By L.A. Williams
Christian Action League
August 6, 2020
Health officials say COVID-19 has killed more than 158,000 people in the United States since late February. During the same time period, abortionists took the lives of an estimated 391,000 babies. And yet, the abortion industry continues to try to circumvent state restrictions to further escalate its war on the unborn.
“There is never enough death, never enough harm done to satisfy these folks, it seems,” said the Rev. Mark Creech, executive director of the Christian Action League. “Even during a pandemic, when many businesses have been closed and most people are doing all they can to protect life, this industry has been full steam ahead with doors wide open to take life. Now, they’re even pushing to be allowed to provide abortions remotely. Think about that for a moment, abortion doctors want to be able to prescribe deadly drugs without once meeting, much less examining, the mothers whose babies they are killing.”
In North Carolina, one of 18 states that does not allow telemedicine abortions, the law requires physicians to consult with patients in person before they can prescribe Mifepristone and Misoprostol, which together produce a miscarriage. But in a recent Fayetteville Observer article, Asheville doctor Julia Oat-Judge said allowing abortion doctors to serve women online would make it easier to accommodate patients’ work schedules and allow them to stay home to lower their risk of contracting COVID-19. She said seeing how easy it is to offer routine patient care remotely made her wonder why abortions couldn’t also be handled that way.
“I think the Asheville doctor misses the point. If you reread Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (which reaffirmed but modified Roe v. Wade), you will discover that the entire predicate for the constitutional right is that there is a doctor/patient relationship such that they can discuss together the decision to abort and include in that pondering the woman’s place in the universe and her life plans,” attorney Paul Stam, North Carolina former House Speaker Pro-Tem, wrote in response to the article. “How does that work with a doctor Skyping from DC or New York with a patient she has never met?”
Stam, a longtime advocate for life, pointed out that the required ultrasound and physical exam are necessary to ensure that the patient is actually pregnant, that the unborn child is not in the fallopian tube, and to determine the gestational age.
Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the NC Values Coalition, said verifying the baby’s age is paramount since chemically-induced abortions are dangerous late in pregnancy. She also asked why abortion clinics should be pushing for permission to use telemedicine when the COVID-19 outbreak hasn’t forced them to close their doors.
“Abortion clinics remained open during the pandemic, despite the closure of almost all other ambulatory surgical centers,” Fitzgerald said. “There has been no limitation on access to abortion.”
Despite that fact, Planned Parenthood announced in April that it is making telehealth available in all 50 states, even though the agency will presumably have to follow individual state laws prohibiting remote abortions.
In North Carolina, during the pandemic, Gov. Roy Cooper banned elective surgeries and non-urgent medical procedures but a special carve-out was created for the abortion industry. In states that tried to put a temporary hold on abortions during escalating virus cases, Planned Parenthood immediately pushed back.
“Planned Parenthood is not only advocating against temporary rules that protect the lives of women and children, preserve medical supplies, and hurt its business model. It’s also using the novel coronavirus as an opportunity to ignore safeguards and push for a boost to its bottom line,” wrote Brittany Jones, policy manager at the Family Policy Alliance and Meridian Baldacci from the Family Policy Alliance on the Pregnancy Help website.
According to Jones and Baldacci, at least two Planned Parenthood locations in Pennsylvania and California went so far as to ask for donations of personal protective equipment such as masks and hand sanitizer.
“At a time when states nationwide were doing all in their power to preserve medical supplies for the front lines, Planned Parenthood was asking for a share of the same supplies to perform abortions,” they wrote.
And while the industry claims to be trying to protect women in the midst of the pandemic, in some areas abortion clinics have taken to social media, encouraging women to travel across state lines to get abortions.
“It’s no surprise that, despite all their claims about caring for women and women’s health, abortion providers are about one thing and that’s abortion,” Creech said.