roe vs. Wade.
But aside from the medical risks from surgical abortion and the lack of regulation of its providers is the brazen hypocrisy from The Reproductive Healthcare Movement for woman’s safety! In 1978 the Chicago Sun-Times launched an undercover investigation known as “The Abortion Profiteers” series after which in 1978 state legislators passed laws in Illinois to regulate abortion providers and require them to comply with the same safety regulations that every other out-patient surgical center had to provide for their patients.
By 1983 these safety regulations were finally able to be implemented. Then the A.C.L.U. (and others) challenged these regulations all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in a case known as Turnock vs. Ragsdale (1989). Unfortunately this case was never ruled on by the U.S. Supreme Court. With just days before the court was to hear this case a backroom court settlement (Consent Decree) was struck between the Illinois Attorney General and A.C.L.U. So after nearly 12 years of effort by the people of the state of Illinois and lawmakers to secure the safety of woman’s lives most of these regulations were simply thrown out, rewritten or placed under the supervision of a self-governing medical board that seldom acts on violations made by physicians. Remember Turnock vs. Ragsdale dealt strictly with businesses that provided surgical abortions it never brought a legal challenge to abortion itself.
The Ragsdale case never presented a challenge to legal abortion or to overturning Roe vs. Wade.
In reading from a legal challenge brought against the Illinois Attorney General’s settlement agreement in Ragsdale vs. Turnock 7th. Dist. U.S. Appellate Court Judge Posner wrote …a woman who suffers a medical injury as a result of the failure of an abortion clinic to comply with the statute should be able to use the violation to establish medical malpractice…Sec.47. Was this a probable admission by this court, that it was abandoning the law, abandoning the state constitution and abandoning their obligation to protect woman’s safety? The results of the 7th Dist. Appt. Court ruling and settlement agreement were special exemptions for The Abortion Profiteers making medical malpractice and medical fraud more difficult to prosecute. So what good are statutes if our law enforcement agents chose not to enforce the laws that are passed? And what good do any medical safety regulations have if physicians are left to a self-governing state board of medical directors who occasionally look the other way when repeat offenders are found to be a danger to the general public? (Kermit Gosnell M.D.) Real reform must take place if physicians that act criminally are ever going to be held accountable.
When Virginia’s safety regulations are challenged in the courts the Ragsdale case provides an historical roadmap for state legislators to avoid?
This must somehow come from outside the medical profession to end this system of collusion? In response to the Philadelphia indictments Virginia has become the first state in 33 years to pass out-patient surgical (safety) regulations and apply them to abortion clinics. It is amazing to note here that a national legal strategy had been implemented so that states would not pursue the same type of regulations that Illinois first passed into law in 1978 and was never ruled against by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989. Planned Parenthood & company have placed into the media the intentional fraud that Kermit Gosnell’s clinic was not state certified (illegal). Also they are rejecting the need for outside accountability since their clinics remain self regulated and problem free. This battle has been fought and won once before so this should be a wakeup call for the people of Virginia and they need to learn this lesson from history and not repeat the same legal gauntlet as the Ragsdale case was lead down in 1989. The tragedy of this West Philadelphia clinic is an old story one that has been repeated dozens of times with no end in sight. This same type of unregulated clinic mayhem revealed in the Philadelphia indictments was made public back in 1978 by the Chicago Sun-Times series. Nothing has changed with the business of abortion except for the amount of state and federal funding they receive. Had the Ragsdale case been heard in 1989 women’s lives would have been spared from the many criminal acts of medical malpractice that have plagued the abortion industry for years. Abortion is not a right it’s an industry, and non-profit organizations in reproductive healthcare that profit from government subsidies do so at the expense of woman’s health and the many children that are terminated from elective abortion! As we consider the issues of woman’s safety, medical malpractice, Medicaid fraud, healthcare fraud, entitlement fraud, and the hundreds of millions of tax dollars handed over to The Reproductive Healthcare Movement each year, perhaps we need remember that these criminal enterprises will never give in to true regulation and oversight !
W.W. Wallace is a student/writer and commentator on
