updated: LOUISIANA IS ABOUT TO CLOSE ITS ABORTION CLINICS AND NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT IT

EDIT 1/29/14: DATE AND ROOM CHANGE -- the hearing is now TUESDAY, FEB 4 AT 1PM, Room 173. Email fight4RJLA@gmail.com for info or to get more involved.


Oh, Lawd. I am online bright and early to share this news uncovered by some fellow abortioneers in Louisiana. It's scary and needs immediate attention, so please forgive this hasty reblog (from the folks at New Orleans Abortion Fund, with their permission) and take action quickly: show up for the hearing on Wednesday, or write a letter/email for DHH by Tuesday -- see details in purple below.
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URGENT: Hearing on "backdoor abortion ban," new clinic regulations in Louisiana

It may not be easy to get excited over 21 pages of Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals regulations, but you'll want to hear about this!

Just before Thanksgiving, the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) issued new "emergency" regulations that overhauled the existing regulations on abortion clinics. These 21 pages of rules give DHH the authority to immediately shut down a clinic without opportunity for appeal, even for simple infractions. Clinics have stated that they would be unable to meet the burdensome and excessive requirements, and this would lead to the closure of all five clinics in Louisiana.

DHH's new regulations are another manifestation of the "TRAP" (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws that are sweeping the country. They represent an effective ban on abortion, especially for the low-income women that NOAF serves, who cannot afford to travel. Here are some examples of new provisions:

• Patients must have documented in their charts that hemoglobin and Rh factor lab tests were performed at least 30 days prior to the abortion procedure. This means that some patients will risk being beyond the 20 week deadline in Louisiana (and earlier than that at most clinics) to have an abortion, and will add to the procedure costs for all patients, as they will have to wait an additional month.
• Each clinic who is applying for a new license must submit a "certificate of need" to the State proving the need for their services. In many other circumstances, such as any change to the location or the ownership of an existing clinic, existing clinics must apply for a brand-new license and (re-)satisfy the certificate of need requirement. The subjective nature of these requirements allows the State to severely restrict new licenses and will provide the State with a mechanism for refusing to allow existing clinics to renew their licenses to operate.
• There is no right to appeal deficiencies to any unbiased body outside of the Department of Health and Hospitals. Therefore, every deficiency that a clinic is cited with will be allowed to stand, and those deficiencies are often later used to revoke a clinic’s license on the basis of being a “repeat” offender.
• The new regulations require that all facilities have very specific square footage requirements that are far larger than any currently operating abortion facility. They would be prohibitively expensive to construct, and the requirements have no medical necessity. If the regulations are allowed to go into effect, no clinic will be in compliance on the day the regulations are implemented, and the State will have the ability to shut down every existing abortion clinic in the State.

These regulations were originally enacted without public comment and with no clear indication of need. There will finally be a hearing on Tuesday, February 4 at 1:00pm in Room 173 of the Bienville Building, 628 North 4th Street in Baton Rouge. The New Orleans Abortion Fund and members of allied organizations will be testifying and presenting written comments from advocates, providers, and women who have recently obtained abortions at affected clinics at the public hearing.

The people of Louisiana need your support! Please consider attending this hearing and/or submitting written comments. We have created talking points and a sample letter [PDFs]. Feel free to copy and paste (and re-format if needed!), but please consider adding your personal thoughts.

Hearing details:

Wednesday, January 29, 2014 at 9:30am - get there early; we are packing the place!

Bienville Building, Room 118, 628 North 4th Street, Baton Rouge, LA 70802
NOTE: NOAF and our allies are wearing purple!

If you cannot attend the hearing, we can print and hand-deliver your written comments at the hearing -- you MUST include your full name and address. Email your letter to abortionfundnola@gmail.com by Monday, February3 at 8:00pm CST. 



Thank you! Together, we can fight back!

Even sadder times: Bad doctors, system failures, lost lives

Terrible news. Kermit Gosnell has made the news again. You might remember, we wrote about him in March when his medical office was discovered to be practicing abortion in improper ways and under unsafe conditions.

Now he has been charged with multiple counts of murder. I'm warning you, the story is long, sad and gross; also, both the article and the grand jury report have some unsourced descriptions and apparent speculation. But ignore those and the allegations are still clear. Investigators say that some of the wrongdoings are too old to press charges or too many files have been destroyed to amass sufficient evidence; nevertheless, from the evidence they did gather, they're charging Gosnell and several other people with the deaths of seven prematurely-delivered infants and one woman who sought his services. In fact, because of how much the piece (and all the headlines and abbreviated news pieces going around) lingers on the dead newborns, it's easy to miss the few lines mentioning that he and his staff caused the deaths of at least two women and injuries for many others.

Gosnell's lawyer, while maintaining that everyone's innocent until proven guilty and the case must have its day in court etc, also apparently attempted to mitigate Gosnell's actions by saying he "served patients in a low-income city neighborhood for decades." Would he really have us believe this is what serving the underserved looks like? It's not even like this happened in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming. It's west Philly. It's devastating that society, our insurance system and Medicaid laws, state regulators and medical services have abandoned some women to a situation where they can't obtain the safe, legal and ethical care available a few miles from them. The other side of the tracks may as well be the other side of the world.

Another stupid thing to say:

State regulators ignored complaints about Gosnell and the 46 lawsuits filed against him, and made just five annual inspections, most satisfactory, since the clinic opened in 1979. The inspections stopped completely in 1993 because of what prosecutors said was the pro-abortion rights attitude that set in after Democratic Gov. Robert Casey, an abortion foe, left office.

It strikes me as fucked up and crazy that someone would blame this disaster on a "pro-abortion rights attitude." No pro-choice person wants women to be injured and killed because they sought abortions! In fact, many people are pro-choice because they're aware that women risking injury and death is part of the status quo for most times and places in which abortion is illegal. If there were actually a pro-abortion-rights attitude in Pennsylvania government, they'd have been collaborating with experts who actually care about improving the quality of abortion care.

In fact, if more states did exactly that, then we wouldn't have situations like this in Pennsylvania on the one hand, and state agencies like Louisiana's shutting down clinics for no cause simply to prevent abortions on the other hand. (As Robin Rothrock -- RIP -- said at that time, "No one in their right mind would think the state of Louisiana is interested in quality abortion care. It is interesting that the state sees itself as an expert on these issues when it does not provide any such care, and when it prohibits use of any public dollars for abortion care, including training.")

The most frustrating, haunting thing in all of this is summed up by an excerpt from the March article:

More than a decade ago, CHOICE, a Philadelphia abortion referral service, contacted the state medical board about Gosnell because some of his patients had called CHOICE with appalling stories, said Brenda Green, the organization's executive director. "We were told that we could not file a complaint. It had to be a patient. It could not be a third party," Green said.

Reproductive health activists and Gilbert Abramson, a lawyer who filed the 2008 case that was later dropped, said they urged Gosnell's patients to file complaints with the state. But when the women learned that they would have to provide medical records and other forms, plus attend a hearing in Harrisburg, they changed their minds.

As Rob wrote at Abortion Gang yesterday, states keep getting the oversight wrong. Many states harass providers baselessly. Yet Gosnell was a concern of pro-choice advocates and case managers for years, but the medical board said only an actual patient could file a complaint. Apparently, the state can pursue an abortion clinic relentlessly and routinely without a particular basis, but review of a doctor in private practice (any doctor, not just an abortion provider) must be prompted by a patient. If this is true (confirm, anyone?), I just don't understand it.