The real facts about the Kermit Gosnell story, via The Nation's Katha Pollitt:
Blood-spattered floors. Cat feces. Broken equipment. A 15-year-old giving anesthesia. Two women dead, countless more maimed and injured. Third-trimester fetuses delivered alive whose spines were then severed by the doctor. This was the Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia. This is what illegal abortion looks like.
That’s right. Illegal abortion. A great deal has been written about Dr. Kermit Gosnell and the shocking conditions and practices at his facility, which was closed last March after a drug raid, and is back in the news because a grand jury has indicted him and nine employees for murder in the deaths of one woman and seven infants. There have been many calls for further restrictions on abortion, much revulsion expressed at post-viability abortions, much blame cast on prochoicers for supposedly doing nothing to stop him. But it has not been pointed out often enough that what Dr. Gosnell was doing was illegal in Pennsylvania. It is not legal to perform abortions after twenty-four weeks. It is not legal to slit the necks of born-alive fetuses at any age, much less at thirty weeks or even more. It is not legal for untrained, unlicensed employees to perform medical procedures.
Irin Carmon at Salon debunks the "it's being under-covered prior to this week" meme:
Now prochoicers are being blamed for this rogue operator. The grand jury report suggests that Tom Ridge, Republican governor from 1995 to 2001, discontinued inspections because prochoicers claimed they were too burdensome. The ones I talked to were skeptical. “We never lobbied against inspection,” Carol Tracy of the Women’s Law Project, which represents clinics in Pennsylvania, told me by phone. She pointed out that under Ridge’s Democratic predecessor, Bob Casey, who was famously opposed to legal abortion, Gosnell’s clinic was inspected three times, and each time serious problems were found. Nothing was done. Perhaps it’s relevant that Gosnell’s patients were poor, many of them immigrants—like 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar from Nepal, with whose murder Gosnell has been charged—who may not even have known that safe and legal abortion is available here.
This week, the right wing has been working the refs, demanding to know why the press has been allegedly silent on the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia doctor who allegedly committed horrific acts against his patients with impunity for years. Fox News’ Kristen Powers kicked it off with an op-ed in USA Today, claiming, “The deafening silence of too much of the media, once a force for justice in America, is a disgrace.” Michelle Malkin has helped spearhead a Twitter campaign. Breitbart.com calls it “a full-blown, coordinated blackout throughout the entire national media.”
If you’ve never heard of the Gosnell story, it’s not because of a coverup by the liberal mainstream media. It’s probably because you failed to pay attention to the copious coverage among pro-choice and feminist journalists, as well as the big news organizations, when the news first broke in 2011. There would be something rich, if it weren’t so infuriating, about these (uniformly male, as it happens) reporters and commentators scrambling to break open this shocking untold story. You know, the one that was written about here, hereand here, to name some disparate sources.
On the other hand, Loesch at RedState.com was using the Gosnell story as an excuse to drum up support for even tougher abortion restrictions and/or outright bans of the practice:
We need sensible abortion control. Think of how many classrooms of children lost their lives at the hands of Gosnell. The difference between Gosnell and some other abortionists is that Gosnell was caught. Gosnell didn’t use an AR-15 to snuff out the lives of these live infants. He assaulted them with scissors. Too many to count. There is a photo of one child (via the grand jury testimony) stuffed into a shoebox like a pet hamster. His little legs were too big so they hung out over the sides. Just one life.
Call your lawmaker today. It’s time for common sense abortion control.
Call your lawmakers. Demand common sense abortion regulation. Even if it saves just one life. #Gosnell
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 12, 2013
Waiting for the call of "sensible restrictions" since #Gosnell has blown the lid off of an industry.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 12, 2013
Where is the "sensible solution" talk about abortion regulation in the wake of the #Gosnell live infant murders?
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 12, 2013
Remember when pro-abortionists said women would die in dirty clinics if abortion was illegal? #GOSNELL
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 12, 2013
The difference between #Gosnell and some of these other abortionists is that Gosnell was caught.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 12, 2013
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