Philadelphia abortion clinic scandal spreads to Delaware and Louisiana

Abbie Waters blogs about reproductive health and fertility clinics at FertilityNation.com

Previously I’ve written about Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the “doctor” charged with seven first-degree murder charges related to the deaths of seven babies, and one third-degree murder in the death of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, a woman from Nepal. His office was filthy and he employed high school dropouts to assist him with medical procedures. Yeah, nic

One of the most shocking revelations came from the grand jury probe, which revealed that “Pennsylvania health officials deliberately chose not to enforce laws to ensure that abortion clinics provide the same level of care as other medical service providers.”

Pennsylvania, under GOP governor Tom Ridge, decided that regulating women’s health clinics was not something they wanted to do, so they effectively de-regulated them, allowing a monster like Gosnell to work undetected for years.

Now comes word that a second clinic he worked in part-time, located in Delaware, may have been run as poorly as the one in Philadelphia:

The owner of Atlantic Women’s Medical Center in Delaware — who employed the West Philadelphia abortion doctor facing murder charges for killing infants who were delivered alive — also owns an abortion clinic in Louisiana that in 2009 was cited for a list of health and safety violations.

And guess what other state refuses to oversee women’s health clinics? Delaware.

Yet Delaware regulators cannot say if Atlantic Women’s Medical Center — where Gosnell worked one day a week for a number of years — suffers from similar health and safety deficiencies because abortion providers are not subject to the kind of routine sanitary and safety inspections that restaurants, beauty salons and tattoo parlors get.

Abortion clinics do not fall under the definition of medical facilities in the state that require routine inspections, like free-standing surgery centers, according to the Delaware Division of Public Health.

Wow. I guess these politicians who refuse to oversee abortion clinics think that women seeking abortions get what’s coming to them. After all, they’re just women.