4 pro-life reactions to Supreme Court blocking Louisiana's abortion clinic law

I had to look up the reasons for admitting privileges, and more or less, it’s an additional layer of certification by which hospitals and insurers hope to winnow out the bad doctors—those doctors with problems at hospitals where they work are going to be denied admitting privileges the next two year cycle.

The “rub” comes, I believe, when you have a region where the vast majority of hospitals are church affiliated. The abortionist comes to Baptist Hospital or St. Luke’s Hospital, applies for admitting privileges, and will hopefully be flat out rejected. All of a sudden, you’ve got a situation where no abortionist outside a big metro area with big secular/government hospitals can continue to practice.

Now the question is whether this would make things any safer for mothers in abortion clinics, and while I’m 100% pro-life, I think the answer is no. In the Bible belt, you’re going to have most of the state refusing privileges to abortionists no matter what their skills, along with a few in the big cities who are going to get admitting privileges from County Hospital no matter how bad they are. And in that light, we were basically leading with our chins, begging the courts to find that admitting privileges work differently for abortionists than most other specialties—which they did.

To win this one, pro-life activsts more or less need to persuade themselves and their neighbors both to not support subsidies for Planned Parenthood (because it keeps abortuaries open that otherwise would close), and not to do business with abortionists, even in non-abortion related medical care. In short, tell the abortionists that they can commit abortion, or they can practice medicine, but they cannot do both.

And when the country sees the real nature and cost of abortion, once its subsidies are removed, the door just might be open to ban abortion outright.

It strikes me that what we might be able to do is to take a close look at how states certify doctors, and see if you could duplicate or even improve what the hospital admitting privilege process tends to do. That noted, the gap in safety for abortionists seems to be mostly that basic sanitation and capability protocols are not enforced, not that abortionists are typically “fly by night” actors who use gaps in credentialing to escape scrutiny. Most of those whose names get to the press have practiced for decades in the same area, like Kermit Gosnell and Warren Hern.