By Dave Andrusko
It’s easy to come to the conclusion that the media is “out to get” us when no sooner does the Los Angeles Times do a puff piece on one would-be abortionist than the Washington Post uses that as “evidence” there are fewer abortionists because of threats of violence.
Writing for the Post, Sarah Kliff describes a story by the Times’s Jenny Deam as “a fantastic profile of abortion provider Mila Means, who recently opened a clinic in Kansas.”
Kliff attributes the decline in the number of abortionists to threats, particularly in the 1990s, although she also says the number of abortionists has “held steady” in the peaceful 2000s.
Two quick points. First, pro-abortionists have done everything humanly possible to deny the right of conscience to aspiring physicians and to force med schools to teach abortion “techniques.” They have formed organizations dedicated to recruiting medical students and young doctors with the goal of turning their plowshares into swords.
Yet their numbers still have not grown. Maybe there is something else that explains their reluctance to become purveyors of violence. Like the fact that to many doctors (as even abortion advocates admit) abortion is for hacks. Like the fact that abortionists are reluctant to tell their friends what they do, not out of fear, but out of knowledge that even “pro-choicers” blanche in their presence.
Second, it’d be hard to pick a less likely candidate for martyrdom than Mila Means. Kathy Ostrowski wrote about Means yesterday (www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2012/03/hard-to-characterize-these-abortion-providers-as-victims). For starters, the implication in Deam’s Times story—that there are “barriers” to opening an abortion business in Kansas– is flat-out wrong. State health department rules for abortion clinics developed in 2011which Planned Parenthood met– were successfully enjoined by the other two Kansas abortion clinics.
The real reason Means is “waiting,” Ostrowski wrote, perhaps
“has something to do with an extensive, unsettling profile of Means done by Fred Mann of the Wichita Eagle last June (www.kansas.com/2011/06/23/1904507/doctors-plan-for-clinic-continues.html). Mann’s account showed Means to be a 57-year-old, floundering physician in permanent financial hock, whose personal life was in shambles, but who nonetheless claimed she was not embarking upon providing abortions to make money.”
Ostrowski also wrote about Kris Neuhaus, an ex-abortionist facing the imminent loss of her medical license. Neuhaus is often portrayed as a victim.
In fact, just this past week an administrative law ruling revoked her license, subject to Board approval. “Under ordinary circumstances,” Ostrowski wrote, Neuhaus “would already have lost her medical license—first in 1994 due to federal drug agency penalties, and again in 2001, after the Kansas Healing Arts Board twice described her as a ‘danger to the public.’”
In her Times’ story, Deam quotes Elizabeth Nash, who tracks state legislation for the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.
“The turnaround in Kansas is pretty amazing in a short period of time,” she said. Nash “sees Kansas as the centerpiece of a stripe that runs from North Dakota to Oklahoma where abortion is starting to disappear.”
It is “starting to disappear” not out of fear but out of the determination of pro-lifer legislators to do everything allowed by the Supreme Court to put the brakes on the runaway “right” to abortion.
