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TUPELO, MISSISSIPPI, April 26, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – The governor of Mississippi says Barack Obama and others who opposed a bill he signed this month to raise health standards at the state’s lone abortion clinic are hypocrites whose “one mission in life is to abort children.”

Governor Phil Bryant blasted “the hypocrisy of the Left,” which “says that I should have never signed” a law requiring all state abortionists to be certified OB-GYNs with admitting privileges at a local hospital. He said abortion advocates are more interested in assuring the state’s only abortion clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization in the state capital, stays open than they are in preserving women’s health.

“They don’t care if the mother’s life is in jeopardy, that if something goes wrong that a doctor can’t admit them to a local hospital, that he’s not even board certified,” he said.

“You would think that Barack Obama and all those on the Left that love so much to talk about women’s health care would rush to support this bill,” he said.  He stated the bill assured a woman’s “life and safety to be paramount.”

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“The true hypocrisy is that their one mission in life is to abort children, is to kill children in the womb,” Bryant said.

Mississippi Right to Life President Barbara Whitehead told LifeSiteNews.com it was common sense to require medical specialists to have “expertise in that field,” and to be able to send women to local hospitals in the case of botched abortions. “The doctors who actually perform the abortions are coming in from out of state, so they don’t really have a connection to the state,” Whitehead said. 

She said the same logic is behind the Left’s opposition to a bill MRTL favors that would ban tele-abortions, a practice in which doctors prescribe an abortifacient drug without ever meeting their patients. “If you’re really concerned about women, you’re not going to send them in to see a doctor on a TV screen,” she said.

Gov. Bryant has said he longs for the day Mississippi is “abortion-free.”

“I clearly said I want to end abortion in Mississippi,” he said Tuesday. He previously supported the state’s Personhood amendment.

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Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves said the new law “should effectively close the only abortion clinic in Mississippi.” Felicia Brown-Williams, regional director of public policy for Planned Parenthood in Hattiesburg, said she was “sick about this” bill after it passed. The clinic’s owner, Diane Derzis, has threatened to sue if she is unable to comply with the bill, although similar laws have been upheld in other states.

The clinic is in the midst of another political battle, as Reeves is currently blocking the nomination of Dr. Carl Reddix to the State Board of Health because of his role in referring the clinic’s patients to local hospitals.

Reddix, who was nominated by former governor and one-time presidential hopeful Haley Barbour, told local media he did not perform abortions but referred the victims of other doctors to the emergency room.

“Having a doctor [on the state board] who does have a relationship with the abortion clinic does not seem to me to make a lot of sense, especially since there are problems there to begin with,” Whitehead told LifeSiteNews. Its members “have not been following all the guidelines for the abortion clinic,” she said.

“We believe that Governor Bryant will put somebody in there who will make certain that the health department will follow the laws.”

The governor made the remarks Tuesday on American Family Radio‘s “Family Radio’s Today’s Issues” with American Family Association president Tim Wildmon and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins. AFR is based in Tupelo.

A full transcript of the segment follows the video.

 

Gov. Bryant: You would think that Barack Obama and all those on the Left that love so much to talk about women’s health care would rush to support this bill, would just say, “Absolutely we want the strongest health care. We want admissions privileges. We want that women that is going through that abortion for her life and safety to be paramount.” Well, it should be the paramount of the child.

Even if you believe in abortion, the hypocrisy of the Left that now tried to kill this bill – that says that I should have never signed it – the true hypocrisy is that their one mission in life is to abort children, is to kill children in the womb. It doesn’t really matter. They don’t care if the mother’s life is in jeopardy, that if something goes wrong that a doctor can’t admit them to a local hospital, that he’s not even board certified. We passed that bill, and I think you’ll see other states follow. And when that happens, at least these fly-in abortionists are going to be regulated under the state laws of the Medical Procedures Act here in the state of Mississippi, as they should be across the nation.

Tony Perkins: Well the driving factor is profit for many of them.