Abcarian: The anti-abortion gang that couldn’t shoot straight has lost again – this time over a $500,000 lawsuit settlement against a doctor who, back in 2006, performed a ‘partial birth abortion’ on a 24-year-old woman.
The doctor, however, wasn’t doing anything new in 2006. Back in 1998, another doctor from Utah performed the same thing, when he used a vacuum aspiration device to pull the baby out of her mother’s abdomen while she was under anesthesia. In fact, there are at least 15 cases, more than a decade old, of doctors using various versions of this procedure against women.
Abortion rights activists have been trying to hold the line in the face of this threat since the dawn of Roe v Wade in 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down state bans on abortion in the middle of the night:
“It is clear that Roe cannot survive if the ‘undeniable truth’ that it protects is ignored by legislatures. It will be overridden if, after the Court’s decision, ‘a state legislature seeks to displace it by passing a law that restricts access to abortions.'” The case of Stenberg v. Carhart, decided three years after Roe, continued on this line, noting that when the Supreme Court rules in a manner the lower courts are bound to follow, “any state or federal law that falls outside this principle is’simply void.'”
The threat of an anti-abortion lawsuit is exactly what prompted the Utah doctor to have a private discussion with his obstetrician friend from years earlier, asking him to perform the abortion using a procedure more commonly known as a “D & C” – the abbreviation stands for Direct & Continuous, meaning that the doctor would use a vacuum to remove the baby’s head and then pull it out continuously as she recovered from the anesthesia. And a few weeks after that conversation, he went to the hospital where the patient was and completed the abortion.
But now we have a lawsuit that claims the doctor, Dr. David Harris, should have used the appropriate standard of care instead.
The lawsuit claims that, by using a vacuum aspiration procedure instead, he’s committed a “design error” that puts him at risk for legal action by abortion providers, and that he’s also failed to get necessary medical licenses to practice medicine anywhere else.
Abortion rights supporters (with the exception of the