We Need Clinic Regulations

 

 

Kermit Gosnell Grand Jury Excerpts: “If oversight agencies expect to prevent future Dr. Gosnells, they must find the fortitude to enact and enforce the necessary regulations. Rules must be more than words on paper”

By Dave Andrusko
The jury of seven women and five men has convicted abortionist Kermit Gosnell of three counts of first-degree murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter. We promised you earlier this week that we would include the final section of the Grand Jury’s “Overview” section, which deftly summarized all that these dedicated men and women discovered and recommended. By talking about what needed to be done, the Grand Jury illuminates what had gone so awfully, awfully wrong.
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What to do
If oversight agencies expect to prevent future Dr. Gosnells, they must find the fortitude to enact and enforce the necessary regulations. Rules must be more than words on paper.
We recommend that the Pennsylvania Department of Health plug the hole it has created for abortion clinics. They should be explicitly regulated as ambulatory surgical facilities, so that they are inspected annually and held to the same standards as all other outpatient procedure centers. Inspectors should review patient files, including ultrasound images, on site. Equipment, and employees’ licenses, should be scrutinized. Second trimester abortions should be performed or supervised by physicians board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology.

The Pennsylvania Department of State must repair its review process. Complaints should be taken by internet and telephone, and patients should be assured of confidentiality and a response when the investigation is completed. No complaint should be dismissed until the subject’s full history of prior complaints has been considered, and malpractice databases have been examined. Reports about individual doctors should be cross-checked against reports about the medical offices where they have worked, and vice versa.
The Philadelphia Department of Public Health should do at least as much to control infectious medical waste as it does to inspect swimming pools and beauty parlors.

Statutory changes are necessary as well. Infanticide and third-trimester abortion are serious crimes. The two-year statute of limitations currently applicable for these offenses is inadequate to their severity. The limitations period for late abortion should be extended to five years; infanticide, like homicide, should have none. Impersonating a physician is also a serious, and potentially very dangerous, act. Yet under current law it is not a crime at all. An appropriate criminal provision should be enacted. There may also be other statutory and regulatory revisions that we, as lay people, have not thought to consider. Legislative hearings may be appropriate to further examine these issues.


We recognize that these relatively technical recommendations will be unsatisfying to those fighting the abortion battle. “Pro-choice” advocates will argue that the real solution is government-funded abortion. “Pro-lifers” will see the case as an indictment of all legalized abortion.

We must leave these broader questions to others; our authority as a grand jury is more limited. But we exercise its full extent by recommending the maximum response available under the criminal law: murder charges. If you willfully disregard a deadly risk to the mother’s life, and kill her, you will be charged with murder. If you deliver a viable baby, born alive, and kill it, you will be charged with murder. That prospect may make doctors more careful about performing abortions, especially abortions approaching the legal limit. We hope so.

Source: NRLC News