Tanning salons and restaurants are subject to more frequent health inspections than are abortion clinics in New York, according to the New York Post:
The state Health Department is failing to inspect many of New York’s abortion clinics — with some facilities escaping scrutiny for more than a decade, bombshell documents obtained by The Post reveal.
Health inspectors regulate 25 diagnostic and treatment clinics and surgery centers that provide abortion services — though pro-choice advocates say there are 225 abortion service providers in New York state.
Eight of the 25 clinics were never inspected over the 2000-12 span, five were inspected just once, and eight were inspected only twice or three times — meaning once every four or six years.
A total of just 45 inspections were conducted at all 25 facilities during the 12-year period.
By comparison, city eateries are inspected every year and graded, while a new law requires tanning salons to undergo inspections at least once every other year.
As for the abortion providers that were not subject to regulation or inspection at all:
“Some facilities are not required to have ‘abortion services’ in their operating certificates in order to perform abortions,” Health Department records-access official Elizabeth Sullivan wrote in a letter, explaining why other abortion providers are not inspected.
“The Department does not otherwise maintain a list of every Article 28 facility that performs abortions.”
The documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Chiaroscuro Foundation in the wake of revelations that Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s clinic went un-inspected for almost two decades. In Pennsylvania, the Grand Jury report on Gosnell’s crimes noted, the Department of Health in 1993 “abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all.”