By Dave Andrusko
Blessings and salutations to the Associated Press for its Freedom of Information request, the results of which “revealed that some facilities [in Illinois] had gone up to 15 years without inspections, and two now have closed after regulators found health and safety violations.”
The revelations are nothing short of shocking, painting a picture of an abortion industry that had long since grown comfortable with not being challenged.
As we reported last week, after having been given a slap on the wrist and given the choice between paying a small fine and closing, the Rockford-based Northern Illinois Women’s Center surprisingly “voluntarily closed.” The Associated Press (AP) reported that last October the Women’s Aid Clinic in Lincolnwood “closed when the owner decided to surrender its license rather than pay a $36,000 fine or endure an expensive legal fight with the state. The fine was for violations including the clinic’s failure to perform CPR on a patient who died after a procedure. Its owner told the AP her clinic was safe and she felt victimized by the surprise inspection after 15 years.”
The AP’s lead is that the revelations surrounding abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s West Philadelphia “house of horrors” explains the greater scrutiny of Illinois’ abortion clinics. And with a backlog of neglected inspections—one in Chicago’s last inspection was 16 years ago, another in a suburb of Wood Dale was last inspected nearly 15 years ago– they will have plenty to do.
State regulators say, the AP reports, “ideology isn’t involved.” Why would there be, unless the ideology was to ignore slothful, dangerous abortion clinics?
As we’ve reported in NRL News Today, Kansas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Utah have tightened up lax inspection standards. The impetus clearly was Gosnell’s clinic “where late-term abortions were routinely performed by untrained staff, and viable newborns died by having their spinal cords cut with scissors,” according to the AP.
What was not known, until the AP’s Freedom of Information request, was that
“Those reports also spurred the Illinois Department of Public Health into action, said Karen Senger, who supervises licensing and regulation of health care facilities in the state. The documents show the state began quietly increasing the inspections of its clinics last year.
“’It was a departmental decision,’ Senger said, adding the Philadelphia case ‘gave us a focus’ and motivation to find out ‘when was the last time we were in these facilities?’”
Last year when Illinois inspectors visited all nine licensed abortion clinics that are defined as pregnancy termination centers (“a category that limits them to first-trimester abortions”), they found they hadn’t been inspected for years, some since the mid-1990s!
But what about centers “that perform more services than first-trimester abortions and are classified as ambulatory surgery centers”? Senger said she didn’t know how many there are of them (local pro-lifers told the AP there are four), but in any event, they weren’t inspected.
The AP reports that there is a third category of facilities which isn’t licensed or inspected in the state—those that “are considered to be similar to doctors’ offices.” And, surprise, surprise, “Planned Parenthood clinics fall into this category.”
The AP interviewed Larissa Rowansky, a co-owner of the Women’s Aid Clinic in Lincolnwood, who told the AP that “her clinic helped women and provided the best care that a professional clinic could provide.”
“But Illinois inspection reports detail citations for practices such as frozen TV dinners stored in a biohazard lab refrigerator that also held placental or fetal tissue,” according to the AP. “The clinic’s dusty equipment, lack of a supervising registered nurse and failure to perform CPR on a patient who later died also drew citations.”
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