Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com responded to the Supreme Court ruling overturning a Texas law as expected: with a June 27 article by Penny Starr uncritially repeating anti-abortion activists predictably denouncing the ruling. And since Starr is in stenography mode, she makes sure not to correct the false claims they make.
Starr quotes these activists decrying how there purportedly are now no saftey standards for abortion clinics in Texas and that they will now descend to the level of Kermit Gosnell:
"The Supreme Court's decision to strike down H.B. 2 undermines the health and safety of vulnerable women,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in a statement about the ruling in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. “This decision is a loss for women and gives the abortion industry a free pass.
“The need to regulate abortion facilities is necessary to protect women against cut-and-run abortionists at shoddy abortion facilities,” Perkins said. “Mandating basic and necessary health and safety standards such as trained staff, corridors that could accommodate a stretcher in case of emergency, admitting privileges to a hospital, and up-to-date fire, sanitation, and safety codes should be beyond the politics of abortion.[...]
"How shabby are these abortion clinics that they cannot meet the minimum standards other outpatient surgical centers are required to meet, and just how bad are these abortionists that they can't get admitting privileges at a local hospital?" Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said in a statement.
"As we saw with Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia, it's clear that the lucrative abortion industry is not able or willing to police itself and allows filthy, deplorable conditions to go unchecked,” Tobias said.[...]
"The Court was wrong to strike down a reasonable law that protected women from unsafe abortion facilities like Kermit Gosnell's notorious and deadly 'house of horrors' clinic,” Heritage Foundation experts Roger Severino and Elizabeth Slattery said in a joint statement. “This decision will allow abortion extremists to keep open disreputable abortion clinics that fail to meet basic safety and cleanliness standards followed by every other facility that performs invasive surgeries."
In fact, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his majority ruling that earlier court rulings have found that insisting on surgical-center standards at an abortion clinic will not result in improved care, adding that Gosnell would have run afoul of previous Texas standards had they been properly enforced:
In the same breath, the dissent suggests that one benefit of H. B. 2’s requirements would be that they might “force unsafe facilities to shut down.” To support that assertion, the dissent points to the Kermit Gosnell scandal. Gosnell, a physician in Pennsylvania, was convicted of first-degree murder and manslaughter. He “staffed his facility with unlicensed and indifferent workers, and then let them practice medicine unsupervised” and had “[d]irty facilities; unsanitary instruments; an absence of functioning monitoring and resuscitation equipment; the use of cheap, but dangerous, drugs; illegal procedures; and inadequate emergency access for when things inevitably went wrong.” Gosnell’s behavior was terribly wrong. But there is no reason to believe that an extra layer of regulation would have affected that behavior. Determined wrongdoers, already ignoring existing statutes and safety measures, are unlikely to be convinced to adopt safe practices by a new overlay of regulations. Regardless, Gosnell’s deplorable crimes could escape detection only because his facility went uninspected for more than 15 years. Pre-existing Texas law already contained numerous detailed regulations covering abortion facilities, including a requirement that facilities be inspected at least annually. The record contains nothing to suggest that H. B. 2 would be more effective than pre-existing Texas law at deterring wrongdoers like Gosnell from criminal behavior.
Again: Starr is a stenorgrapher, not a reporter, so her readers won't know that the anti-abortion activists she quotes are being deceptive.
