Gosnell and Abortion, Part 3 of 3

In the first post,
I introduced the theme that pro-choice journalists are unconsciously
avoiding directly covering the Gosnell case because it would cause
cognitive dissonance and provided the first example: the Gosnell case
would reveal just how liberal and out-of-touch the abortion status quo
is in this country. In the second post
I got to the heart of the issue: the extreme laws on abortion make it
impossible to distinguish between abortion and infanticide, leading not
just Gosnell but also pro-choice leaders (including President Obama) to
openly call for infanticide. Gosnell’s problem: he followed through on
the logic.

There’s one last myth that cannot survive the Gosnell story, and in
some ways its the hardest for the pro-choice lobby to accept but also
the most important to understanding the pro-life perspective. So here
goes.

3. Abortion is not good for women 

As a commenter to my second post noted, the pro-choice lobby is
trying to spin the Gosnell story and they are trying to spin it hard.
The most egregious example of this is a completely astounding article from The Atlantic
running with the headline: Kermit Gosnell and the Anti-Abortion
Movement’s Intelligence Failure. The sub-title really says it all:

An anti-abortion group says it spent 20 years praying
outside his clinic. Why didn’t any of the women tell them what was going
on?

In other words: you pro-lifers were right outside the clinic. Why
didn’t you do something? Here’s the problem with that accusation: the
pro-life protesters might have been right outside, but the pre-eminent National Abortion Federation had already been inside the facility. Arguing that the pro-lifers should have known only highlights the fact that the pro-choicers did know.
Not only did they come and inspect Gosnell’s facility (they denied him
admittance into their group), but he worked part time at an NAF
facility.
The Atlantic piece alleges that it was fear of pro-life protesters that drove women to the squalid and lethal house of horrors:

In a March piece for the Huffington Post, Kate Michelman,
the former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Carol E. Tracy,
the executive director of the Women’s Law Project, wrote that one reason
that poor minority women went to Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors was
that they were driven there by fear of anti-abortion protestors outside
Planned Parenthood facilities in Philadelphia.

But there’s no reason to have to speculate that pro-lifers may
have driven some women to Gosnell’s clinic because we already know how
quite a few of the women ended up there: the NAF sent them. As RealChoice documents (citing the grand jury report):

The Grand Jury in the Kermit Gosnell case found that at
least six young women and girls, including the mother of Baby Boy A, had
never intended to end up in the hands of Dr. Gosnell They had sought
out a member of the most reputable organization of abortion
practitioners in the world: the National Abortion Federation (NAF).

For more on the Gosnell / NAF connection, Shannen Coffin reports that:

Gosnell worked one day a week at
the now-defunct Atlantic Women’s Medical Services in Wilmington, Del.,
which was an NAF member. Many of the witnesses for the prosecution were employees of that NAF-member facility. The grand-jury report found
that he routinely referred women who were too far along in their
pregnancy to get an abortion under Delaware law to his West Philadelphia
clinic, and the patients paid the NAF-member Delaware facility for the
abortion services at the Philadelphia clinic. At least one of the
abortions at issue in the indictment was started (given the need to
induce labor, late-term abortions often take place over several days) at
the Delaware NAF-certified facility and the unborn child was finished
off at the Philadelphia clinic.

So, just to recap, not only did the pro-choice lobby fail miserably
to stop Gosnell when they knew exactly how bad things were, not only did
they allow him to work at their clinics and start abortions there that
he finished at his own clinic, but on top of their egregious and callous
disregard for the plight of the women they abandoned to that butcher,
they have the audacity to complain that the pro-life protesters should
have done more. The sad thing is that, inadvertently, the pro-choice
lobby seems to be admitting in the end that the ones with genuine
concern and compassion for women are not the pro-choice lobby who
created and sheltered Gosnell, but the pro-lifers. (Check out  the first Friedersdorf piece again
for a recap of the ways in which the pro-choice lobby protected Gosnell
from audits, inspections, and investigations for years while his grisly
reign continued unabated.)

It seems hard to believe that the pro-choice lobby would put abortion
ahead of the welfare of women, but it’s not actually news. They’ve been
doing it for years when they oppose common-sense regulations on
abortion clinics, such as requiring the buildings to meet the same
standards as surgical outpatient facilities or requiring abortionists to
have admittance privileges with local hospitals for when something goes
wrong. The ideal of total access to abortion has become so extreme that
they have forgotten their own rhetoric, that abortion is supposed to be
a means to feminist empowerment and not an end in itself. But that’s
exactly what it has become. Partially this is due to the precarious
position that Roe v Wade has put them in. Just as the abortioneers would
rather silence a fellow abortionist’s plea for help in staying the
course despite the trauma of daily homicide, the abortion movement
generally believes that if poor and minority women have to deal with
dangerous and substandard care to preserve maximum access to abortion
for everyone: so be it. Necessary sacrifices, and all that. Partially it
may also be due to the unresolved trauma some pro-choice women feel as a
consequence of their own abortions. Different women react in different
ways, but for many it leaves a scar that never heals, a wound that never
fully closes.

The pro-choice movement has been locked into a precarious, volatile,
and absolutist position ever since Roe v. Wade. Because they had their
political victories handed by fiat rather than earned on the
battleground of public opinion, a single supreme court opinion could
undo all of the “progress” they ever made. Unlike civil rights,
“abortion rights” was not a case of the SCOTUS successfully getting out
ahead of an inevitable cultural shift. They gambled at social
engineering, and they guessed horribly wrong, and now the pro-choice
lobby has no choice but to defend their misbegotten political turf by
hook and by crook.

The American people would not tolerate the reality of our current
regime for a single day if it was presented to them plainly. The Gosnell
case threatens, if not to pull the cover off the whole enterprise, to
at least give a glimpse of what abortion in American is really about
today.

And you know what? It’s not so much that pro-choice journalists can’t
abide the thought of the American people taking a look at that, as it
is that they can’t stand the possibility that they themselves might be
forced to see the reality of their own political views. They aren’t
hiding something they’ve seen from us; they have their hands covering
their own eyes.