To Live and Die in Philadelphia

The abortionist’s house of horrors.
Feb 7, 2011
By JOSEPH BOTTUM

Excerpt:
Pennsylvania may not be a third-world country, but its abortion mills—like those in most other states—really are reminiscent of one: free and independent entities, uniquely exempt from supervision and regulation, carved out from the rest of medicine. Every other kind of doctor is weighed down by record-keeping and inspection requirements. Abortionists alone are free. “Pennsylvania’s Department of Health has deliberately chosen not to enforce laws that should afford patients at abortion clinics the same safeguards and assurances of quality health care as patients of other medical service providers,” the Gosnell grand jury explained. “Even nail salons in Pennsylvania are monitored more closely for client safety.”

The reason, of course, is what such medical practices involve. Ever since the Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, ending states’ power to outlaw abortion and making it instead an individual right, abortion has distorted American law and snarled American politics. Why should it be any surprise that it has soiled American medicine as well? People like Dr. Gosnell are allowed to exist by the pro-abortion lobbying groups that insist ordinary medical supervision will lead to a curtailing of access to abortion in this country.

As it happens, they’re right. Partly that’s because laws concerning medical licensing genuinely do offer a chance for pro-life state legislatures to hurt the abortion business by burdening its practitioners with extensive paperwork and expensive equipment. The activists at NARAL and Planned Parenthood are not exactly wrong to worry about what they call TRAP laws (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers). And yet, there’s a more serious reason that medical supervision threatens the abortion license in this country. It’s what ordinary medical regulation and supervision would reveal: the fact that the abortion business is the gutter of American medicine.

Make no mistake: Abortion genuinely is a business in the United States, and a big one. The grand jury estimated that Gosnell was bringing in nearly $1.8 million a year, mostly in cash, by performing ordinary (or “just a little illegal”) first- and second-trimester abortions with his untrained staff every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday night. No one knows how much more he made from the operations he apparently performed most Sundays: the abortions so late in the third trimester that he allowed only his wife to help with them. Add what he made by writing prescriptions for narcotics—he was one of the top three Oxycontin prescribers in the state—and the man was running his own little mint on the streets of Philadelphia. the rest