In a USA Today opinion column, Amanda Marcotte joined the ranks of pro-aborts blaming pro-lifers for the Gosnell travesties. Her reasoning (if it can be called that) adds to a long list of strange bullet points (like this, this, and this) that have been proffered by the abortion lobby defending the position that Gosnell was a fruit of pro-life legislation and activism. Marcotte opines that pro-life measures somehow drive women into the arms of abortion practitioners like Kermit Gosnell because they limit access to so-called “safe, legal abortions.” According to the article:
Anti-choicers have suggested that what is needed is to pass more unnecessary regulations of abortion clinics that do more to shut down safe, legal clinics than they do to make abortion safer for women.
What exactly are safe, legal abortion clinics? This term suggests the idea that abortion facilities at large are safe places for women, while Gosnell is an anomaly standing alone among many law-abiding abortionists.
However, Live Action’s Inhuman investigation is exposing clinics across the nation that are functioning without legal intervention even though the physicians and staff at each one readily admit their willingness and propensity to commit malpractice and break the law on a regular basis. (For example, Dr. Cesare Santangelo said that if a child were born alive after a failed abortion at his facility, he “would not do anything to help that child.”) Therefore, suggesting that Kermit Gosnell’s patients were somehow the unfortunate women who did not have access to anyone else does not mean that under any other abortionist they would have received better or safer care.
The article also states that Gosnell was denounced by pro-lifers and pro-aborts alike, which is only half-true. Although organizations like NARAL lied and said that they had been opposing Gosnell from day one, pro-abortion organizations spoke up only towards the end of Gosnell’s trial, after the media storm against Gosnell was well underway, which itself occurred long after pro-lifers like our own Lila Rose began decrying his practices years ago.
The article then blames pro-lifers for the high cost of safe, legal abortions, saying that Gosnell took advantage of women in poverty who could not afford the former:
Gosnell mostly exploited women’s poverty, undercutting reputable clinics on their prices. For many women in poverty, getting the money together for a clean, safe abortion takes a long time, often so long that they are past the time when they can legally get one.
The pro-life measures in question, presumably (because the article does not back up its claim with examples), are those that hold abortion clinics to standards similar to those of other surgical centers. Some of these measures would include requiring wide hallways in case a gurney needs to be admitted to take away a woman who is bleeding out with sepsis or a perforated uterus. One such woman was a victim of Gosnell, named Karnamaya Mongar. According to the Gosnell grand jury report:
[T]here might have been some slim hope of reviving Mrs. Mongar. The paramedics were able to generate a weak pulse. But, because of the cluttered hallways and the padlocked emergency door, it took them over twenty minutes just to find a way to get her out of the building.
If those pro-life measures (which look out for the well-being of the woman and her child, while pro-abortion measures support neither) were not implemented, so-called “safe and legal” abortion facilities would be effectively unregulated, and there would be very little, if any, differentiation between the unsanitary practices of Gosnell and every other abortion practitioner in the nation. Clearly, blaming pro-lifers for the Kermit Gosnells of the world is illogical and a distraction from the real issue, which is the unwillingness of abortion facilities to operate lawfully with the best interests of women in mind.
