Nebraska state Senator Megan Hunt has introduced a bill to allow non-physicians to commit abortions. Hunt hasn’t been shy about prioritizing her friends at Planned Parenthood. The abortion behemoth, in turn, regularly praises Hunt in social media posts like this, this, this, and this. Hunt’s latest stunt, Legislative Bill 276, would ensure that women are even more endangered from undergoing abortion in the state of Nebraska than they already are, following in the footsteps of states like California and now Hawaii that also prioritize Planned Parenthood’s needs over women’s safety.
If Planned Parenthood gets its way, LB 276 will remove the requirement (under penalty of felony) that a physician carry out abortions. Physician requirements don’t prevent babies from being killed, but only govern who can do the killing. They exist as a women’s safety measure, making it puzzling to some why the purportedly “pro-woman” abortion lobby would oppose them. The reality is that anti-abortion advocates care about the health and safety of both children and women — and champion protections for both — while abortion industry is concerned with only their profit margins.
Nebraska’s Planned Parenthood demonstrated its antipathy toward women when it allegedly sold abortion drugs to a rapist posing as his pregnant victim’s father (which should not have been possible under the verification measures mandated by Nebraska’s parental consent law). According to the Omaha World-Herald, the teen told police that her abuser, a school janitor, “pretended to be her father and took her to Planned Parenthood to obtain an abortion pill, something that later was corroborated by medical records.” Failing abuse victims and breaking the law is Planned Parenthood’s established M.O.
The abortion industry wants to strike down the physician requirement because it’s difficult for them to find healers who are willing to kill. And that is exactly what abortion requires a physician to do. Abortion is an act of heinous violence using drugs and devices to artificially interrupt pregnancy and kill a child growing inside his mother’s body. Convincing a doctor to use his skillset to kill his patients is asking him to discard the entire body of Hippocratic healing principles that formed him, and that’s no easy ask. By tearing down women’s safety provisions, the abortion industry yields a whole new field of less-trained candidates to do their bloody business.
Name another surgery for which we are trying to downgrade the health and safety standards and licensing requirements for a medical free-for-all. Does the abortion lobby propose that we get rid of doctors across the board so that all kinds of people can engage in all kinds of procedures? Do we really need to be sure that dentists are cleaning their equipment through regular inspections or that out-patient plastic surgeons have had supervised surgical training? Such requirements, even if annoying to unscrupulous practitioners, are for the safety of patients. Changing medical standards because finding and hiring physicians is expensive or inconvenient for a profitable business puts patients at risk. The most basic goal of public healthcare policy is to make sure that people survive their encounters with those who want to make a sale.
Sure, it might be easier for abortion vendors to hire less-skilled individuals to carry out abortions. It would be cheaper and enlarge their employee pool. But that's not a valid reason to do it. Groups like the “Reproductive Health Access Project” go as far as hosting workshops to teach anyone who is interested how to carry out an abortion by practicing on papayas. Using fruit to teach people off the street how to perform an act that is dangerous to women and deadly to children encapsulates the abortion lobby’s utter lack of concern for the lives and wellbeing of patients. And if physicians with specialized obstetrical and surgical training are irrelevant to abortion, why are we stopping at abortion and not changing standards for all complex procedures?
Planned Parenthood has no problem placing the bodies of Nebraska women — or any women — at the mercy of non-physician staff. The abortion industry kills children for money; that’s why it exists. To expect Planned Parenthood and its ilk to not sacrifice mothers when it sacrifices 972 children a day could only stem from profound cognitive dissonance. We should not expect better from this industry and those, like Megan Hunt, working to prop it up. Keeping physician requirement in place is a bare minimum protection that should garner bipartisan support from all who claim to care about the wellbeing of women.
Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America and SFLAction, with more than 1,250 groups primarily on college and university campuses in all 50 states, including 24 in Nebraska. Follow her @KristanHawkins and subscribe to her podcast, Explicitly Pro-Life.
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