Guest post: eye-opening view of Senate clinic bill vote

Today, a guest post from Pro-lifer Bill from Olathe:  “I had the pleasure of being in the Senate chamber today for the passage of H Sub SB 36, the Abortion Clinic Licensing Bill. It passed 24-15 and will almost certainly be signed into law by Gov. Brownback.  Some high points of this bill are:

• it requires clinics to meet minimum medical standards, like having doorways wide enough to fit a gurney through and keeping the surgical equipment from being stored amongst medical waste.
• it requires that injuries and deaths occurring during the act of abortion are reported.  As it stands, if a woman isn’t reported dead at the abortion clinic itself, then there is no requirement for the clinic to report the death. This makes tracking the number of abortion-related injuries and deaths rather dicey.
• it would ban the prescription of RU-486 via web cam. Honestly, I didn’t even know this was an option.  Any time I have a sinus infection, my doctor of 15 years requires I’m tested and checked out before prescribing the same antibiotic he prescribes every year.  I suppose abortionists are a little less concerned about the health of their patients.

This is a good bill, and a necessary one. Kudos to the right-thinking 24 senators. My beef is with the usual suspects who attempted to defeat this common sense bill.  Here are the high points of the debate and by “high points” I actually mean points of almost indescribable idiocy.

Sen. Terrie Huntington

Terrie Huntington of Fairway got the opposition ball rolling by pretending to care about all the other outpatient clinics in Kansas.  I guess she’s heard the horror stories of dead baby pieces being stored in the refrigerators of Lasik surgery centers.  Of course, we’ve all heard stories of patients being too embarrassed by their knee replacement to report doctors hopped up on booze and painkillers.

Oh wait.  Those didn’t happen.  Only in abortion clinics do we find that  happy intersection of quack doctors and emotionally distraught patients. 

John Vratil, the pride of Leawood, picked up that fumbled ball and did some interesting fumbling of his own. He thought that the $64,000 price tag associated with this bill was a waste of government money.  In fact, after calculating that two annual inspections of each of the three abortion mills in Kansas worked out to be about $10,000 per inspection, he asked  where he could sign up for that job.  I’ll look it up for you, John.

Sen. Vratil

And if, it will get you away from the Senate floor, I’ll fill out your application and give you one heck of a glowing endorsement.  I suppose protecting women from filthy and dangerous back-alley abortionists isn’t worth $64,000 of the state’s budget to Mr. Vratil…the same guy who voted himself and all the legislators a 4% pay raise in 2007.  Save many women with that one, John?  Eh, what do you care?

Speaking of back-alley abortionists, we were next treated to long, rambling and largely incoherent diatribe by David Haley from Wyandotte, which began with a fictional account of the history of the term “back alley abortion” …  meandered to a tale of his escorting multitudes of women through throngs of pro-life zealots to reach the shining star of the paradise that is abortion… then made an unexpected switchback to playing the class warfare card.  Just for the record, he was wrong about the “back alley” history and the zealots were probably little old women with rosaries.  As to the countless women he led to the clinic, I don’t care to speculate.

Sen. Haley

The class warfare card was interesting, though.  It seems that if RU-486 is made more difficult to receive, then rich women will just fly to France and pick it up at the home office.  Poor women will have to just scrounge up whatever dirty old unsafe abortionist happens to be nearby.  Similarly, if abortion clinics have to pay to sterilize their equipment, the price of abortion might go up…fine for the rich, but the poor will be left finding cheaper methods of infanticide.

Let me get this straight, Dave, dirty and unsafe abortions are acceptable to you, so long as the price is low?  Killing women is okay to you, so long as it fits the budget?  People of Wyandotte, is this really your guy?  He talked for half an hour, becoming more unhinged as he went…although he did use the word “umbrage” in a sentence,which is pretty cool.

Sen. Owens

So far though this nonsense, Mary Pilcher-Cook has been weathering the storm seemingly on her own.  She was the one answering every lame question tossed out by these crackpots, and she did a phenomenal job.  I

Pro-life leader Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook

can’t imagine ever having the self-control to face such lunacy without laughing, getting sarcastic or throwing something.  She was excellent.  Calm, polite and informed.

At this point, though, a new voice piped up.  Garrett Love has taken over the Huelskamp seat, and this guy is something else.  He stands up and references the Gonzales case as if he’d been doing it for years.  That was in response to Tim Owens‘ fears of a constitutional crisis.  Love didn’t change Tim’s vote, but Tim Owens never met a pro-abortion bill he didn’t like.  He’s as pro-abort as they come and his make-believe constitutionality argument was just an excuse to get his fix.
Love also responded very well to Rambling Dave Haley by proclaiming that he didn’t think unsafe abortion was okay for any women, be they rich or poor. Keep an eye on this Garrett Love.  I think he’s going to fill Tim Huelskamp’s shoes quite respectably.

Pro-life Sen. Garrett Love

Sen. Marci Francisco

The last objection came from Marci Francisco, who proved that not everyone in a college town is fully literate.  She was another half-hour talker who spent her time asking Mary Pilcher-Cook to read to her and explain the definitions.  It really only got interesting when Marci read half a sentence on one page, applied it to the context of a couple pages back and tried to make the bill say something it didn’t.  You wouldn’t think it would take thirty minutes to build a straw man, but Marci Francisco of Lawrence proved that reading truly is fundamental …just not for her.” –End of Bill’s commentary.

Read more: the KFL press release on the abortion clinic bill victory here.