News
Featured Image

DAYTON, Ohio, December 1, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The Ohio Department of Health has revoked the license of an abortion facility operated by notorious late-term abortionist Martin Haskell because it failed to meet required health and safety standards.

Women's Med Center, which has a history of complaints against it, failed to obtain admitting privileges with a local hospital. It has in the past sent an abortion patient to the hospital in a life-threatening condition called status epilepticus. Hospital admitting privileges, required for abortion centers by Ohio law, allow for continuity of care should an abortion go badly and harm the mother.

Women's Medical Center sought an exception from the law, but the Health Department denied it.

“Ohio Right to Life thanks Director Hodges for holding this abortion facility accountable to basic health and safety standards,” said Devin Scribner, executive director of Ohio Right to Life. “This is the same facility that, according to the Ohio Department of Health, violated a woman's right to refuse an abortion last June. We're grateful to see action being taken on this facility and are hopeful that it will spare thousands of lives in Dayton.”  

“For years, this abortion facility has operated without sufficient emergency back-up care for the thousands of pregnant women who come through their doors,” Scribner continued. “The whole state of Ohio should be alarmed by this facility's consecutive failures to either secure an agreement with a local hospital, or meet the department's rules for alternative back-up care. The traditional medical community has rejected doing business with this facility, and the state of Ohio is doing the same.”

Haskell was one of the pioneers of partial-birth abortion, a late-term abortion technique in which a baby is delivered alive except for its head. The abortionist inserts scissors into the base of the baby's skull, expands them, and sucks out the baby's brains. The dead baby is the fully delivered. The procedure is now illegal, but other forms of late-term abortion are not.

The pro-life community has long pointed to Haskell's conduct as an example of corruption in the abortion industry.

In August 2016, Haskell allegedly committed an abortion on a woman who could not legally consent to it because she was impaired by an overdose of street drugs. In 2011, public officials said he was endangering women by having obtained exemption from the hospital admitting privileges rule. 

Another of Haskell's abortion facilities was forced to shut down in 2014, and Haskell has sent a long string of patients to the emergency room after botched abortions.