Pro-life groups that spend time outside Planned Parethood clinics have recorded eighteen recent instances where women have had to be transported to nearby hospitals by ambulance. The most recent case occurred the day before Thanksgiving in St. Louis :
A St. Louis Planned Parenthood patient was rushed to a nearby hospital after suffering serious abortion complications the day before Thanksgiving, officials with the prolife group Operation Rescue informed LifeNews today. Paramedics arrived at the abortion clinic at approximately 2:45 p.m. on November 21, 2012, and removed the patient from the building with her face covered with a cloth.Mary Maschmeier of the local pro-life group Defenders of the Unborn told OR, “A counselor spoke to the brother of the injured woman and he said he thought she was going to be okay. We have made contact with him but have not received a returned call. We ask for your prayers for this woman and her family.”
This is the eighteenth medical emergency that Operation Rescue has documented at Planned Parenthood abortion clinics nationwide since January, 2011, including another botched abortion at this same St. Louis Planned Parenthood on February 12, 2011 .
Planned Parenthood clinics do not offer a full array of medical services and are rarely held to same standards for health and safety as hospitals. Nor are they required to report numbers for medical complications or patient deaths. This despite the fact that abortion is not a medical procedure as traditionally understood—-a procedure conducing to life and health—-but rather an attack on the child that can also pose grave risk to the mother.
More information on medical emergencies related to abortion is needed, both through regulatory reporting requirements and gumshoe reporting. What little we now know comes via reports of observers like Operation Rescue and from headline-grabbing cases like that of the once-admired Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell , charged with the murder of a woman who visited his clinic.
The back alley is alive and well at wholly legal (indeed, government-funded) abortion clinics—-where, thanks to the principle of induced demand —-far more women seek out the procedure than would were it illegal. The eighteen anonymous women hauled away from Planned Parenthood clinics in recent months testify to the violence abortion can do to mother as well as child.
There has been universal sorrow (and selective outrage) over the death of Savita Halappanavar, but how many women have to be injured or killed during legal abortion before the call rises to end abortion? There is always the possibility—-sometimes tragic—-of misapplication, but Ireland’s abortion law (which allows for “termination of pregnancy” in select cases) was not in itself responsible for Savita’s death. The question instead is, how many women’s lives has it saved?
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