By Maria Gallagher, Legislative Director
gallagher@paprolife.org
The closing of the Hillcrest Women's Medical Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania has to be a relief to the women who submitted Google reviews condemning the abortion center as uncivilized and unsafe.
Consider the words of Kaylee, who wrote,"They just wanted your money. & I gotta live with my mistake I made everyday. hearing that machine... Seeing other (babies') blood... I just wanted to tell my story so hopefully people who see this do not go there."
In February, during an inspection of the long-standing abortion center, state health department regulators uncovered 44 pages worth of health and safety violations--everything from supplies dating back 13 years to staff members who had failed to undergo routine criminal background checks.
But it was not until mid-September when Hillcrest gave up its license to do abortions in the Commonwealth and shut its doors for good.
It seems fair to say that, if Hillcrest were a diner, it would have been forced to close down immediately, without a seven month window of opportunity to jeopardize the health of more customers.
We also really don't know how long Hillcrest compromised women's safety, because no abortion centers in Pennsylvania were inspected for more than 15 years. The inspection blackout was the result of the pro-abortion policies of former Governors Tom Ridge (a Republican) and Ed Rendell (a Democrat) who feared that inspecting abortion centers would, in fact, lead to their closures and therefore decrease access to abortion.
Once Pennsylvania's common sense abortion center regulation law went into effect several years ago, state regulators cited Hillcrest for violations four times in six years. With that kind of track record, one wonders how many women were sickened, maimed, or otherwise harmed within Hillcrest's walls before the safeguard became law.
The law grew out of the recommendations of the grand jury in the Kermit Gosnell case in West Philadelphia. Gosnell, a long-tme abortionist, is now serving consecutive life terms in connection with the killing of three full-term babies. He is also serving time as a result of the death of a female immigrant patient, Karnamaya Mongar, whose death was entirely preventable.
How many other women are at risk because abortion centers are not sufficiently regulated in their states? How many other casualties have resulted from extreme pro-abortion policies that place the holy grail of abortion above women's health and safety?
The closing of Hillcrest is obviously a victory for women in Pennsylvania. But, wherever abortion facilities operate loosely regulated or not regulated at all, female patients are being treated as second-class citizens.
And that's a crime--whether the state recognizes it or not.
