A health care provider’s take on the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence

[Today’s guest post is by Clare Farrell.]

I have been a health care provider for over 30 years, first as a registered nurse and for

the last 15 years, as a nurse practitioner. For most of my nursing career, I worked in

either a hospital based operating room setting or an ambulatory surgical setting. Both

hospitals and ambulatory surgical facilities are highly regulated by the state, with

tremendous oversight, including annual and surprise on-site inspections by state health

department authorities. There are quite literally thousands of regulations governing the

operation of these facilities, which range from how instruments are sterilized to what the

floors are washed with to how the doctors and nurses are vetted and how surgical

consents are obtained. Facilities that fail to meet the state standards face penalties that

range from fines, to loss of Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement, to closure in the most

egregious cases.

If you need your hammertoe repaired, or you need a colonoscopy, your procedure will

be performed in one of these facilities. You will be in a facility with clean floors and

sterilized equipment and licensed and uncensored physicians who explain your

procedure and the associated risks and obtain legal consent. And if you have a miscarriage,

otherwise known as a ʻspontaneous abortionʼ to clinicians, your dilation and curettage procedure will likely be performed

in one of these facilities.

But if you are a frightened young woman confronted with an unplanned

pregnancy? Thanks to the Supreme Court’s disappointing recent decision, you may find yourself in an abortion facility does not meet the same standards required of the facility that

can fix your crooked toes. And in the event of a complication, don’t expect continuity of care, since states can no longer require abortionists to hold hospital admitting privileges. The Supreme Court, in its brilliant wisdom, has simply legalized abortion and walked away.

Truly, HB2 never had a chance.

If we, as a society, can legalize the physical destruction of the unborn child within its

motherʼs womb, why would we need to regulate it? Perhaps the take-away from the Supreme Court decision is that there is no real way to “regulate” the

murder of the unborn. There is no way to oversee it, or make it cleaner, or more

sanitary, or safer. Are abortion-minded women really much better off today than they were before Roe v. Wade?