Yong Kim/Philadelphia Daily News, via Associated PressDr. Kermit Gosnell in 2010. A jury in Philadelphia on Monday convicted Kermit Gosnell, a doctor who clearly does not deserve that title before his name, of three counts of first-degree murder.
The details of the crimes are horrific — Mr. Gosnell conducted illegal late-term abortions, past the 24-week mark, which, in some cases, resulted in live births. Dr. Gosnell then instructed his employees to plunge scissors into the babies’ necks to kill them.
These acts were illegal not just under Pennsylvania law, but also under the framework established by Roe v. Wade, which said that states and the federal government may not prohibit a woman from choosing to have an abortion prior to viability, meaning “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid.” The date of “viability” is a matter of controversy. But Mr. Gosnell’s actions don’t seem to have fallen into a grey area; he was stepping over an established line.
Moreover late-term abortions, illegal or not, are rare. The Times story on Gosnell notes that fewer than 1.3 percent of abortions are past 20 weeks’ gestation.
For these reasons, the Gosnell case does not really speak to the broader abortion debate. (I’ve said this before.) Of course that won’t stop anti-abortion groups from drawing the connection for their own ideological purposes. They have already done so, using the case in their effort to move the commonly defined date of viability from 24 weeks to 20 weeks or even earlier.
The attempt to limit the abortion window is part of a larger push to prevent women from exercising their reproductive rights — unnecessary waiting periods, physically intrusive sonograms, onerous requirements for doctors who perform abortions, and so on. Some extremists have committed murder in their supposed campaign for life. Anti-abortion groups don’t seem to care that, in their struggle against Planned Parenthood, for instance, they are also cutting off poor women from basic health care services that have nothing to do with abortions — like cancer screening, pre-natal care and family planning.
No one is arguing that late-term abortions should be common practice, and they’re not. No one, except I suppose his defense attorney, is arguing that what Mr. Gosnell was convicted of doing was anything other than a crime.
But if anti-abortion activists get their way — and let’s not doubt that the ultimate goal is to deny women the right to choose under virtually any set of circumstance — Gosnell-type stories won’t disappear. If abortion were illegal, women wouldn’t stop having abortions, they’d just have trouble accessing medically safe abortions. Many would resort to unscrupulous doctors who operate in unsanitary conditions, like Mr. Gosnell.
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: 'You Say What You Like, Because They Like What You Say' - http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/731-you-say-what-you-like-because-they-like-what-you-say.html
http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNF7eHkM3xgUtq9pI6DH3CMgP39Xcg&url=http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/what-the-gosnell-case-doesnt-tell-us/
0 comments:
Post a Comment