For some abortion supporters, regulations that require certain medical standards from abortion clinics are a trap — literally, a TRAP: targeted regulation of abortion providers.
Included among this supposed scheme are laws requiring abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. A paper in the American Public Health Association calls them “stringent” and “medically unnecessary.”
Yet a majority of Americans aren’t buying it. The pro-life organization Americans United for Life commissioned a poll by YouGov, a non-partisan polling firm, which surveyed more than 1,300 adults last month to ask them about these medical standards.
Of those polled, 62% strongly agreed that abortion doctors should be held to the same standards as ordinary physicians, and 58% felt the same way about abortion facilities and hospitals.
Far from being a political ploy, many Americans rightly see these restrictions as medically important.
“Women deserve the same standard of care no matter who their doctor is,” AUL President and CEO Catherine Glenn Foster said in a statement. “Continued efforts by elected officials and political institutions to limit protections and safeguards for women are out of step with core American values.”
The results of the poll come more than a month after the Supreme Court agreed to take up a case involving an abortion law in Louisiana that requires abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. Is it really so radical to demand the full standard of healthcare from an abortion doctor?
Apparently so. The pro-abortion crowd complains that rather than ensuring medical excellence, the laws are meant to trap abortion clinics in red tape, sometimes forcing them to shut down. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, like many other Democrats, hopes to ban TRAP laws.
There’s no reason to loosen medical standards, but the Democratic Party has become increasingly radical on all issues pertaining to abortion, from the dismissal of “safe, legal, and rare” to the party discouraging pro-life Democrats, the few who exist, from running for attorney general.
Even some who support abortion, though, appear to agree that abortion clinics must meet certain medical standards. Of those surveyed in the YouGov poll, 43.3% were self-identified as pro-choice, 35.5% were pro-life, and 23.9% were neither.
Not everyone in America is as radical about abortion as Warren and her peers. In fact, most aren’t. Democrats should keep in mind that not all of their base has followed the party’s severe leftward lurch.
Also worth noting is that a full one-fifth of those polled didn’t identify as either pro-life or pro-choice. They may still be on the fence, and doing whatever it takes to support abortion, even if it means sacrificing medical standards, isn’t likely to win them over.
