“How self-righteousness and cold rationalizations blur distinctions between man and monster”
By Dave Andrusko
Abortionists Steven Brigham, Kermit Gosnell, and Timothy Liveright
Over the years we’ve talked multiple times about abortionist Steven Brigham, including Tuesday (“
Abortion apologists try to shift blame for notorious abortionists from themselves to pro-lifers”).
We write about him because he’s lost his license in multiple states, is
accused of maiming who knows how many women, and is Houdini-like in his
ability to escape sanctions.
Of course our opposite numbers also care about the women Brigham (and
the abortionists who’ve worked for him in four states) are accused of
injuring and exploiting. But there is another reason they have written
more of late about Brigham, who is fighting yet again to get his
suspended New Jersey license reinstated: Kermit Gosnell. His three
murder convictions were the worse black eye the abortion industry has
suffered in decades. They must distance themselves from the man who
operated the “House of Horrors.”
Contrary to what the Planned Parenthoods insist, Gosnell and Brigham,
two peas in a pod, are not the only abortionists who are unskilled,
untrained, and uncaring. This uncomfortable truth (for the abortion
industry) is admitted near the end of Eyal Press’s 10,000-word-long
story, “Steven Brigham’s abortion clinics keep being sanctioned for
offering substandard care. Why is he still in business?” which appears
in the current New Yorker.
As we talked about Tuesday, the first of Press’ self-assigned tasks
is to demonstrate that it’s really the fault of pro-lifers that the
likes of Brigham and Gosnell exist. Here’s Press’s explanation of how it
all came to pass:
“The caricature of clinics as
‘abortion mills’ run by venal profiteers has long been a staple of the
anti-abortion movement. As a result, pro-choice activists understood the
potential dangers of drawing attention to any facility that might
reinforce this stereotype. One clinic director told me, ’We know the
anti-choice community will manipulate any story, however minor, to paint
the entire abortion-care community with the same brush.’ Politicians
could cite such stories as justification for imposing burdensome
regulations. Yet clinic owners also knew that some providers saw what
they did as a business, not as a social mission. As reputable doctors,
hospitals, and medical schools increasingly distanced themselves from
abortions, it became more likely that substandard providers would fill
the void.”
If I understand her point, pro-lifers’ accusations were
self-fulfilling prophecies. Label abortion clinics “abortion mills” and
suddenly “substandard providers” will “fill the void” left when the
“good people” leave or never get into the trade.
Really? Not to belabor the point, but quacks have been a part of the
abortion trade going back to the first days after Roe v. Wade and Doe v.
Bolton were handed down. Think about what you have to do in abortion
and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it attracts those kinds of people.
And those predators exist today. Look at what self-described
“pro-choicers” who at one time worked for Planned Parenthood of Delaware
recently said.
Nurse Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich testified that there are some
“startling similarities between the situation with Planned Parenthood of
Delaware and Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s clinic in Philadelphia.” What were
those similarities? “Both operated extremely hazardous abortion clinics
and
their respective states refused to close them despite repeated warnings,” according to the News Journal. (Emphasis mine)
Another similarity—uncannily like what is you read not just about
Gosnell but also in Press’ account about Brigham—is the behavior of
abortionist Thomas Liveright. Mitchell-Werbrich told columnist Kristen
Powers that she saw him
“’slapping a patient,’ and placing
patients on ‘operating tables still wet with the blood from the previous
patient.’ He refused to wear sterilized gloves during procedures and
would sing ‘hymns about sin to girls during the painful dilation phase
of an abortion’ and play ‘Peek-A-Boo’ with patients. She said he ‘rushed
abortions’ and allowed ‘sedated patients to wander down [the street]
dazed and confused.’”
There’s much more, but let’s go back to Press’s question: why do the
likes of Steven Brigham (and Kermit Gosnell and Thomas Liveright and who
knows how many others)
stay in business?
The initial cover story in Press’ account is, as we wrote Tuesday,
that it’s difficult to air dirty laundry in public when the
“anti-abortion movement” caricatures clinics “as “’abortion mills’ run
by venal profiteers.” In other words, in almost all cases they won’t
tell authorities no matter how horribly these guys act for fear of
giving “ammunition” to pro-lifers.
But, truth be told, if you read Press carefully, you can divine five
reasons that have nothing to do with pro-lifers, all of which reflect
badly on pro-abortionists.
#1. The aforementioned cowardice. If you read others
stories (especially about how abortion advocates went out of their way
not to blow the whistle on Gosnell), you’d think there was a virtual
army of “abortion rights advocates” trying to get Brigham out of the
abortion trade. There weren’t that many. More common was the response of
equally notorious abortionist LeRoy Carhart, who specializes in late,
late abortions.
Carhart recalls for Press meeting Brigham at an National Abortion Federation meeting, in the early 1990s
“’He came and asked me if I would
train him to do second- and third-trimester abortions.’ After learning
that Brigham had limited experience doing first-trimester abortions,
Carhart cautioned him against the idea. Privately, he was taken aback:
‘He seemed like a nice person, but I was amazed that somebody would, you
know, want to learn how to fly a jumbo jet before he learned how to fly
an airplane.’”
If, as even Press admits, the dangers (to the woman) increase the
later in pregnancy the baby is aborted, if you really cared about women
(as Carhart insists he does), why wouldn’t you move heaven and earth to
stop a man who is not even a gynecologist?
#2. It is not pro-life state authorities who turn a
blind eye to the Brighams and Gosnells. As we wrote repeatedly in our
coverage of Gosnell, the 261-page Grand Jury report was a searing
indictment of the Department of Health, the Philadelphia Department of
Public Health, the Department of State, and fellow doctors, especially
those at nearby hospitals who treated Gosnell’s victims.
What Gosnell was doing was not a mystery, not cloaked away in
anonymity. There were plenty of people who knew and who could have shut
down Gosnell. They chose not to for a host of reasons, including “for
political reasons,” to quote the Grand Jury. (That’s a reference to when
a pro-abortionist became governor of Pennsylvania.)
Making sure there were no “barriers” to women seeking abortions was not only Job #1, it was the only job.
Read Press’s story and you find example after example after example
of Brigham wriggling out of corners, brazenly evading state laws and
orders from medical authorities. It is impossible to believe that if
they really wanted to, they could not have put Brigham permanently out
of business.
On the other hand, Press’s story lets the cat out of the bag. Not
long after New York revoked his license in 1994, the New Jersey Board of
Medical Examiners prepared to render judgment on whether it should
revoke Brigham’s license, too.
Brigham, naturally told an administrative-law judge that, well, these
things happen in what Press euphemistically calls “advanced-gestation
abortions.” Who knows what would have happened if it were Brigham’s word
alone, but, Press writes, he lined up
“Michael Policar, a respected
gynecologist and a former national spokesperson for Planned Parenthood,
[who] testified on Brigham’s behalf. The injuries that the New York
board had attributed to negligence, Policar said, could have happened to
patients ‘in the best of hands.’ (Policar told me that he had reviewed
the medical records for only two patients, and had never vouched for
Brigham’s general competence.) Several other physicians offered similar
testimony.”
The judge ruled in Brigham’s favor. Press has other stories coming
out of Maryland of colossal indifference to women or a resolute
inability (unwillingness?) to follow through to keep Brigham and his
associates from flimflamming what minimal laws on abortion existed in
Maryland.
#3. Brigham could sell ice cubes to Eskimos.
Handsome, youthful looking, a former athlete, he oozed charisma and
sincerity in his interviews with Press, who admits she was almost taken
in.
“Brigham was cordial and
ingratiating, and he never raised his voice. He seemed so convinced of
the purity of his intentions and the bad faith of his detractors—they
were either protesters or competitors, he said—that, while he spoke, it
became difficult to imagine otherwise.”
Brigham deflected every criticism of his outrageous behavior,
attributing it to those crazy pro-lifers or his greedy competitors. The
syllogism goes something like this.
Pro-lifers are awful and liars to boot.
Pro-lifers accuse Brigham (and his associates) of treating pregnant women horribly.
Thus Brigham must be innocent, since pro-lifers are liars.
Or, as Press puts it, Brigham would have you believe he “was a
dedicated doctor, and the zealotry of the religious right was
responsible for his troubles.” Of course, there is not a shred of truth
to this bogus evasion.
#4. What else explains why women go to the likes of
Brigham (besides those awful pro-lifers and “unnecessary” laws)? Shame.
They believe they deserve this because of the “stigma” of abortion.
Yet the middle class professional Press uses to illustrate that it is
not just poor women who are exploited by Brigham– while “passionately
pro-choice”—is” embarrassed” not by pro-lifers but by the fact that
she’d already had an abortion.
“I’m twenty-eight years old, and I can’t figure it out yet?”
Finally
#5. Brigham is invincibly confident, self-assured, a
man who never gets rattled. The
rationales/justifications/rationalizations he offers Press sound eerily
like what Gosnell told reporter Steve Volk after he was convicted. They
transform themselves into martyrs to a higher cause, incapable of seeing
(or at least admitting) the trail of victims they leave in their wake.
I disagree completely with Volk that Gosnell’s “case is more complicated than most media portrayals allow.’
But he could have been speaking of Brigham when he concluded, “Yet,
up close, his story is worse than we knew—a lesson in how
self-righteousness and cold rationalizations blur distinctions between
man and monster.”
Source: NRLC News
Another
year begins and the U.S. Supreme Court rulings legalizing abortion are
still in place, although much altered since 1973. Those of us who
remember that January 22, 1973, day when the Court handed down Roe v.
Wade can likely describe the key points of this fateful decision. That
day altered our lives and our nation’s public policies and politics.
WASHINGTON
– The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) today commended the 227
members of the U.S. House of Representatives who voted to pass the
landmark No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 7), but directed
sharp criticism at the 188 House members who voted against the bill, and
at President Obama, whose White House issued a veto threat.
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