(This is a particularly clever tactic when all the hospitals in an area are either owned by religious groups that oppose abortion or are public / state-college affiliated hospitals which can be prevented from giving admission privileges by those same legislatures.)
The problem is, the whole idea is built on a lie. Legal abortion is incredibly safe — much safer than many other outpatient procedures that don't get the same concerned scrutiny .
'When it comes to first-trimester abortions, the rate of serious complications — issues that may land a woman in the hospital — is less than 0.05 percent. The risk of dying from an abortion is considerably smaller, estimated as occurring in 0.0006 percent of all legal surgical abortions. To put that in perspective, the risk of death associated with childbirth is about 14 times higher.
Medically speaking, there are dozens of common medical procedures that are considered to be very safe but that are still riskier than abortion. The mortality rates are higher for gallbladder removal, knee replacement surgery, bariatric surgery, and hernia surgery. There are also non-surgical procedures sometimes performed outside of hospital settings that are more likely to kill people than abortion, but that don’t face the same type of regulation that abortion does. “As an example, the mortality rate associated with a colonoscopy is more than 40 times greater than that of abortion,” Jeanne Conry, the former president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the largest group of OB-GYNs in the country, recently explained to Kaiser Health News.'
You'd almost think they had another reason in mind when they pass such laws.
Embedded Link
The Myth of the Dangerous Abortion
All around the nation, Republican-led legislatures are passing Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws that are based largely on the false claim that abortion is a highly risky medica…
One hundred percent dangerous for the babies, though.
+Mark Means Even positing that a 10-week old fetus is a "baby," abortion is both legal and constitutionally protected.
By playing games like this, on the other hand, the state legislatures are playing a dangerous game, in terms of dictating standards of practice in a dishonest fashion, intruding on people's lives for no compelling state interest, and establishing the precedent of effectively prohibiting activities they don't like, even if those activities are similarly constitutionally protected.
"Even positing that a 10-week old fetus is a "baby," abortion is both legal and constitutionally protected."
So is gun ownership, yet it doesn't seem to keep some people from trying to stop that, either.
Not by weaselly legislation based on a lie.
And really, resorting to ignoratio elenchi serves nobody, +Mark Means
+Mark Means A fair enough comparison on the surface of it — though the converse would seem to be true.
That said, though, the same compromises pertain — the state can, where it can show a compelling reason and that it is the least intrusive say of doing so, regulate a right. Regulating it out of existence is not allowable. A law that said "You can own a gun, but it needs to be locked and the key can only be held by a gun control advocate somewhere within a 100 mile radius" would be clearly seen as de facto violation of the 2nd Amendment. Similarly, laws that overly restrict the types of guns one might own have similarly been struck down, though other laws that reasonably restrict gun ownership have not — thus, under the current SCOTUS interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, requiring very stringent regulation of fully automatic weapons is legal; banning all handguns is not.
One might wish, in the case of abortion, that SCOTUS would overturn or otherwise invalidate Roe v Wade. A gun control advocate might as easily wish that SCOTUS would change its base interpretation of the 2nd Amendment as an individual right to bear arms, not one that applies to a right for states to have an armed militia. Until those things change, however, in both cases, those fundamental rights, as interpreted, remain, and trying to eliminate them by over-restrictive regulation — especially when done through dishonesty — is not allowed.
So, how are they "regulating it out of existence"? By making them conform to higher standards? Are you saying that all/some/most abortion clinics are the cleanest, most sanitary of places?
If the legislation doesn't have any basis in medical fact, it shouldn't get very far, should it?
Oh, and +Scott Randel , we both know there are plenty lies bandied about anytime some anti-gun nut wants stricter control over our right to defend ourselves.
I'm not surprised that you choose the lowest bar as your standard. "Those 'nuts' [your word] lie, so it's OK for us nuts!" Nice work tarring yourself with that brush, +Mark Means .
_So, how are they "regulating it out of existence"? _
Did you even read the article? They're making the clinics conform to standards they don't apply to other, more dangerous, procedures! It's a double standard that can have only one basis, and it's not public safety. If that were their concern, they would outlaw home births.
Your comment about legislation not succeeding if it weren't fact-based is disingenuous at best, rank hypocrisy at worst. Or perhaps you are against striking down any legislation that has been passed, since it must be valid to have been passed. The ACA, for instance? If that "doesn't have any basis in medical fact, it shouldn't get very far, should it?" Can we assume that you now wholeheartedly support Obamacare?
I'm surprised one can see this another way. With the standards being applied from what the article states it appears abortion is the issue and not safety itself.
+Jon Weber Absolutely abortion (and the stopping of it) is the issue.
Which means, +Mark Means, that it having "no basis in medical fact" means very little because that's not the real idea here. The intent is to make it too difficult and costly to operate an abortion clinic, making abortion de facto unavailable, if still de jure legal.
(To fit the gun control analog to this, if legislation was passed that guns could only be sold to and from gun shops, and that each gun in the store had to be locked in its own individual gun locker "for safety", and that each gun shop further had to have its own on-premises shooting range below-ground, and a full-time shooting instructor — not one of the other staff — to provide a mandatory single-session uninterruptible 16-hour training course to anyone seeking to buy a gun … in short, made it financially impossible for all or the vast majority of gun shops to operate, all in the guise of safety but without any statistical basis for establishing those guidelines … it would be quite fair to say that it was a disingenuous effort to eliminate all or the vast majority of gun sales, regardless of the 2nd Amendment.
By requiring abortion clinics to operate with medical requirements beyond what the actual medical evidence (and experts) indicate is necessary — requirements that are both very costly and politically difficult if not impossible — these laws are doing the same thing.