Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Action Alert 3: Georgia Women In Danger

I want to go back to the question of Atlanta Women Medical Center and the entire abortion industry's lack of a standard of care for women. I can't help but wonder why there are not more inspections of these centers and when violations are found, why there is no enforcement of the laws. It appears the state and the culture has extended the patient's right to privacy (as spelled out in Roe v. Wade) to abortionists and abortion centers. So much so, that Georgia and other states have assumed a hands off policy, allowing the exploitation of that right each time the abortionist gets away with substandard care.

I am reminded of the House of Horrors that was reported a year or so ago in Philadelphia. The conditions of that abortion center were so squalid, the DEA agent investigating the doctor for prescription drug violations reported it to the Attorney General. One of the complaints over the more than 15 years that the state refused to take action against the center was the passing of venereal diseases through unsterilized instruments (see Philadelphia Attorney General Report: http://1.usa.gov/ec0mSy). AWMC also failed to properly sterilize it's equipment, but we have no way to measure if diseases have been passed to patients because of the lack of regulation enforcement.

I am told (by an ex-abortionist) that the goal of an abortionist is to do 10-12 abortions an hour. If they do not have enough sets of instruments to do fifty or more abortions a day, sterilization will be an issue. The autoclave only holds 2-3 sets of instruments at a time and the process of sterilizing them will take at lease an hour. When the autoclave is taken up to 270 degrees, the instruments have to stay in the autoclave at least 10 minutes, but preferably 20 in order to ensure they are sterile. The instruments then need to cool before they can be handled by the physician. In order to keep up with the abortions they would have to have at one least one set of instruments for each abortion sheduled that day, which would be rare. Even if they did, the violation found was that they were not sterilizing the instruments as outlined in their own policies and had not been doing so for months, perhaps even years!

They also had violated the elevator waiver for some time. Staff was not aware of the requirements of the waiver and the Facility Administrator acknowledged he/she had not instructed the staff not to escort patients because of an altercation that occurred sometime in the past. In other surgical procedures there appear to be rules that drive the medical industry and that drive the standards of medical care. I am not sure if it is because of insurer requirements or government regulations that medical standards are established and adhered to, but whatever it is, it appears to be absent from the abortion industry. Everyone seems to be looking the other way and applying privacy standards to abortion rather than the patient in whom the right to privacy vests. When women are injured by the abortionist, and later goes to her OB-GYN or the hospital, it is not recorded as a complication of an abortion. The diagnosis may be that they are septic, but will not document that the infection was a result of an abortion. Because of this we may never know the true impact that abortion and shoddy medical care has had on Georgia women.

I pray you will join me in urging our Governor to enforce our laws and require every abortion provider to comply with them. Urge our legislators to change the laws regarding physicians that do abortions in their offices, so that no purveyor of abortion is able to escape accountability for providing reasonable medical care. The health of Georgia women is at stake.

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