More on Gosnell

 

Part Two: The Gosnell Murder Convictions, the Day After

 

By Dave Andrusko
Now that abortionist Kermit Gosnell has been convicted on three counts of first-degree murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter (along with a host of lesser charges), the battle is on to “explain” what the case “means.” This is important because there was such little coverage of what was by any standard a sensational murder trial that people just hearing about what happened at Gosnell’s “Baby Charnel House” will not have the context that readers of National Right to Life News Today have.

In Part Two, we’ll probe deeper into the pro-forma pro-abortion response. You really can’t understand what they are saying unless you understand that there is nothing that could happen—babies’ spinal cords severed, live babies swimming in toilets, flea-infested cats resting on the same spot women about to abort will rest, women dying of drug overdoses—that pro-abortionists won’t find the “right” response, that is, excuse themselves of all responsibility and grease the skids.
Which is why the mantra is ever and always more and more abortion—more and more access to abortion and absolutely no regulation of abortion clinics lest “access” be hindered. We wrote about this yesterday and all your really need to know to judge their sincerity is this.

An investigator for the National Abortion Federation went to Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Center after Gosnell asked to become a NAF member. The conditions were horrific, as she testified to the Grand Jury, so awful that she deemed the abortion clinic ”beyond redemption.” Who’d she tell? No one.
Not to worry. In responding yesterday to the Gosnell verdict, NAF attributed their unconscionable lack of accountability to one thing: the investigator did “not witness any illegal activities.” Just to be clear, I am not selectively quoting or taking what NAF said out of context. THAT was their defense.
How about the Philadelphia Inquirer? (Gosnell’s abortion clinic was located in West Philadelphia and the paper covered the trial very well.) Its editorial is titled, “How Gosnell got away with it,” and includes a classic line, “His murder conviction Monday should leave both sides of the sanctity-of-life debate asking how he got away with it for so long.”

Excuse me , pro-lifers know exactly why he got away with it. Part of the answer the Inquirer includes in its editorial: They were poor women—thousands and thousands and thousands of them.
But even this they draw the wrong conclusion. As the Grand Jury explained Gosnell’s abortion clinic went uninspected for 17 years because his “patients” were “poor women of color,” and “because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.”
As the Grand Jury made abundantly clear, the responsibility is all on one side.

”After 1993, even that pro forma effort came to an end. Not because of administrative ennui, although there had been plenty. Instead, the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all. The politics in question were not anti-abortion, but pro. With the change of administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”

Just to be clear, in the attempt to make sure no “barriers” were erected, countless women were left to the tender mercies of Kermit Gosnell. So much for pro-abortion politicians looking out for women.
The Inquirer contributes some useful commentary, but often mixes in misleading comments. For example, it is absolutely true that no amount of clinic regulation means anything without enforcement. But while it is true that “Pennsylvania already has some of the nation’s strictest abortion-clinic regulations,” that wasn’t the case until a law was passed (over tremendous pro-abortion opposition) in 2011, thanks to the publicity from the Gosnell trial.


To elaborate the Inquirer argues that pro-lifers are wrong to argue all abortion should be ended (it’s their right to hold that position), and then adds, “But the bad doctor’s atrocities serve just as much as a clarion call for better scrutiny of all abortion providers.”
Although I have my suspicions, I don’t know for a fact what the Inquirer’s position was on enacting tougher abortion clinic regulations in 2011. But to harken back to what the abortion industry has been saying all along, it’s their position that they can (and should) self-regulate—and never mind that in many states tattoo parlors are more closely scrutinized than abortion clinics.

Final thought: The Inquirer begins with a sentiment much of the rest of the editorial is at odds with—“Kermit Gosnell has been found guilty of the very savagery that legalized abortion was supposed to end.”’
We will talk more about this in Part Three.

Source: NRLC News