Re: Saletan's Current Series

[See here.

Update: My original posting is here along with responses to someone who sees what he wants to see.  The responses underline the uneven treatment, including the last one.  The importance of the procedure merits special concern that it is provided without undue burden, more so than many other procedures.

The best situation would be to have neutrality while protecting the right at issue, but that isn't the case now.  If this at times results in less oversight, who's really to blame there?]

The case, Ragsdale v. Turnock, involved an Illinois law that required abortion clinics to meet the same construction, equipment, and personnel standards imposed on outpatient surgery clinics. In the settlement, Illinois clinic representatives accepted sanitation standards, four annual inspections, and a few other requirements. In exchange, the state scrapped a host of exorbitant demands.

Interesting that "the same" rules were required but it took a lawsuit for a settlement to be made that resulted in the state scrapping "a host of exorbitant demands." It leads one to assume that the rules weren't really equally applied. Others have noted the problem, one suggested by this:

Testifying before Grizzle's committee on Dec. 5, clinic owner Patricia Windle explained the providers' fears. She described "the climate of terror" around them: kidnappings, bombings, and burnings. She recalled how some pro-lifers, bent on driving clinics out of business, had pursued ambulances carrying patients with complications. These activists, she alleged, had invaded patients' hospital rooms and pressured them to sue clinics and their doctors for malpractice.

This is not the path to trust, is it? You have state and private actors singling out abortion providers, who in many areas are a rare breed, unlike your average "outpatient surgery clinics." The result is not likely to be pretty. My preference would be to regulate the industry as a medical provider. This would include health insurance (private and governmental) treating it as such. But, it is singled out. And, this results in (totally unsurprising) wariness from providers when regulators come in. Evidence shows that they are not being treated equitably.

The result is problematic.