Abortion advocates love to perpetuate the fear of “back-alley abortions” should Roe v. Wade be overturned and abortion law goes back to the will of each individual state. NPR, one of many legacy outlets carrying these talking points, recently ran a story of women who had abortions before it became legal in 1973, highlighting a woman who had a sketchy abortion and was told not to go to the local hospital and ended up hemorrhaging. They tell these stories as if the same thing doesn’t happen right now. That’s where they are wrong. The state of many abortion facilities post-Roe is horrendous, and women are not getting the whole story.
Most of the public has no idea that many abortion facilities are less regulated and inspected than nail salons or veterinary offices. People don’t know that most are not governed by normal medical standards that every other outpatient facility operates under, such as standard hallway widths to be able to get a gurney through and mandating that the abortion doctors have admitting privileges to local hospitals. The abortion industry despises these regulations, so much so that they went to the Supreme Court over them in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstadt, arguing that these regulations imposed an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions, which is entirely ironic given that abortion clinics claim to put women’s health above all yet are unwilling to comply with standard medical operating procedures to make that happen.
Here’s why these “undue burdens” are important: They protect women from the supposed “back-alley abortions” the abortion industry supposedly doesn’t want to go back to should Roe fall. An abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida, was forced to close in late May because it was seriously harming women. In fact, it was because of the lack of emergency procedures and transfer agreements that led to an emergency order from the state of Florida, closing the clinic because the attending abortion personnel didn’t follow basic emergency protocol.
A woman came into the American Family Planning Abortion Clinic in Pensacola on May 5, 2022, for a second-trimester abortion at 19 weeks. The abortion was botched, and she lost a lot of blood, but no one knows how much because the writing on her chart is illegible. After sitting in the car with her spouse, and not being monitored yet in dire need of emergency care, the clinic told her husband to drive an hour away to another hospital for care instead of using a hospital in Pensacola, where the abortion doctor didn’t have admitting privileges. By the time the woman received care at the hospital, she had “undetectable blood pressure” and “required resuscitation and mass transfusion.” No records of this are at the abortion clinic, which is required by law.
Another woman came into the same clinic in March 2022 also for a second-trimester abortion at 20.2 weeks, and excessive bleeding started immediately during her procedure. Her vitals were not monitored, and by the time she was transferred to the emergency room, she had no pulse and had lost an unknown amount of blood. Records indicate there were “pools of blood” at the abortion clinic when emergency personnel arrived. Two “big hole[s]” were discovered on the left and right walls of the uterus, plus cervical lacerations. Doctors weren’t able to save any of her reproductive organs, and she underwent a total hysterectomy.
This is from one clinic only. Look at state health department reports posted to CheckMyClinic.org for equally horrifying stories of abortion clinics harming women — many of which remain open. The entire abortion industry would be fighting tool and nail for commonsense regulations and oversight of their clinics if they wanted to protect women. But they aren’t. They are doing the opposite while proclaiming that overturning Roe will force women into terrible situations that will put their health in jeopardy. But their health is already in jeopardy when they enter an abortion clinic.
Women deserve so much better than shoddy care in shoddy clinics. They deserve better than abortion. There are many organizations that can help them with both tangible and emotional needs when facing an unplanned pregnancy — options that don’t involve taking the life of their child and putting their own health at risk. I hope more abortion clinics will be shut down because of the immediate danger they pose to women.
Missy Martinez-Stone is the CEO and founder of reprotection.org.
