Late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart, notorious for abandoning and killing several of his patients and countless preborn children, was invited to lecture earlier this month at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Carhart runs an infamous abortion mill in Baltimore and travels to commit abortions in Nebraska.
In his lecture, Carhart bemoaned the Pro-Life provisions found in Texas’ House Bill 2, the Pro-Life Omnibus Bill of 2013, which heads to the Supreme Court of the United States next week. Carhart is opposed to the bill’s requirement that abortionists procure admitting privileges and ensure that their facilities meet the standards of non-abortion surgery centers in the state. Abortionists have been univocal in opposing these provisions, which can encroach on their profit margins because many of them are unwilling or unable to comply with the heightened safety standards.
One of the law’s requirements is that abortionists possess hospital admitting privileges within a 30-mile radius of their abortion mill, which helps to ensure that when botched abortions occur, injured women will be admitted for emergency care with less delay—delay that can mean the difference between life and death. Some Texas abortionists have been unable to obtain privileges at any nearby hospitals because the hospital will not grant them. Carhart blamed the hospitals for being greedy, positing that they will not grant privileges because abortionists are less likely to admit patients than other doctors on staff. He said:
The big problem is the hospitals don’t want us on the staff. You can’t really be a physician on a hospital staff, unless you’re going to guarantee them income. If you’re not going to admit, they don’t want you. And I don’t want to admit. When I admit, that’s a problem. So just by that alone, if you can’t get privileges, you could be, you know, the best doctor in the country, but if you’re not going to admit, then they don’t want you on the staff… that part right there is very disruptive.
Carhart scoffed at the requirement that abortion mills meet the same safety and building code standards as typical medical surgery centers. These regulations, which Carhart dismisses, would have potentially saved the lives of women like Karnamaya Mongar. He said:
As far as having hospital-type requirements for the clinics, which is what they want, you know, 250 square foot surgery rooms, and 6-foot aisles and 6-foot hallways and it’s just ludicrous. It’s just not needed.
In other parts of his lengthy lecture (found here in full), Carhart talks about how abortion’s feticidal injections produce a “dead baby,” and how virtually all abortions remove “a part of the fetus before it dies, and the rest of it afterward.” Regarding stories of abortionists like Kermit Gosnell (and Douglas Karpen, and others), Carhart conceded that the stories of born-alive infants killed post-delivery “it’s certainly possible that it could all be true.”
In his attempts to ridicule HB 2, Carhart ignores the rational basis for the Texas Legislature’s efforts to protect pregnant mothers and their preborn children. Legislators crafted HB 2 in response to the shocking revelations about abortionists like Gosnell and Karpen. Texans chose to no longer turn a blind eye to the atrocities taking place in “safe and legal” abortion mills in our state. Abortionists, Carhart included, may find other states are also unwilling to allow the abortion industry to operate with a blatant disregard for human Life and substandard care for the vulnerable pregnant mothers who walk through their doors.