In what can only be considered a blow to freedom, the attorney general of California may force a hospital to perform abortions.
Here’s the background: Hoag hospital and St. Joseph’s hospital recently formed a partnership and recently announced that Hoag hospital was no longer going to perform abortions. Most people believe that the decision had something to do with their partnership with the Catholic organization. This decision ignited a storm of protests and pressure against the hospital.
All you have to do is ask Susan G. Komen to know how much pressure pro-aborts can exert. A lot. And all of a sudden now, we’ve got California’s Attorney General Kamala Harris, a rising star in Democrat politics, reportedly investigating whether low-income women might be hurt by the decision. If she decides they are, she could force Hoag to perform abortions.
A column by Michael Hiltzik states:
Harris’ approval of this deal may already be fraying at the edges. She is currently investigating unspecified allegations that Hoag has failed to meet the conditions she set on allowing the abortion ban. These include a requirement that Hoag “take steps to insure that alternative providers are available and accessible to all women, especially low-income women, for direct abortions” in Hoag’s service area, which stretches from Seal Beach to Dana Point and inland to Rancho Santa Margarita. The AG is also looking into allegations that the hospitals misrepresented statistics they provided her to make the number of abortions at Hoag seem insignificant. Hoag says it is “cooperating and responding to any and all AG inquiries” in the matter…
The legal standard governing Harris’ authority to reject a hospital transaction requires her to find that it would “significantly” erode the availability or accessibility of healthcare in the community. Defining “significant” is a judgment call, but it’s hard to see how Hoag’s abortion ban fails to qualify.
Unlike women living in areas where abortion rights are under full-scale assault and where there may be a lone abortion clinic for hundreds of miles around, women in Orange County obviously don’t lack for options for reproductive healthcare. But that doesn’t mean Hoag’s action is not “significant.”
So the columnist even admits that there are plenty of places for women to abort their children but that doesn’t matter. Hoag must be punished for “capitulating” to the Catholics.
In case you weren’t sure how Harris might decide, just know that NARAL Pro-Choice California gave Harris their 100 percent stamp of approval. And let’s face it, what NARAL wants, NARAL gets. Keep your eyes open for this one.
