Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has signed into law a measure that treats abortion clinics just like other medical facilities in the state, making them subject to the same health and safety inspection standards, including spontaneous inspections.
The Women’s Health Protection Act (HB 2284) requires abortion clinics to be subject to the same safety and inspection standards as all other health care institutions. In addition, the legislation makes it a crime to help a minor obtain an abortion and avoid Arizona’s parental consent requirement.
The Center for Arizona Policy, which helped write the new law, was influenced last year by pro-life organization Live Action when it released the video below showing a Phoenix abortion clinic potentially violating Arizona law and regulations concerning such clinics. In the video, an abortionist admitted that if an infant survives an abortion, nothing is done to try to save that baby’s life even though Arizona law requires doctors to “use all available means and medical skills…to promote, preserve, and maintain the life” of that child.
The Women’s Health Protection Act was introduced by Arizona state Rep. Debbie Lesko (R), the majority whip.
“I’m thrilled that the governor signed my legislation to protect women’s health,” Lesko said in an email statement to Breitbart News. “Arizona’s abortion clinics will finally be brought up to the same health standards as every other health facility in the entire state. This is a win for women and a win for Arizona.”
In an interview with Breitbart News, Josh Kredit, legal counsel to Center for Arizona Policy, said the law makes “common sense changes” that will place greater value on the health and safety of women going into abortion clinics. Kredit observed that, as was discovered during the trial of convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell, many politicians in the state of Pennsylvania found it politically advantageous to ignore reports of the horrific and unsanitary conditions at Gosnell’s clinic that led to its title of “house of horrors.”
“During the Gosnell trial, opponents said, ‘Don’t inject politics into the situation,'” Kredit said. “Well, it’s politics that led to the horrors in Gosnell’s clinic. We want to prevent that by making sure abortion clinics are treated no differently than other medical facilities in the state.”
Though pro-abortion groups and media continually refer to abortion as “women’s reproductive health care,” they were unsupportive of Arizona’s attempt to increase the health and safety of women in the state’s abortion clinics, and the potential opportunity to prevent future Gosnell situations.
Supporters of Planned Parenthood Arizona, which, in December, recorded a video in which members changed the words of the Christmas song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” to “The Twelve Days of Contraception,” protested the bill and the Center for Arizona Policy (CAP).
“CAP believes that you and I don’t have any core values,” said Bryan Howard, president of Planned Parenthood Arizona. “And so they believe that they should impose their dogma on us.”
“This is a dictatorship; make no mistake about it,” said Kat Sabine, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Arizona.
Writing at the Huffington Post, Rita Nakashima Brock, Ph.D., co-founder of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School, said Arizona’s new law has “instituted warrantless surprise searches of abortion clinics, even though abortion is one of the safest medical procedures women use in the United States…”
Regarding supporters of the new law, Brock said, “Their alleged intention to help women and save fetuses is polite cover for their nefarious goal of restoring the white supremacist patriarchal culture of the Jim Crow south.”
However, Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, said, “Abortion clinic inspections matter, and it is unconscionable that they would be exempt from common-sense health and safety standards.”
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