Are the legal activities of New York abortion clinics really any less horrifying than those of Kermit Gosnell?
Is the Kermit Gosnell baby-murder mill in Philadelphia an isolated case? Consider what happened at Dr. Emily’s Women’s Health Center in The Bronx on Jan. 11, 2013.
By Kyle Smith
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
April 27, 2013
In an undercover sting operation, a woman who was 23-plus weeks pregnant (abortion is illegal in New York and other states after 24 weeks) secretly recorded the conversations she had in this abortionist’s office.
In an exchange laden with euphemisms on both sides to conceal the gruesome nature of the discussion, the pregnant woman wondered aloud what would happen if “it” (her fetus) emerged from her intact and alive.
AP
Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell is on trial for infanticide.
The employee assigned to take note of medical history reassured the woman, “We never had that for ages” (a seeming admission that a baby did survive abortion at the clinic at least once) but that should “it” “survive this,” “They would still have to put it in like a jar, a container, with solution, and send it to the lab. . . . We don’t just throw it out in the garbage.”
Oh, and this innocuous-sounding “solution” was, of course, a toxic substance suitable for killing an infant.
“Like, what if it was twitching?” asked the pregnant woman.
“The solution will make it stop,” said the clinic employee. “That’s the whole purpose of the solution . . . It will automatically stop. It won’t be able to breathe anymore.”
As for any qualms a woman might have about seeing her newborn child being poisoned and drowned in a jar, the employee advised her “patient” not to worry: She’d be under sedation, and the murder would take place in another room anyway.
The employee said, humorously, that “the doctor” is “not gonna wake you up and be like, ‘Hey, excuse me, you have—’ ”
The sentence was left unfinished, too unthinkable even for a euphemism. There’s no polite way to say, “You have just given birth, but we will murder the child.”
In fact, when the pregnant woman brought up the idea that, if the abortion failed and resulted in a live birth, “I would have to take it home,” the employee said, “No. That is so illegal! Once was start this, we have to finish it.”
Inside a Bronx clinic
So went a sting operation conducted by Live Action, an anti-abortion group founded by activist Lila Rose. Rose’s recording raises the alarming possibility that some abortion clinic employees think it’s illegal not to murder any infant who survives an abortion.
A similarly horrifying attitude prevailed at the Philadelphia abortion clinic of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who is facing five counts of murder — four of them babies who survived abortion, one a 41-year-old woman. Eight employees at the clinic have already pleaded guilty in the case, three of them to third-degree murder.
Gosnell both illegally aborted fetuses that were past 24 weeks and ignored the distinction between abortion and infanticide by inducing labor then severing the spinal cords of babies after they were born.
The Bronx clinic hasn’t been accused of any such wrongdoing. But as Rose puts it, “People need to understand what a late-term abortion is.”
Aborting a fetus at 23 weeks in Pennsylvania or New York is perfectly legal, no matter how awful the details.
And the details can be as horrific as what happened as Gosnell’s clinic.
After the pregnant woman pressed the employee at the Bronx establishment, “If it’s twitching or breathing or something, like whatever showing signs of life or something, I’m not gonna have to, they’re not gonna be like you have to take this home like,” the employee replied, “No! No!”
The employee also advised the pregnant woman to murder her child should the infant unexpectedly be born at home.
“I don’t want to like go into labor at home,” the pregnant woman said. “Like what if it like pops out, like, at home?”
“If it comes out then it comes out. Flush it!” said the employee.
Should the child be born on the floor? “We’ll tell you to put it in a bag or something and bring it to us,” the employee advised.
Arbitrary 24-week rule
Rose says this isn’t the only sting her group has conducted. She promises to reveal the results of at least two more undercover operations conducted in other abortion clinics.
The pro-choice side points out that Gosnell was already acting illegally, hence there is no need for more regulations on abortion.
But the Bronx sting raises the question of how blurry the line might be between legal and illegal actions in abortion mills.
Gosnell “is not an aberration. He is not alone. There are abortionists all across the country who are performing [illegal] late-term abortions and killing babies,” Rose says. “The inhumanity is business as usual.”
But a primary reason the Gosnell case has received amazingly scant and grudging attention from most of the major media outlets is that it’s impossible to discuss illegal abortions without thinking more about legal ones.
It’s necessary (unless you think abortion should generally be illegal) to declare an arbitrary cutoff point. But is 24 weeks the right one? Fetuses that old have an excellent chance of surviving once born. By contrast, at 21 weeks or less, viability outside the womb is virtually nil.
You can bet that Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice groups that enjoy strong support from the media would raise an unholy ruckus at any suggestion that the 24-week limit is not strict enough.
Yet when the 23-weeks-pregnant woman told the Bronx clinic, “It actually looks like a baby,” she was told by a different counselor, “It is at this point.”
Not to worry, though: all that would be left after the abortion, she was told, would be (those disturbing euphemisms again) “pregnancy parts” and “tissue.”
The New York Times, in the sole article it published on the Gosnell trial before it grudgingly admitted the story was an important one and reversed course, incorrectly and revealingly referred to the murdered babies who had survived abortion as “fetuses,” The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto pointed out.
Fetus? No. That’s misinformation meant to downplay what happened. Once born, you’re no longer a fetus. And ending your life is infanticide, not abortion.
Looking the other way
But if a child should be born and immediately murdered — “snipped,” in the revolting word in use at Gosnell’s clinic — who will know about it? The only people present and not under anesthesia are likely to be complicit in the crime.
So it’s a murder that will be discovered only if one of the murderers confesses. And given the nature of what goes on in abortion clinics, those murderers might seem likely to fail to even admit to themselves what they have done.
If your mission in life is to destroy fetuses, even 24-week-old fetuses capable of surviving outside the womb, and a fetus should miraculously survive all efforts to extinguish it, how ready are you going to be to, as the law commands, completely reverse yourself and recognize that a baby has been born and enjoys the same rights as any other human being?
Shouldn’t there be mandatory classes to drill all abortion workers on these basic tenets? Shouldn’t abortionists be at least as subject to investigation as restaurateurs, who face regular unannounced inspections backed with business-imperilling penalties (such as big nasty signs on the window) should they, for instance, leave the butter out?
Last month, in the suburbs adjacent to Philadelphia, state dog wardens informed the media that they are “knocking on doors in Delaware County this week to make sure dog licenses are current.”
At the Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia, abortionist Gosnell was murdering, in the estimate of the grand-jury report, “hundreds” of babies, though he now stands formally charged with only four of the slayings, plus that of a 41-year-old grandmother. The grand jury noted with alarm that in Pennsylvania, you can’t be charged with infanticide if the murder occurred two or more years earlier.
Regulators hadn’t bothered to visit Gosnell’s murder factory in 17 years.
The army of local and state government snoops was just too busy investigating houses that had leashes on their front lawns to take any interest in whether any newborns might happen to be getting their heads hacked off and their feet placed in jars like pickles.
Gosnell’s murder spree would probably be continuing uncontested were it not for the fact that his abattoir coincidentally turned up in an unrelated prescription-drug investigation.
No fallout from Gosnell
So, how many Gosnells are out there right now? Isn’t in it in the interest of any of our various governments to find out?
As President Obama said, in reference to the massacre of children in Newtown, “If there’s even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.”
Obama bemoaned the influence of a rich, well-connected, absolutist influence group (the gun lobby) at that time.
Will Gosnell’s murder spree cause the president to bemoan the influence of a rich, well-connected, absolutist influence group (the pro-abortion lobby) this time?
Will he call for new laws? Better enforcement of existing laws? Will he say anything at all? Or will he stand by his curiously tightlipped new formulation, “I’m familiar with it”?
Of course not. Obama praised Planned Parenthood Friday morning (“God bless you”) and not only didn’t mention Gosnell, he didn’t even use the word abortion, of which the organization provides more than any other group in the US.
Instead he kept using euphemisms like “women’s health,” as though pregnancy were a disease and ending it was like prescribing medicine, and he even confused abortion with “contraceptive care.”
The Gosnell case is a deeply political one. The grand jury directly accused political conditions for creating an environment in which abortion mills escape even the mildest curiosity from regulators who take a great deal of interest in your chihuahua.
From 1979 to the 1990s, such establishments were subjected to yearly visits from inspectors — who failed to do anything about the violations they discovered.
Then the inspectors stopped coming at all: “With the change of administration from Governor [Bob] Casey to Governor [Tom] Ridge,” wrote the grand jury, “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.”
Again, Gosnell is not a one-off. A Delaware Planned Parenthood clinic recently suspended operations after five patients had to be rushed to the ER this year. A former nurse told Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV, “I couldn’t tell you how ridiculously unsafe it was.” The station reported that “Planned Parenthood is essentially in charge of inspecting itself.”
NY’s lax abortion rules
The position of the pro-abortion lobby is so extreme that even a 24-week cutoff point for abortions doesn’t satisfy them. Why shouldn’t a woman be able to put off the decision as long as she pleases?
To placate this influential, deep-pocketed group of extremists, the nominally Catholic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, is working on a bill, not all of the details of which have been made public, that would make it easier to get an abortion after 24 weeks.
Cuomo aides have been saying the law is needed in case the Supreme Court should restrict abortion, but that seems less farfetched than the idea that Cuomo plans to run for president and is trying to get to Hillary Clinton’s left to win the support of the abortion lobby.
Cuomo certainly isn’t thinking merely of his fortunes in New York state, where some two-thirds of voters think abortion is already too common.
New York City already has a sickeningly high abortion rate: According to 2011 statistics, 40% of all pregnancies here are aborted.
That’s twice the national average. In The Bronx, 48% of pregnancies are aborted. Among African-Americans, the rate is 57%.
Obama often speaks of the need to cool the rhetoric, to get opposing sides out of their trenches and meet in the middle to shake hands. His attempt to do so in the field of gun control was a miserable, indeed embarrassing, failure.
But there are lots of abortion-related issues that enjoy broad public support from virtually everyone except extremist interest groups.
Starting with the principle that abortion clinics should be at least as interesting to regulators as dogs or restaurants.
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