Texas abortionist uses debunked argument to claim women at risk from abortion restrictions

Despite the fact that abortion facilities are being closed for unsafe conditions, that women are being rushed out of Planned Parenthood and other abortion centers in ambulances, that women sometimes die, and that abortion doctors and staff are not the pristine pillars of society they paint themselves to be, the media (and the abortion industry) hide the truth from American women.

One abortionist doing his part to mislead is Bhavik Kumar (pictured), who works at Whole Woman’s abortion facilities in San Antonio and Fort Worth.

Kumar is a graduate of Texas Tech Health Sciences Center School of Medicine in Lubbock, Texas. He completed his 3rd and 4th year of medical school at the El Paso, Texas, branch in 2010 and then completed his residency training this past July, 2013. He is being promoted as an expert in abortion when, in fact, he was only licensed by the State of Texas last year.

In a recent interview with the Texas Observer, Kumar admitted that there are few doctors who will do abortions, saying, “There’s less of us providing this care, so it can be isolating for us.”

Despite the fact that unsafe conditions have been found inside Texas abortion facilities, the abortionist complained about the impact of Texas’ HB2, a law which has closed a number of abortion facilities statewide. Kumar claimed that women who are seeking abortions and coming from the border have tried self-aborting. “How many women will wind up in the ER and not come to this clinic instead?” he asked.

Wrong question. The real question is how many women are rushed to the ER from legal abortion?

Kumar added:

The reason that they have to drive that far is because there are fewer clinics, given other laws like the admitting privileges and ambulatory surgical center requirement. And, you have to pay mostly out of pocket, or use abortion funds, in order to pay for your procedure. So, that sometimes adds cost because you’ve had to wait an extra few weeks because you couldn’t access a clinic, you have to stay overnight. If you have kids, you have to find somebody to take care of your kids, [take] time off of work. If you’re not able to get the funds within 24 hours, you have to wait even longer to get the money to pay for it.

It is obvious what Kumar is doing here. He is resurrecting an old tactic, used successfully in the early days of legalized abortion – the claim that women die or will be hospitalized when abortion is illegal or cannot be accessed easily.  The problem is, this claim was debunked more than a decade ago.

During the debate to liberalize abortion in New York, the issue of unsafe abortions swayed one representative to change his vote on the floor, opening the door to abortion on demand. Assemblywoman Constance E. Cook stood to the floor during that 1970 debate to push the lie of unsafe abortion, claiming that “prohibition only drives abortion underground” and makes it unsafe, “under the most abominable circumstances.” This clip from the film “Choice at Risk” gives a historical glimpse:

The deciding vote was cast by Democrat Assemblyman George Michaels, who told the LA Times that for years he had been told by local party leaders not to vote for the repeal of the abortion ban, and he pledged not to. But after a conversation with his daughter-in-law, who told him that “thousands of women will be mutilated and die because of that stupid Legislature,” he decided to vote to repeal the abortion ban.

NARAL (which in the past stood for the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) also lied about women dying from illegal abortions. One of their early founders, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who later became pro-life, described how they lied to the public:

“We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one,” recalls the movement’s co-founder. “Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000.”

Princeton’s Professor Robert P. George broke it down further when he wrote this about the NARAL founder:

Nathanson and his friends lied—relentlessly and spectacularly—about the number of women who died each year from illegal abortions. Their pitch to voters, lawmakers, and judges was that women are going to seek abortion in roughly equal numbers whether it is lawful or not. The only effect of outlawing it, they claimed, is to limit pregnant women to unqualified and often uncaring practitioners, “back alley butchers.” So, Nathanson and others insisted, laws against abortion are worse than futile: they do not save fetal lives; they only cost women’s lives.

For clarification, statistics show that, in the year prior to Roe, the CDC disputed the lie that thousands of women died from illegal abortion, as shown in this table (right) from their surveillance report on abortion.

Groups like Live Action News, Operation Rescue, and many others have documented the horrendous way that women are treated by abortion providers. And it wasn’t that long ago when the State of Pennsylvania closed the “House of Horrors” abortion facility owned by the now-convicted abortionist Kermit Gosnell. His facility, like many in the United States, operated legally for many years while abortion advocates lobbied for little to no restrictions on abortion facilities. Gosnell, who killed at least three babies that were delivered alive and who was responsible for the abortion-related death of one of his patients, was no anomaly. His story and the fate of the women and babies taken to his facility are the true mirror of unrestricted abortion in America.

While abortionist Bhavik Kumar (who believes “providing abortion care is a moral, just, and ethical part of being a family physician”) and the abortion lobby try to rehash false scare tactics about women dying in the streets because of abortion restrictions, they remain silent about women their industry injures along the way. But as long as Kumar is worried about women being rushed to the ER, this reminder from the Associated Press describing Gosnell’s legal abortion clinic should be of interest:

Women went to Dr. Kermit Gosnell to end their pregnancies. Many came away with life-threatening infections and punctured organs; some still had fetal parts inside them when they arrived at nearby hospitals in dire need of emergency care.

(Images from Saynsumthn’s Blog and Texas Observer)