Finding Justice in an Unjust Law, II

jus·tice

ˈjəstəs/

noun

1.     

just behavior or treatment.

But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!(Amos 5:24)

I don’t believe in ghosts. But the deaths of Tonya Reaves and LaKisha Wilson haunt me, frequently breaking my rest – two young women, vibrant women taken away by the substandard care provided in the abortion arena. Their deaths are reminders of the injustice foisted on women through abortion.  Let me explain. Tonya Reaves died in a Planned Parenthood abortion center located at 18 S. Michigan Avenue. This location is important to note because according to their website they are not equipped to perform surgical abortions. In the deposition given by the doctor that performed the abortion, over a five hour period she went back in and scraped Tonya’s uterus an additional two times but was not able to complete the abortion. Five hours after she began, she finally called for an ambulance that did not arrive for another thirty minutes.  Six and a half hours after the procedure was initiated the trauma hospital where she was taken was able to successfully complete the abortion. Sadly, eleven hours after the procedure  was started, the hospital found an uncontrollable bleed, but was unable to save Tonya’s life when she coded during the surgery.

To me and others it seemed that Mandy Gittler, the abortionist in this case, did not care about Tonya or her life. Gittler had no sense of urgency to get lifesaving help to her patient, instead she chose to  focus on doing other abortions in between scraping Tonya’s insides.   Gittler was almost cavalier in her responses during her deposition when she blamed Tonya’s (nonexistent) two chamber uterus. Later Gittler stated Tonya did not want to go the hospital because she “felt fine”, despite the notes in the record that she had heavy bleeding throughout her ordeal. Gittler did what Tonya could not, she walked away from the abortion center all the while assigning blame to her patient, her supervisor and even Tonya’s mother!

LaKisha, according to her record, visited several abortion centers in the Cleveland area before landing at Preterm on Shaker Blvd. Claiming they provide safe, compassionate abortion care, she trusted them to terminate her pregnancy. Unfortunately, the care LaKisha received that fateful day in March was neither safe nor compassionate. Information recently received in the prolife community reveals Preterm broke the laws of the State of Ohio because Lakisha was more than the legally allowed 20 weeks pregnant. But Preterm has friends in the Ohio Health Department that swept the violations under the proverbial rug. Ohio ignored the gestational age of the child and ignored the fact that Preterm did not meet facility codes because the building elevator was broken. The EMTs could not quickly evacuate Lakisha and even if it hadn’t been broken they could not have used a gurney to get her out because the elevator was too small. There were a plethora of other things that confirmed Preterm’s disdain for LaKisha’s life including a lack of a sense of urgency to get her the help she needed. The worker that placed the call for an ambulance could not give the operator vitally needed information to get immediate assistance and when she reported LaKisha was not breathing - at all - and we learned later she was not breathing for more than 28 minutes, she did not sound like she cared.

For reasons that are not clear to me, it appears abortionists get a pass on maintaining the standards of quality care other physicians are held to. Even nail salons and veterinarians  are held to a higher standard than abortionists. When it comes to abortion, state after state has turned a blind eye, allowing violations of laws designed to protect the patient. It is not uncommon to hear of  injuries to women including death, rape, unsanitary conditions, overmedicating the patient, failing to notify parents or obtain their consent where required, failure to report statutory rape and a host of other violations. Kermit Gosnell’s house of horror in Pennsylvania is but one of many examples of the lack of action by the state. Now we have Lakisha’s death and it is clear the state of Ohio ignored the violations of the law. There are many examples of abortionists violating the laws and only when they have done so numerous times, will a state take action to shut them down. Pendergast in Florida, Finkel in Arizona, Patel in Oklahoma, Virmani in North  Carolina, Alexander in Michigan are just a few of the abortionists that lost their licenses after a long list of violations of state law.

Last year a huge battle erupted in Texas. The state decided to require abortion centers to meet the standards of medical care required of surgical centers and physicians. The abortion industry sent paid operatives into that state to protest the state’s interest in protecting women from substandard care. These operatives used vile words and body waste to express their disdain for the state, for children in the womb and women. Some of them chanted “hail satan” while vilifying the pro-lifers who were praying and singing hymns.

The politics of abortion have prevented these women and others from receiving justice.  The politics of abortion allows callous abortionists to destroy the babies in the womb and their mothers without repercussion. We can no longer allow  “the rights of a life developing in the womb” to “outweigh the rights of the person carrying it, or that she has an obligation once pregnant to provide society with a live, full-term infant” as one pro-abortion supporter bragged. Nor can we continue allowing women, mostly Black, mostly poor, to be destroyed in the name of reproductive rights. It is time to  …let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! (Amos 5:24). Yes, it is time for justice and righteousness to once again prevail – for the babies, for Tonya, for Lakisha.