Left's Gosnell Response: More Funding, Allow Later Abortions

Left's Gosnell Response: More Funding, Allow Later Abortions

The mainstream media was caught with its pants down on failing to report on the gruesome trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist who is charged with murdering one woman and seven infants born alive during abortion procedures. As might have been expected, abortion supporters are now finding ways to spin what most human beings would say is unspinnable.

The left’s talking points on the Gosnell “house of horrors” trial is that we need less restrictions on, and more funding for, abortion in order to keep the Gosnell situation from happening again.

Using “back-alley abortion” rhetoric popular in the Roe v. Wade years, Katha Pollitt of The Nation argues that, had abortion been legal in Pennsylvania past 24 weeks, and had there been more Medicaid funding of abortions, so that “poor” and “immigrant” women did not have to use Gosnell’s clinic for their abortions, the “house of horrors” could have been prevented.

“This is what illegal abortion looks like,” writes Pollitt of the murdered infants and grotesque Gosnell clinic conditions as described in the grand jury report.

Referring to Gosnell himself as a “rogue operator,” which remains to be seen, Pollitt proceeds to defend abortion and its supporters with the following argument:

What fueled Gosnell’s business were the very restrictions the legislature was so keen on passing–parental notification, waiting periods, biased counseling and, most important, a ban on state funding for abortion for low-income women. Would women have gone to the Women’s Medical Society if Pennsylvania paid for abortion with Medicaid funds? Would they have had late procedures if they could have afforded earlier ones? Maybe some underage girls went to him to avoid the parental notification rules that supposedly protected them. Only women who felt they had no better alternative would have accepted such dangerous, degrading and frightening treatment. In a way, that’s the saddest part–that women didn’t feel they could turn around and leave.

Though state departments appear equally culpable, the prevention of the murders of these infants and Gosnell’s patient(s) could easily have been in the hands of the National Abortion Federation (NAF) who inspected the clinic and rejected its application due to its horrific conditions but failed to report it to authorities.

The NAF did not return calls from Breitbart News, but Pollitt quotes NAF head Vicki Saporta’s defense of her organization: “What we saw didn’t meet our standards, but they’d cleaned the place up and hired an RN for our visit. We only saw first-trimester procedures.”

Pollitt goes on to say that “it makes perfect sense” that Gosnell got away with his horrors because in Pennsylvania, with all of its “restrictions” on abortion, abortion is not treated as “medical care” and, therefore, did not have appropriate “oversight.”

It seems that abortion supporters always want it two ways. They want abortion to be considered “medical care,” but they also want to wield it as a powerful feminist political issue. With abortion supporters’ continued insistence on usurping “medical” language, i.e. “reproductive health care,” as euphemisms for abortion, they still cannot get most Americans, and even increasing numbers of young Americans, to believe that abortion is not killing children. The reactions to the Gosnell “house of horrors,” and whatever other “horrors” will be discovered in other abortion clinics, underscore this reality.

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