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SCOTUS Texas abortion decision puts women's health at risk
WASHINGTON EXAMINER
By Marsha Blackburn
July 8, 2016

Ignoring the Constitution's silence on abortion, the Supreme Court invented a "constitutional right" to abortion and stripped the people of their right to regulate or even prohibit the procedure through laws written by their elected representatives. For example, the Court's rulings have, without justification, set a double standard — one that allows elected representatives to set the rules for medical facilities in every other area of medicine, as has been the case in our country for generations, and one that makes the Court a de facto medical board determining the appropriateness of laws that apply to abortion.

The Court's decision in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt sets a dangerous precedent. The challenged law, H.B. 2, was passed by the elected representatives of the people of Texas who were concerned about the callous treatment of both the unborn and their mothers. Horrified by the revelations of the abhorrent practices at Kermit Gosnell's unregulated abortion clinic, the Texas legislature passed H.B. 2 to ensure that nothing of the kind would occur in the Lone Star State. The law required abortion clinics follow the same standards of safety and cleanliness as other ambulatory surgical facilities. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court would not allow even this modest modicum of decency to stand, preferring instead to ignore the will of the people of Texas. Now any state across the country that has or wishes to enact the same protective law has been prevented from doing so by the Supreme Court.

Common sense tells us that if abortion is in fact a healthcare service, the law should treat clinics like healthcare facilities. Abortion, after all, is an invasive procedure. While the Court attempts to justify its decision by claiming to protect women's health, in reality it struck down the very protocols designed to prevent women from experiencing the brutal and inhumane practices of Kermit Gosnell, who was convicted of murder for killing seven babies and a mother during late-term abortions. He got away with his atrocities for so long because government officials, perhaps afraid of the criticism that accompanies involvement in one of the grave moral issues of our time, preferred to look the other way.

We have a moral obligation not to look the other way, but to prevent the conditions that endanger women and babies left to the mercy of criminals like Kermit Gosnell, who prey on the most vulnerable in our society. We owe it to women to set standards at abortion clinics that minimize the risk of injury or death. That is also why last year the House approved the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act to ensure precious babies who are capable of feeling pain or who are born alive during abortion procedures are provided the same protections all human life deserves.

Science tells us that unborn babies react to touch as early as eight weeks into the pregnancy and that they can feel pain by at least twenty weeks. Doctors have testified they have seen babies on the sonogram flinch and move away from sharp objects during surgical procedures to avoid the pain. As technology has advanced, so should our laws to protect women and children.

Many of the same people who demand that the Court continue to control this area of law also object to the important work the House Select Investigative Panel has been tasked with. At every turn, our panel's investigation is revealing that the Texas legislature's efforts were justified because the abortion industry has placed money above the safety of women and unborn children. Among those entities we have subpoenaed are abortionists who perform abortions through the third trimester — LeRoy Carhart, who operates out of the Germantown, Md., clinic where numerous women have been sent to the hospital in recent months, and Southwestern Women's Options, located in Albuquerque, N.M. We have already made a criminal referral based on the relationship between Southwestern and the taxpayer-funded University of New Mexico.

It is a sad irony, and a distortion of our constitutional system, that those who want to shut down the panel would deny the proper role the people have in our representative democracy and instead advocate that unelected, life-tenured justices control this entire area of law by fiat.

We must not flinch from our duty to do what we can to ensure respect for human life at its most vulnerable. To ignore an issue of such gravity would be to diminish the responsibility of our democratically elected institutions of government and to abdicate the most basic obligations of humanity.

Marsha Blackburn serves as Chair of the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives and is Vice Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. She represents the Seventh Congressional District of Tennessee.

Click here to read Chairman Blackburn’s op-ed published in the Washington Examiner.