Maine's Governor Proposes Bill Permitting Nurses to Perform Abortions

Nurse’s salaries are about $70k/year for an experienced nurse, PAs get around $100k, and family practice physicians get about $190k. Obstetricians, about $250k or more. There are about 1500-1800 abortionists nationwide doing about 700,000 surgical abortions each year at a cost (excepting late term) of about $500 or so apiece. So more or less, the revenue from abortion per practicioner just about pays the doctor’s salary and benefits, but nothing to cover anesthesia, nurse, clinic, and the like. This is a brazen attempt to expand the pool of people who will perform this procedure and keep clinics open if/when federal and state subsidies are cut.

And keep in mind here that we are talking about a surgical procedure here that will at times result in excessive bleeding that needs to be sutured almost instinctively—you really need someone who is trained in surgery to do it safely for the mother (though obviously not the child). Authorizing nurses, NPs/PAs, and the like to do this is a recipe for getting women killed and maimed.

For reference, my source on the # of abortionists and average cost of a prenatal infanticide is Planned Parenthood’s Guttmacher Institute. Sadly, the specific links have disappeared since I blogged about it a few years back, but the long and short of it is that fiscally, legal abortion is skating on thin ice except in towns with large D1 universities (I’m talking 25-30k and bigger) and cities with over half a million people. That’s the (usually unspoken) backdrop of almost all of our debates about abortion restrictions. So any significant regulations on prenatal infanticide abbatoirs, cuts in subsidies, or becoming ineligible to provide Medicaid services, will tend to result in a LOT of clinics closing.

That’s also why there is a push to protect late term abortions, though they’re never medically necessary; they cost a lot more. But if you require care (say the kind of NICU you’ll find at hospitals named “Children’s” all around the country) for those born alive, that model doesn’t work anymore.