Abortion: A nightmare in Philadelphia

What a fittingly ironic way to mark the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, said Christine M. Flowers in the Philadelphia Daily News. A grand jury last week indicted Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell for murdering eight people during illegal, late-term abortions. Seven of the victims were fully recognizable babies—6 and 7 months along—that he or an assistant allegedly delivered live before severing their spinal cords with scissors. Gosnell, whose filthy, foul-smelling office was filled with poor and desperate black women, reportedly joked that one baby he’d delivered and killed was “big enough to walk me to the bus stop.” Having fed us “a sanitized version” of late-term abortion for years, “the choice crowd” now has to confront the horror Gosnell wrought: “the tiny carcasses thrown into jars” and stored in a freezer, the baby that breathed for 20 minutes before he snapped its spine. This case is a “blunt” reminder that sometimes “it’s hard to tell the difference between abortion and a capital crime.”

No, it is not, said Amanda Marcotte in Doublex​.com. The “vast majority” of the nation’s 1,800 abortion providers “run clean, professional operations.” And who is to blame that some poor women have to resort to “shady” operators like Gosnell in the first place? “The anti-choice movement,” for harassing and stigmatizing doctors who provide abortions, so that they’re now hard to find. The real culprit here is poverty, said Belinda Luscombe in Time. The “low economic status” of Gosnell’s clients meant that state officials ignored his egregious practices, despite several complaints and the death of a 22-year-old patient from an infection.

It wasn’t just racism that kept officials from acting, said Melinda Henneberger in PoliticsDaily​.com. The grand jury report says state officials feared that shutting down Gosnell’s clinic would be “putting a barrier up to women.” Was keeping his house of horrors open really in the best interests of women? asked William Saletan in Slate.com. Obviously not—but try telling that to “pro-choice absolutists,” who insist that women should have access to abortion “as late as necessary”—even in the last three months. For them, abortion is a simple issue of women’s rights, not a moral quandary with gray areas and reasonable cutoff dates. As Gosnell has now shown, that kind of extreme thinking leads to butchery that shocks the conscience, and only helps those who want to ban all abortions.

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