Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has twice vetoed bills that would single out abortion clinics for special regulations, sending a message last year that she’d sign one that applied to all the state’s surgical centers. But House lawmakers gutted such a bill this week and turned it into the same old anti-abortion bill, as if forcing Sebelius into another veto mattered more than actually trying to make abortion clinics safer. As our editorial notes on today’s opinion pages, “they also ignored an excellent point that Rep. Nancy Kirk, D-Topeka, was trying to make with her broader bill — that as the nature of health care continues to change, the Legislature needs to ensure that there is sufficient oversight of the multiplying number of clinics that do office-based surgeries.” As it is, some lawmakers seem more interested in abortion politics as usual.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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35 Comments
All it would take to end abortion would be for everyone to act like real adults. Everyone has sex, young, old and in between. Once we as a species excepts that then we can control it.
While it seems blatantly dishonest to pass laws singling out abortions clinics for special regulations in an attempt to shut them down or at least cost them thousands of dollars to comply…I can sort of see where they’re coming from. If I thought something was really morally wrong, I would do everything in my power to try and curb it, even if I had to lie about my intentions.
That said, if I ever need my gallbladder taken out, I would really hope that Surgicare or Center For Same Day Surgery would be held to standards like being audited every 5 years. Really, what harm could come of that?
The problem with a lot of these abortion-clinic targeted bills is that they often consist of regualtions like “water fountain streams must be X inches high” or other unimportant fluff. I wouldn’t want Surgicare shelling out money on water fountains when they could be spending that money on equipment and staff pay.
I think it’s funny that we act all shocked–SHOCKED– that the sole intention of these regulation bills are to harrass abortion clinics under the transparent claim of protecting patients. Well, duh. People who are anti-abortion will fight it anyway they can.
I think every abortionist should be required to go hunting with Dick Cheney one day a year.
Actually.. there should be minimum standards for EVERY clinic in the state that performs any kind of surgical procedure.
Sam,In fact, there are.
Tara,”…I can sort of see where they’re coming from. If I thought something was really morally wrong, I would do everything in my power to try and curb it, even if I had to lie about my intentions.”
What you are saying is that it’s moral to commit an immoral act if it is against something immoral. The end justifies the means?
I still say that if all women who support choice just stopped having sex with men until abortion was safe and legal in all 50 states, it would take about five minutes to get all those laws passed. Come on girls…no one knows what goes on in your bedrooms, or behind the voting booth curtains.
Well, actually, no one knows about your bedroom stuff except phill kline.
The Lysistrata approach. Time tested. However, a lot of women are pro-life. I’ve even seen myself become less passionately pro-choice(yeah, hard to believe) as I have been in relationships where I could imagine having children, even unintended ones. Of course, I always will be pro-choice because I remember what it was like to be 16, to still have college ahead of me, to make stupid choices and to be overly idealistic about love, and I have seen my students in sexual relationships and not prepared for it. Unfortunately, making sure that where you have an abortion is more carefully regulated than where you have any other day surgery doesn’t really seem to help.
gee allie, do ya think all the “pro-choice” men could stop having…oh never mind.
Hey Farm Gal,Your blanket (on the couch) approach is damned unfair to all us pro-choice guys! And besides, I’ve seen a lot of them anti men, and I’ll bet they weren’t getting all that much to begin with!
lol jed…I’m just sayin….
Allie,Try to remember that pro-choice is exactly that. You can still choose to have a child, and that child will be a product of love rather than stupidity. Better for the mother, better for the child.
The laws of natureIf our legislators had any guts at all they would define “when it is human?” and settle this never ending squabble.As many of you already know, due to nature’s metamorphosis, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, a cut worm becomes a moth, a tadpole becomes a frog, a grub worm becomes a June bug and a sperm from a human male has a chance of becoming a human.A caterpillar is not a butterfly, a cut worm is not a moth, a tadpole is not a frog, a grub worm is not a June bug and a sperm from a human is not a human. In fact, after conception, it is nothing more then a loveable parasite in a human female’s body, sucking life from this host body. It will continue to suck life from this host body until it either dies in the womb or the umbilical cord is cut. Until that time (the cord is cut), based on the law of nature, it cannot be called human.
Up North,You could take it even further, and say they aren’t human until they leave home. Anyone raising tennagers would agree!
Make that “teenagers.”
Jed,I know, and I thank my mother for both being pro-choice and choosing a good time to have me. However, I do understand how women lose the pro-choice views of their youth, when it no longer matters as much and they know the joys of having a wanted child at the right time. Youth and age just have different idealisms. It is why we need more than just the women for whom abortion really matters being pro-choice. Thus, I thank pro-choice guys like you.
Sad to know that if abortion is made illegal it will not stop abortions. It will stop medically safe procedures, but not abortions.
Allie,One of the most pro-choice women I ever knew was a 94 year-old teacher who had an abortion in 1930. She was secretly married, because the school board only hired unmarried women teachers, since married women had no business working outside the home. She went on to have two of the most talented and wonderful sons I’ve ever known, and was the most influential teacher I ever had!
“What you are saying is that it’s moral to commit an immoral act if it is against something immoral. The end justifies the means?”
I’m not saying it’s moral. Just saying that I can see it from that point of view. To pro-life people, abortion really, truly is murder…it would make sense that they have the mindset of “little white lie=less evil than the abortions happening everyday”.
I remember being disgusted with Operation Rescue and I went to their website. I think it said, “Is abortion murder? If so, WHY AREN’T YOU ACTING LIKE IT?”After reading that, they still disgust me, but I guess I can understand. Not agree, but understand.
The right is only concerned about medical procedures and clinics as pertains to their particular “morality”
Something out of place in a pro choice clinic? Shut that sucker down!
What? Doctor cut off your left arm? What is that you say? Your right arm was infected? You think the Dr might have been drunk? Oh shut up and suck it up.
All it would take to end abortion is if men castrated themselves and women had their tubes tied. THERE! NO MORE ABORTION ARGUMENTS!
JR it’s called “tort reform” isnt it?
Rapt,Years ago, I knew a chiropractor here in town, whose practice was almost exclusively performing illegal abortions. He, and three of his friends were performing about half again as many abortions a year as are being done here now, and there were also doctors and nurses who did them part-time, as well as a few butchers in back alleys for the poorest women. Of course, some of these were in times when condoms were illegal in Kansas, or when the pill was being withheld from unmarried women.Roe v. Wade, thankfully, put this guy and his friends out of business- not that he was bad at it after decades with a curette and dialators- but he had no medical back-up when things went sour. I have no idea how many women bled to death rather than go to an ER, where they were subject to arrest, but I know some did. I, for one, don’t wish to go back to those bad old days!
It’s called selective justice. “Tort reform” is the label they use to say “we are right and everyone else is wrong because we say so and God tells us it is right”
Very interesting and TELLING. More inspections demanded of abortion clinics….less accountability (liability) for the medical and pharmaceutical industries at large.
Oh but it IS all part of the bush ownership society! Unplanned pregnancy? It’s all yours! You got raped in a bed, now sleep in it! Victim of malpractice? You chose that doctor! It was your choice! Deal with it!
Killng babies is a dirty business, but it should to be done in a sterile environment. I remember George Tiller once said he wanted anyone who came to his clinic to have “a first class experience”. He even offered coupons for 15% off the precedure if a woman had it done by a certain date. Amazing (and sad)! To some it’s no different than buying a bag of potatoes.
Da,That’s because the pro-abortionists have effectively de-humanized the human fetus in their twisted minds.
Da,”To some it’s no different than buying a bag of potatoes.”I’ve sat with these women and listened to their stories. It’s almost never done casually. These are women who are at or near the end of their ropes.
Yeah, and I’ve sat a listened to women who made impulsive decisions out of desperation and regretted it their entire life. That’s what I hate most about this issue, it’s not a woman’s nature to end the life of her offspring. Men can walk away from it so much easier, but women often have a different experience. I can’t count the number of women I know that can tell you exactly how old the child would be and wonder what it would be like had they chose not to abort. I know that’s not the case with everyuone, but that’s the case with a lot of woman I know as friends and that I’ve worked with professionally.Abortion is a quick solution to a temporary problem, but often it’s the easy decision that’s the hardest to live with afterwards.
Da,The vast majority of women I’ve talked to felt nothing but relief. The people you deal with are all troubled- stands to reason you’d see PASS more often, but trying to extrapolate that to the population as a whole would be a mistake. I find it interesting that the people who scream the most about PASS are the ones doing their damnedest to produce that guilt!
It seems that the tolerant Dutch are becoming less so. I wonder if most “pro-choice” Americans are aware of the racial philosophies of Margaret Sanger?
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
Marianne van den AnkerA health official in the Netherlands has called for a debate on the idea of forced abortion and contraception to deal with what she sees as a crisis of unwanted children.
Alderman Marianne van den Anker of the Leefbaar Rotterdam Party wants specifically to target communities of Antilleans and Arubans where she sees the biggest problems of unwanted childrenHer comments have stirred protest by a health foundation working with those communities in Rotterdam. The group, which called the comments degrading, is asking Mayor Ivo Opstelten and other politicians to distance themselves from Van den Anker’s views.
Van den Anker is a mother of two children and the official in charge of Rotterdam’s health and security portfolios.
In an interview in a newspaper Saturday, she said she had tried everything to prevent child abuse.
“I fail, I fail,” she told the interviewer as she outlined her controversial idea for a debate on compulsory abortion and contraception.
The target groups for her program are Antillean teenage mothers; drug addicts and people with mental handicaps, she said, according to a report in Expatica.
According to the report, Van den Anker said children from these groups run an “unacceptable risk” of growing up without love and with “violence, neglect, mistreatment and sexual abuse.”"The exceptions,” she said, “and there are some, can be counted on a pair of hands.”
Van den Anker pointed to the growing number of Antillean youth gangs in Rotterdam whose members come from loveless homeshttp://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48930
Viva La Raza Blanco!!
Jed, Women I know who have experienced an abortion are not neccessarily troubled. Many of my good friends have been through the experience and for years after the fact have lived with pain and/or regret, even if they feel that it was the right decision at the time. It’s not like having a tooth pulled, no matter how much the prochoice side wants to protray it as such. That side of the issue is downplayed a lot by those in your camp, but the reality of abortion is much more complicated than the right of a woman to “control her body”. I’ve lived too long and I know better, for most women it’s a choice that must be lived with for life, and not an easy one to sweep away and forget about.The thing I’ve noticed is that those who insist that abortion trama is mostly a myth, are not the same ones who have experienced one.I respect your opinion and I know in your heart that you are sincere, but the issue is not so simple.I believe that sometimes an abortion is the proper choice, but that doesn’t negate the feelings of loss that a woman often experiences afterward.
Damoon..And a little talked about fact is that the father of the aborted baby has to deal with that fact the rest of his life as well. It may take years before he even knows or understands what he has done, but nonetheless, the deed cannot be retracted.
My brother still carries the guilt and remorse from the abortion his then girlfriend had more than 25 yrs ago. He felt helpless and depressed, then became very involved in the Right to Life movement. When you see the sign that says “What does an abortion cost? A human life”, he was the one who did the illustration.He has had to carry the burden, also.
Sam,I imagine that can happen, but many of those same men drag their heels when ordered to pay child support. And many men accompany their wives to the clinic and are very supportive and involved in the decision. Each case is different, so generalizations about what people feel about their abortions isn’t helpful. They are the ones in their shoes, and should make their own decisions.
True Jed, but whatever decision a person makes, they better be prepared to live with it for the rest of their life. There are no “do overs”.