California law protects dogs, cats, and other animals from unscrupulous veterinary clinics with an array of 158 separate laws, including licensure, qualification and training requirements for veterinarians and staff, physical clinic standards, and cleanliness standards.
Why, then, does California law provide no standards whatsoever to safeguard women experiencing abortion from dirty and dangerous abortion businesses? Because every single one of the commonsense medical standards that use to protect California women from fly-by-night abortionists — from a 24-hour follow-up system for emergencies to an “adequate patient recovery area” have been wiped off the books by state courts or pro-abortion lawmakers, at the urging of abortion practitioners and advocates.
How can it be that in California and many other places in America, we care more about our pets than we do about the health and safety of women facing a life-changing abortion decision?
Americans United for Life set out to answer that question with the most extensive public records investigation ever to shine the light of truth on the nation’s abortion industry. The result is Unsafe, an exhaustive analysis of every publicly available abortion facility health and safety inspection report, and the grave implications this trove of inspection documentation raises for the safety of women who seek abortion in America.
Unsafe tells the story of how the abortion industry bet everything on a strategy of total repeal of the nation’s abortion laws, believing against the evidence that abortion would be safe if it were just made legal. America’s women lost that bet when the Supreme Court struck down abortion laws in all 50 states in Roe v. Wade. Unsafe is the comprehensive, documented record of the tragic consequences of that lost bet: 2,400 abortion facility health and safety violations reported in just the last 12 years (2008–2020), implicating well over 300 abortion businesses in hazardous, unclean abortions. Add to that the colossal toll abortion has taken in human lives and the physical and emotional suffering of survivors.
One of the reports that sticks in my mind comes from Planned Parenthood in Birmingham, Alabama, from 2014. A state health violation report tells us the story of a 14-year-old girl who already had two living children when she visited Planned Parenthood’s clinic in Birmingham. Planned Parenthood aborted her third child. Did they at least report suspected sexual abuse to the authorities? No. They sent her right back into what we can only assume was an abusive situation.
Tragically, if not surprisingly, just four months later, this same little girl came in again, and Planned Parenthood performed another abortion, no questions asked. Again, no suspected abuse was reported, and this young girl got no help — just Planned Parenthood repeatedly performing abortions, taking her money, and sending her back to sexual abuse, twice in four months. For this child’s second abortion, 7 of the 16 mandated health and legal records were missing or incomplete.
We don’t know this little girl’s story. We don’t even know her name. But we do know that she was a 14-year-old little girl in an extremely vulnerable situation, in which we have laws governing how she should be treated. Instead of obeying the law and alerting the authorities to a situation that common sense would dictate was likely abusive, Planned Parenthood happily cashed her check and looked the other way. That is the abortion industry in a nutshell. And those horrors are just the tip of the iceberg.
Unsafe’s 50-state investigation exposes abortion businesses that have been operating without a license, utilizing unlicensed, unqualified, or untrained abortionists and staff, repeatedly fined for filthy conditions, and dangerously mishandling narcotics and other drugs. As it has since the days before Roe v. Wade in 1973, the abortion industry operates as if the laws regulating abortion don’t exist.
Thankfully, Unsafe is also the story of how the pro-life movement has been rebuilding legal protections for women and unborn infants through 50 years of lawmaking and courtroom advocacy, saving millions of lives from the horrors of abortion.
The truth is sobering. But by exposing the ugly underside of the abortion cartel, the dirty and dangerous conditions, pro-life advocates can effectively put the lie to abortion industry claims that abortion is a routine, “safe” medical procedure. That’s why we do what we do at Americans United for Life, drafting laws that will withstand abortion industry attacks in court and protect women and babies from an industry that cares more about money than it does about even about wiping down the table between patients.
Steven H. Aden serves as the chief legal officer and general counsel for Americans United for Life.
