MONTANA, April 10, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A judge in Montana has granted a midwife and a nurse permission to commit abortions while a law preventing non-doctors from practicing abortion is litigated.
Preventing non-doctors from committing abortions “places unnecessary, unfounded, and arbitrary barriers to Montanans’ access to abortion care,” according to Caitlin Borgmann, the Executive Director of the ACLU of Montana. The Montana Abortion Control Act currently mandates that only licensed doctors commit abortions.
That law “perpetuates ongoing irreparable harm to the Plaintiffs and their patients,” District Judge Mike Menahan wrote. His ruling only allows the two non-doctors fighting the law, APRN Helen Weems and certified nurse midwife “Jane Doe,” to be exempt from it at this time.
The ACLU and the Center for Reproductive Rights are challenging the law. They argue that midwives and advanced practice registered nurses (APRN) should be allowed to commit abortions.
Menahan acknowledged in his ruling Weems isn’t even fully trained on how to commit abortions but “expects to be competent to provide abortion services (medication and aspiration abortion) within a matter of weeks or months, respectively.”
“The State has not met its burden of showing a compelling state interest in restricting Montana women’s fundamental right to privacy,” Menahan wrote.
In 2013, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill allowing midwives, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants to commit first-trimester abortions.
Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist convicted of killing babies outside of the womb, had a 15-year-old employee administer anesthesia to patients at his “house of horrors” abortion facility.
Just as political slogans supporting abortion have shifted from “safe, legal, and rare” to “keep abortion safe and legal,” it seems the left has given up on its former claim that abortion “is between a woman and her doctor.”
One wonders when the abortion lobby will stop harping about how pro-life laws send women to the “back alley” for unsafe abortions, given that they think non-physicians are qualified to carry out the deadly procedure.