The hero in Robb’s story was Dr. Lester Minto of Harlingen, Texas, who was getting around the new state law signed by Gov. Rick Perry requiring abortionists have hospital admitting privileges by hinting to patients that they go buy misoprostol pills in Mexico to begin a miscarriage, so he can finish off the “miscarriage management.” Robb compared him to the Wizard of Oz with one scared 17-year-old aborting Dorothy:Dr. Minto sat down with the teenager. He took her hands. He looked like the Wizard coming out from behind the curtain, when he wisely but humbly tells Dorothy and her friends that anyone can have a brain, a heart, and courage. “I can only help you if you’ve tried something [to miscarry].”
The teenager’s name (at least for the story) was Vale, and this was her second abortion in four months. This time, she accepted the doctor’s recommendation of birth control. Robb also included the required lecture from NARAL:
“Do-it-yourself health care almost never ends well, whether it’s unregulated pills bought on the Internet or back-alley procedures that were the staple of our grandmothers’ youth,” says Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “Research is conclusive all over the world: making abortion illegal or inaccessible doesn’t make the procedure less common. It only makes it far less safe and results in many more deaths.”
Robb also insisted “Fewer than 0.05 percent of U.S. abortion patients ever need to be hospitalized. If a woman finds herself in that rare situation, the professional groups all say that she should do the obvious thing: Go to an emergency room to be treated by someone trained in emergency medicine.” There is no space in Cosmo for young women dying when abortionists seemingly can’t be bothered.
Dr. Minto’s “miscarriage management” operation — now discontinued — hardly sounds ideal, but that is Robb’s point, that pro-lifers are making “women’s health care” more expensive, painful, and risky. A poor woman named Gabriela finished her abortion without much pain relief except for nitrous oxide (laughing gas). When she emerged from the procedure, “Gabriela’s expression was murderous.” Robb (and Cosmo) didn’t see any irony in the word choice.
LifeNews.com Note: Tim Graham is the director of media analysis for the Media Research Center, a media watchdog group. He was a White House correspondent for World magazine in 2001 and 2002. This originally appeared on the NewsBusters web site.
LifeNews.com by Tim Graham
