Maryland’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOH) announced on Friday that 12 of 16 abortion clinics inspected in the state failed to meet the state’s safety regulations, the most recent of which went into effect in July of 2012.
LifeSiteNews reports that Joshua Sharfstein, secretary of the Maryland DOH, said one of the most common violations discovered was the “failure to maintain a sanitary environment at all times and to consistently use chemical indicator strips in sterilized equipment packing.”
In addition, violations included “failure to obtain information about the professional credentials of physicians on staff from the National Practitioner Data Bank,” and “failure to include a discharge diagnosis in the medical record.”
The state suspended the licenses of four of the abortion clinics, owned by Associates in OB/GYN, which had been temporarily suspended just two months earlier for violations, and then reopened. The previous closure of three of the clinics, associated with noted late-term abortionist Steven Chase Brigham, followed the discovery of an abortion-related death of a patient. Brigham and another abortionist, Nicola I. Riley, were arrested for murder after police raided an illegal abortion facility in Elkton in 2010. A botched abortion that resulted in a patient’s ruptured uterus and other injuries led authorities to the site where 35 corpses of viable late-term babies were discovered in a freezer.
While all three Planned Parenthood abortion facilities in the state were found with some relatively minor violations, at one facility a staff member was not certified in basic life support or trained in emergency transfer of patients to the hospital or the administration of IV sedation medications.
At the Maryland abortion clinic of late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart, state investigators discovered eight pages of violations, including a registered nurse whose license had expired, nurses without proper training in administering drugs, and failure to train staff in emergency transfer of patients to the hospital.
Carhart is serving as a “trainer” of family planning supporters along with euthanasia advocate Peter Singer at the Women Deliver international conference, directed by an organization run by Melinda Gates. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is also speaking at the conference.
Most of the Maryland abortion clinics were permitted to remain open after providing satisfactory plans of corrected procedures that would bring their facilities in compliance with state regulations.