By Dave Andrusko
Let’s hear it for open-records request. The Washington Examiner thought to inquire of abortion clinics in Virginia if their Doomsday prediction had panned out—that as a result of the state’s new commonsense requirements, abortion clinics were forced to close right and left. (As you may remember, the law applies to those performing five or more first-trimester abortions a month.)
Of course, the answer is no. The Examiner reports that
“Twenty of the 23 facilities affected by the new rules have already informed the state that they meet those new standards or would make the necessary changes to comply”
and
“Of the other three that didn’t apply for a license, one already stopped providing abortions and two others didn’t have to meet the new standards because they plan to perform fewer than five first-trimester abortions a month.”
“We didn’t get anything that said, ‘This was the end for us,’ said Erik Bodin, of the state Health Department’s Office of Licensure and Certification,” reported the Examiner’s Steve Contorno. “The health department will now conduct on-site inspections and review the compliance plans.”
Faced with the facts that they had peddled panic, abortionists pushed Armageddon off into the future. “It wasn’t a veiled threat at all,” Tarina Keene, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia, protested to the Examiner. “All of these clinics are trying to do what they can to meet these regulations, but we don’t know what’s going to happen yet.”
So the next dodge is to say that future renovations could cost clinics between $150,000 and $3 million each, according to Keene. Of course, she could have said the renovations could cost $10 million each.
But the public sees through all this. Last fall we wrote about a Quinnipiac University poll that found that there was an overwhelming 55% to 22% response in favor of “tougher abortion rules” (as the poll’s headline phrased it) that transcended all categories—male/female, black/white, Republican/Democratic/Independent.
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