In the womb at a shiny, clean clinic.

In
response to the Gosnell trial, some pro-choicers are claiming this is
what happens when we restrict access to abortion. They say Gosnell
exemplifies exactly why we must fight to protect abortion rights. For
example, here’s NARAL’s statement on the subject:

Kermit
Gosnell’s actions were reprehensible, illegal and reminiscent of
back-alley abortions from the days before Roe v. Wade. The conditions in
Gosnell’s clinic were horrific, demonstrating what can happen to women
when abortion isn’t available through safe and legal providers. This is
why we work every day to protect the constitutional rights of women to
access legal and safe abortion care regardless of income and geography.

Gosnell
was a rogue operator taking advantage of an environment created by the
careless oversight of local and state regulators. He preyed on women who
were financially unable to choose a better option, thanks in part to
Pennsylvania’s repeated efforts to limit access to abortion. When states
go to extreme lengths to restrict abortion, unscrupulous providers like
Gosnell are often a woman’s last resort. 

Gosnell’s
clinic was far below the standard of care. The conditions there remind
us of what women were forced to go through before Roe v. Wade. We can
never go back to those days of back-alley abortion. The best way – the
only true way – and to ensure we don’t is by protecting and
strengthening access for all women to safe and legal abortion care.

Like
so many pro-choice defenses of abortion rights, I can’t help but notice
NARAL’s statements focus solely on the women, completely ignoring the
infants Gosnell and his staff murdered. (I can say “murder” this time
because these babies were outside their mothers’ wombs when they were
killed; there are no inane semantic arguments here about how “murder”
and “abortion” are different because murder is illegal.)

That’s okay, though. Over at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Kyle Wingfield covers the infanticide angle [warning: graphic descriptions]:

   
But pro-choice people are kidding themselves if they believe details of
the way the mothers were treated are the only details from the Gosnell
trial that matter in this debate. Consider these bits of testimony:

• “I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” one of
  Gosnell’s employees, Sherry West, said of the screams coming from a baby
  she estimated to be 18 to 24 inches (i.e., the size of a child carried
  to full term) when it was delivered and then killed.
• “It jumped, the arm,” another employee, Lynda Williams, said of a
  baby whose neck she “snipped” after it was delivered into a toilet.
  Williams testified that Gosnell told her not to worry about the
  “involuntary response” from an “already dead” child. But why would an
  “already dead” child have to have its neck “snipped”?
• The post-birth abortion procedure was “literally a beheading. It is
  separating the brain from the body,” said Stephen Massof, who previously
  pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in the deaths of two infants at
  Gosnell’s clinic.
• “I see this big baby boy laying there … He had that color of a baby.
  I didn’t feel as though he had a chance,” testified Adrienne Moton, who
  both worked for Gosnell and had two abortions at his clinic. Moton
  estimated she’d “snipped” the necks of some 10 infants.
• “They looked just like regular babies,” said Ashley Baldwin, who
  began working at Gosnell’s clinic at the age of 15 and testified she
  witnessed five or more babies move, breathe or “screech” between their
  births and deaths. One of them was so large, she said, that Gosnell
  joked, “this baby is going to walk me home.”

    The point is this: All of those children had the ability to
move, breathe, scream, screech and twitch before being removed from the
womb. They did not become human in the birth canal, and they were not
transformed from some stone-like existence to life via the
birth-inducing drugs given to their mothers so that they might be pushed
out.

    The notion that these killings would have
been OK, if only they had taken place within the womb at a shiny, clean
clinic, is barbaric.