“It Is Time to Integrate Abortion Into Primary Care” was published with little fanfare on January 13, 2013 as written by Susan Yarrow, an MSW, not an MD. Her shortcomings to write medical literature become clear when reviewing statistics. She quotes Hensaw, who literally wrote the book on making abortion a public health issue, “Abortion is now one of the safest medical procedures available; only 0.3% of abortion patients experience a complication that requires hospitalization.” The problem is; (1) Henshaw is only talking about complications resulting in hospital admission, others would be unreported here because they are treated in an office or treated and released (2) the documenting health care professional may not relate the event such as a secondary infection or a slow bleed, to the abortion, (i.e. the patient is in shock due to hypovolemia is a proper medical diagnosis as opposed to the patient bled out after an abortion.)
Then, Ms. Yarrow suggests that to fix the problem of doctors not being willing to kill preborn children, an invasive surgical procedure should be relagated to the confines of the primary care practice. It never dawns on her that doctors may be refusing to commit abortion because by training and disposition, doctors save lives, they don’t destroy them. Nor does she address the facility inadequacies to deal with the complication of abortions, such as uterine perforation. Yarrow says, “One in three women in the United States will seek an abortion before she is aged 45 years. For these women, restrictive laws driven by ideology, not science, are undermining the promise of Roe v Wade in many parts of the country.” Where is the “science” behind Roe Vs Wade? We don’t know when life starts. We don’t know when a fetus is viable. Ms. Yarrow is right about one thing, doctors are adverse to malpractice: it’s bad business for them, bad medicine for their patient.
“The cumulative result of these regulations, the harassment, and the lack of training is a shrinking number of sites that offer abortion services.” laments Ms Yarrow. Again, where’s the science? This is nothing more than NARAL diatribe, old diatribe at that. Where’s the survey of former providers where they are asked why they no longer provide abortions. Former abortionist, Anthony Levatino, M.D., says, “I want the general public to know that the doctors know that this is a person, this is a baby.” Former abortionist, Joseph Randall, M.D., says, “The picture of the baby on the ultrasound bothered me more than anything else.” There’s more but there are other points to be made.
If we can not get doctors who find their training and facilities inadequate to perform invasive surgeries in their office, lets get nurse practioners and physician assistants to do it. The Board of Physician Quality Assurance and The Board of Nursing who dictate standard of care (the science and art of nursing and medicine) carefully dictates what these professionals can do. It’s possible that the political climate could change the standard of care and allow nurse practicioners with specialized training and physician’s assistants with additional supervision to do invasive gynecological surgery, but the abortion clinics would run into the same problem they keep ignoring: Former abortion counselor, Nita Whitten, says, “It’s a lie when they tell you they’re doing it to help women, because they’re not. They’re doing it for the money.” Debra Henry, says, “We were told to find the woman’s weakness and work on it. The women were never given any alternatives. They were told how much trouble it was to have a baby.”
In Technical Writing, this is called an Editorial despite the liberal sprinkling of scientific fact. If Ms Yarrow knew what she was doing as a writer, her piece would have been called an Editorial, just another volley in the proabortion polemic. Science has nothing to do with it.