Is abortion 'the safest procedure?' The Planned Parenthood propaganda has dined out for years on its claim that legal abortions are the preferable alternative to 'back-alley' and 'coat-hanger' abortions. There's not a Democratic Party convention since 1973 where this hasn't been shouted to the rafters.

Planned Parenthood is fighting with every tooth and nail it has to keep abortion reporting requirements 'safe' from the public eye, and it's prompting questions about just what they have to hide. According to Washington Examiner op-ed contributor Rachel N. Busick, of Americans United for Life:

Many states have passed laws requiring abortion reporting or enhancing existing reporting laws, including Idaho, Indiana, and Arizona just this year. Surprisingly, abortion providers meet these laws with stiff resistance, lobbying against them before they’re passed and filing lawsuits challenging them after they’re enacted. For example, Planned Parenthood sued to stop both Idaho’s and Indiana’s new reporting laws from going into effect. The outcome of these ongoing court cases will determine whether women in those states will have adequate and relevant information on the impact of abortion as they consider the procedure.

In other words, they don't want women, potential clients, or anyone to know just how dirty and dangerous these acts of killing life are, even in supposedly clinical conditions. Women die from these operations, so far as unofficial data uncovered from death certificates can show and for every one that's died, you can bet a large number of others have been injured. The activists have uncovered a half a dozen deaths. That's not counting the baby, of course.

But reporting requirements are necessary for informed consent, Busick notes. If women knew just how dirty and dangerous these procedures were, many would consider other options for unwanted pregnancies, a result that could cut into Planned Parenthood's bottom line. Informed consent is a requirement for every other type of medical procedure, every foot operation and every chemotherapy session, it's a strange exception that abortion (which is an elective procedure, not something you would utterly need, like chemo) seems to be exempt from reporting requirements. Some bureaucrat in Washington needs to be compiling these statistics. That there isn't is precisely why a butcher like abortion 'doctor' Kenneth Gosnell was able to operate with such impunity.

What, indeed, are these people hiding? And what is what's left of our Congress going to do to make these reporting requirements go national?

Correction: Deleted quotation misattributd to Rachel N. Busick of Americans United for Life.

Image credit: Raquel Baranow, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0