cali (78,730 posts)
I am staunchly pro-choice so it pains me to agree with the anti-choicers
and the right on anything at all.
But they are right about the MSM not covering the Gosnell trial. If I had to speculate as to why, I'd say it's because most editors and journalists in the MSM are pro-choice and they don't want to cover something that they fear could damage the pro-choice side. I don't know.
In any case, no major news organization has sent a reporter to the trial. There has been little coverage and no, it's not merely local story. But it's also NOT about how awful abortion is. It's about one unlicensed butcher and the appalling things he did. So appalling that I'll provide a link but I won't post it here. It's also about a mind boggling failure on the part of the state of PA.
If for nothing else, this should be a national story for how Gosnell perpetrated these horrific acts without being shut down.
<snip>
The first line of defense was the Pennsylvania Department of Health. The department's job is to audit hospitals and outpatient medical facilities, like Gosnell's, to make sure that they follow the rules and provide safe care. The department had contact with the Women's Medical Society dating back to 1979, when it first issued approval to open an abortion clinic. It did not conduct another site review until 1989, ten years later. Numerous violations were already apparent, but Gosnell got a pass when he promised to fix them. Site reviews in 1992 and 1993 also noted various violations, but again failed to ensure they were corrected.
But at least the department had been doing something up to that point, however ineffectual. After 1993, even that pro form a effort came to an end. Not because of administrative ennui, although there had been plenty. Instead, the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all... The only exception to this live-and-let-die policy was supposed to be for complaints dumped directly on the department's doorstep. Those, at least, would be investigated. Except that there were complaints about Gosnell, repeatedly. Several different attorneys, representing women injured by Gosnell, contacted the department. A doctor from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia hand-delivered a complaint, advising the department that numerous patients he had referred for abortions came back from Gosnell with the same venereal disease. The medical examiner of Delaware County informed the department that Gosnell had performed an illegal abortion on a 14-year-old girl carrying a 30-week-old baby. And the department received official notice that a woman named Karnamaya Mongar had died at Gosnell's hands.
Yet not one of these alarm bells - not even Mrs. Mongar's death - prompted the department to look at Gosnell or the Women's Medical Society... But even this total abdication by the Department of Health might not have been fatal. Another agency with authority in the health field, the Pennsylvania Department of State, could have stopped Gosnell single-handedly.
<snip>
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/why-dr-kermit-gosnells-trial-should-be-a-front-page-story/274944/
Gosnell murdered hundreds of baby's during his 20 year stint. And yes, the moment a fetus takes a breath, it becomes a baby.
He butchered scores of women.
<snip>
For this isn't solely a story about babies having their heads severed, though it is that. It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers. Any single one of those things would itself make for a blockbuster news story. Is it even conceivable that an optometrist who attended to his white patients in a clean office while an intern took care of the black patients in a filthy room wouldn't make national headlines?
<snip>
http://sync.democraticunderground.com/10022662847Spare us your outrage DUmmy, the only thing in this story that bothers you is, the way the women were treated. You have no problem with "snipping" if they use sterile instruments. So **** off and die DUmmy.
Cali_Democrat (14,293 posts)
1. The real story here is economic and political. Lack of funding for abortions for poor women:
"Prosecutors have cited the dozens of jars of severed baby feet as an example of Gosnell's idiosyncratic and illegal practice of providing abortions for cash to poor women pregnant longer than the 24-week cutoff for legal abortions in Pennsylvania."
Yeah that's the problem not enough funding so more snipping can happen.
Spider Jerusalem (15,243 posts)
2. this case doesn't make much of an argument for anti-choicers, though
it does make the case that Medicaid coverage should extend to termination of pregnancy; that and that alone is the reason this Gosnell person was able to do what he did in the first place, because these women had no alternatives (apart from risky use of abortifacients like pennyroyal or seeing a back-alley abortionist).
DURHAM D (18,476 posts)
11. The reason the MSM has not covered it is because the victims don't matter.
Your take away should be anger about what choices poor women, desperate women, women of color must resort to.
Only the adult victims matter to you assholes.
LittleBlue (2,550 posts)
8. Agreed. Deep down, every pro-choice person
Last edited Fri Apr 12, 2013, 06:57 PM USA/ET - Edit history (2)
knows that terminating a fetus is killing what will probably become a baby. There's no getting around it.
I'm pro-choice because the greater of two evils is taking away a woman's right to choose, which would just result in abortion providers going underground in the horrific way it was before abortion was legal. News stories like this will hurt the pro-choice movement, though, maybe because it forces people to confront something they don't want to admit.
You stepped in it DUmmy. You can't admit that abortion is taking a life at DU.
cali (78,730 posts)
14. what? No. I don't look at it that way
I don't see terminating a fetus as killing a baby.
What if I decide that terminating a DUmmy isn't killing a person?
