Abortion

Denise's mom, Stephanie White, testified this month before the Senate Finance Committee and House of Delegates Health & Government Operations Committee asking them to inspect and better regulate Maryland's abortion clinics.

Stephanie White lost her healthy 21 year old daughter in 2006. Denise died of an overdose of anesthesia given during an abortion. The abortion clinic did not have a qualified anesthetist. The abortion clinic staff was not trained in basic life support.

Did you know that Maryland does not inspect abortion clinics?

Did you know that abortion clinics in Maryland are minimally regulated - as if they are simple doctor offices which perform routine care, not invasive surgery?

For the health and safety of women, Maryland's abortion clinics should fall under the same regulations as other ambulatory surgical facilities (or out-patient surgical clinics).

SB 505 and HB 23 (the Freestanding Ambulatory Care Facilities bill) would have closed this loophole and required that abortion clinics be regulated just like ambulatory surgical facilities. This bill would have ensured that abortion clinics actually have safety protocols in place so that they are prepared to handle situations when something goes wrong.

Faced with mounting evidence of numerous injuries and even deaths at abortion clinics which were brought to light during the hearings, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) announced it would draft new regulations to address these concerns by July 2011. While the legislature did not mandate their action by passing specific regulations to govern abortion clinics (SB 505/HB 23) , the Conference, a key stakeholder in this legislation, will provide input and closely monitor the drafting process and final DHMH regulations to ensure that the health and safety of women are not compromised.

Read Baltimore Sun article and Catholic Review article on Stephanie White and her daughter, Denise.

Maryland has some of the highest abortion rates in the nation. While the abortion rate declined 9 percent nationally between 2000 and 2005, the abortion rate in Maryland rose 8 percent during that same period. Our state’s abortion rate is now 38 percent higher than the national rate, with more than one-in-four Maryland pregnancies ending in abortion. There were 37,590 abortions performed in Maryland in 2005, or nearly 103 per day, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

Those numbers, sadly, come as little surprise because our state is home to one of the most permissive abortion laws in the country, having in 1992 approved a state version of the Freedom of Choice Act recently proposed at the federal level. Maryland has no parental consent law, no meaningful parental notification law, no informed consent law, no mandatory waiting period, no regulation of abortion clinics, and no abortion reporting requirement. What’s more, $2.7 million of state taxpayer dollars are used every year to pay for Medicaid-funded abortions and, in many cases, abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy.

Science tells us that human life begins at conception, and the Church teaches that human life must be respected at each moment of its existence. In his1995 encyclical letter, The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II wrote: “It is impossible to further the common good without acknowledging and defending the right to life, upon which all other inalienable rights of individuals are founded and from which they develop.”

The Maryland Catholic Conference works to foster a culture of life in Maryland by advocating for laws that uphold the dignity of the human person and that assist pregnant women in need.