On Kermit Gosnell

[Trigger warning for descriptions of violence, medical malpractice.]

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is a doctor in Pennsylvania who, despite having no certification in gynecology or obstetrics, has been offering late-term abortion services. I say "offering abortion services," as opposed to "performing abortions," because, although he did perform abortions, he also did things that are not abortion.

Dr. Gosnell is being arraigned "on eight counts of murder in the deaths of seven babies and one patient," not because he performed abortions, but because he terminated pregnancies well beyond the legal limit of 24 weeks, and, in his unsanitary clinic staffed with people who had no medical training, he would induce labor and then kill viable newborns by severing their spinal cords. (There is more detailed information about the gruesome case here.)

This case is already being used by anti-choice advocates as evidence for why abortion should be criminalized. But, in fact, the opposite is true: It is because of the increasingly limited access to safe, affordable, first-term abortion, as well as safe, affordable, late-term therapeutic abortion, that a heinous anomaly like Gosnell exists. He is an unethical opportunist who made lots of money exploiting desperate women without a better alternative.

Situations like this one will not be prevented by limiting abortion, but by making it more widely accessible. There is a terrible irony in the argument to limit abortion in response to this ugliness, because limiting access will only ensure that clinics run by unprincipled and untrained people will proliferate.

A woman who doesn't want to be pregnant will do anything she can to not be pregnant. Including going to a charlatan in a filthy clinic. That is a reality. The only serious conversation to be had is how we address that reality in a way that preserves the safety of breathing patients.

Anything else is just rubbish. And talk of limiting access to abortion as an effective response to Gosnell-style butchery is truly the stuff of fairy tales.

See also: Amie Newman, Jill Filipovic, Amanda Hess, Daniel Denvir, and Michelle Goldberg.