By Dave Andrusko

New Woman All Women health care facility
Pro-lifers often refer to the “abortion distortion” factor, a short-hand description for the unfortunate truth that when the topic is abortion, seemingly the rules that apply to everything else (including logic and perspective) no longer need apply. Take a hearing Thursday of the Alabama Department of Public Health.
A typical headline was “Alabama abortion foes seek tighter rules for doctors,” but my favorite was this exercise in mass confusion: “New rule would dramatically cut number of abortions Alabama doctors can perform in private practice.”
We’ll return in a moment to the first headline, but what would you think the latter headline means? That somehow there is a proposed rule that would limit the number of abortions an abortionist could perform, right?
Wrong! Please bear with me a second, because none of this makes any sense unless you’re familiar with the case of the New Woman All Women health care facility and a law the Alabama Legislature passed this year.
After an arduous trial and an appeal of his original decision handed down last August, Jefferson County Circuit Judge Joseph Boohaker issued a permanent injunction, ordering that abortions could no longer be performed at the New Woman All Women health care facility because it does not have a license to do so.
In other words, as the Associated Press put it, “the judge ordered the shutdown of what he ruled was an illegal abortion clinic run by Dr. Bruce Norman in Birmingham in a building owned by longtime abortion clinic operator Diane Derzis.”
The connection to yesterday’s Alabama Department of Public Health hearing? Under current Alabama law. if a provider performs 30 or more abortions per month during any two months, the facility meets the definition of an abortion clinic.
Norman offered an arcane way of calculating the abortions that had taken place at the New Woman All Women health care facility, arguing that it thus didn’t perform the minimum number of abortions and therefore shouldn’t be required to have an abortion clinic license.
His argument was preposterous on its face and Judge Bookhaker dismissed his contention. But just to make sure this potential loophole/misunderstanding would no longer exist (I’m speculating here, but it only makes sense), the Department’s rule “would define a clinic as any doctor’s office that performs 10 or more abortions in any month or 100 or more during a year,” the AP’s Jay Reeves wrote Thursday.
The Montgomery Advertiser’s Mike Oliver argued that meant a reduction of two-thirds in the number of abortions a facility could perform before it became an “abortion clinic” (from 30 abortions to 10 abortions). True, but, to be clear, an abortion clinic can abort as many women as it chooses; it just can’t pretend it’s not an abortion clinic when it does.
The proposed rule comes out of the 2013 “Women’s Health and Safety Act” which also includes other requirements. One of those establishes new requirements for the building in which an abortion clinic can be located.
What does the headline “Alabama abortion foes seek tighter rules for doctors” refer to? An impassioned plea by a pro-lifer at Thursday’s hearing that the more specific regulation kick in not when an abortionist performs 10 abortions a month but if he performs even one.
What’s next for the rules? “The State Committee on Public Health will consider all the changes at a hearing in November, said department attorney Brian Hale,” Reeves wrote. “Members could approve the changes as proposed by agency staff or make amendments on their own.”
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