Part 1: How the politics of abortion protects bad clinics

Kermit Gosnell and abortion clinic regulation: Did pro-choice politics protect him? - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine: At the root of the state's lax oversight, pro-choice legal scholars see a failure to recognize abortion as health care. 'By and large, our policymakers have never viewed abortion as a medical procedure—instead placing it under the Pennsylvania Criminal Code—and therefore haven't nurtured a system of abortion care that is woman-focused,' write Carol Tracy and Susan Frietsche of the Philadelphia-based Women's Law Project. 'The commonwealth's focus has been on denying access, not protecting the health and safety of women who need this medical care.' The Department of Health's legal analysis illustrates this mentality. The department assumes—wrongly, in the grand jury's view—that since abortion clinics are regulated under their own subsection of Pennsylvania law, they're immune to dozens of pages of rules that apply to ambulatory surgical facilities.

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