Article Date: 06 Feb 2011 - 0:00 PDT
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Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute has disclosed that a Delaware abortion provider has admitted to greatly underreporting the number of abortions it performs each year-including in statistics that it provided to Delaware's Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS).
"For too long abortion providers have been allowed to practice without regulation or safeguards, and it now appears that the scope of their operations has been hidden by false reports to government authorities, as well. Delawareans need to know the whole truth behind our state's abortion industry."
Surrounding evidence points at the scandal-plagued Atlantic Women's Medical Services, which has recently been linked to indicted abortionist Kermit Gosnell and only this week was suspended from the national abortion provider network.
The Guttmacher Institute's 2008 statistics also reveal that Delaware now has the highest abortion rate in the nation, at 40 abortions annually per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. The state's abortion rate is higher than those of New York, New Jersey, and California, long the leaders in abortion.
Guttmacher further states that 7,070 abortions were performed in Delaware in 2008 (the last year for which figures are available)1.
In its "Delaware Vital Statistics Annual Report 2008," DHSS lists Delaware's total number of abortions at 4,603, only 65% of Guttmacher's total2.
In an attempt to discover the reason for the enormous discrepancy, Ellen Barrosse, President of A Rose and a Prayer (ARAAP), spoke yesterday to Dr. Rachel Jones, Senior Research Associate for the Guttmacher Institute. Dr. Jones confirmed that her researchers received data from every abortion provider in Delaware.
Dr. Jones revealed that for 2007 and 2008, one provider supplied numbers that were substantially higher than the number it had given in previous years. When asked to explain the sudden and dramatic increase, the provider indicated that it had not been reporting all the abortions done at the facility, and that the actual number of abortions had not increased at all.
That's an additional 2,467 abortions per year, or over 200 additional abortions per month.
Dr. Jones declined to identify the provider. The fact that abortions procured by Delaware residents increased by only 530, while abortions procured by out-of-state residents increased by almost 2,000, suggests that the provider that falsified its records is in New Castle County, which is nearer to large population centers in other states.
There are only two providers in New Castle County-Planned Parenthood of Delaware and Atlantic Women's Medical Services.
Just across the state line from Pennsylvania, which requires that minors receive parental consent for abortions, Delaware has long officially reported out-of-state abortions at approximately 25% of the total for the state. The new numbers provided by Guttmacher indicate that 46%-almost half-of all abortions done in Delaware are performed on out-of-state women-many of whom may be minors evading parental consent laws in their home states.
Unfortunately, because the Guttmacher statistics for Delaware do not include age data and because the state data are clearly flawed, we do not know how many of those who seek abortions here are young girls trying to avoid their parents' involvement.
Dr. Jones told Ms. Barrosse that a female staff member of DHSS spoke to her to try to uncover the reason for the large discrepancy between Guttmacher's numbers and DHSS's. Dr. Jones said that she provided the same information to the caller as she did to A Rose and a Prayer, but DHSS has yet to update its numbers to reflect the information it received.
A Rose and a Prayer asks that Attorney General Beau Biden immediately investigate what appears to be a clear case of providing false information to a state agency by an abortion provider.
Ms. Barrosse stated that "Attorney General Biden needs to use his subpoena power to find out why DHSS was provided with materially false and misleading information and whether this was done to obscure from the General Assembly and the community at large what has been going on in New Castle County's abortion clinics.
"For too long abortion providers have been allowed to practice without regulation or safeguards, and it now appears that the scope of their operations has been hidden by false reports to government authorities, as well. Delawareans need to know the whole truth behind our state's abortion industry."
A Rose and a Prayer will be working with concerned members of Delaware's General Assembly to determine how to deal with the revelation that Delaware has become a destination for abortions for minors from other states-and whether the State's failure to regulate abortion clinics has led to this problem.
A Rose and a Prayer and its African-American Advisory Board will be holding a joint press conference at Theater N in the Nemours Building (1007 N. Orange St., Wilmington, DE) on Friday, February 4th, at 10 AM.
1. See table from Guttmacher Institute's Create a Table attached
2. Table D-13, page 140
Source:
Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute
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posted by JP Prichard on 29 Apr 2011 at 12:06 pm
Another reason why we need to have additional scrutiny of abortion providers.
It is not in their own best interest to report problems in their industry - whether its reporting minors seeking abortion (proof of statutory rape); evidence of abuse, exploitation, and human trafficking (as uncovered in multiple sting operations); or gross medical malpractice, health code violations and murder (as seen with Gosnell).
If this is going to be a viable service to women in this country, we need better information. Refusing to collect the info and/or punish those that commit fraud (or worse) makes this abortion a danger to women, not a benefit.
They need to clean up their act if they want people to continue to think of them as a benefit, and not an infection, in our communities.
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