By Dave Andrusko
When news first broke that police had raided the offices of a west Philadelphia abortionist, it took a while for the gravity—the depravity, is actually more accurate—of what was going on at Kermit Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society clinic to sink it. In fact it was not until a Grand Jury unveiled a scathing denunciation of the indifference and incompetence of city and state officials nearly a year later that Gosnell was charged with eight counts of murder.
Abortionist Kermit Gosnell
At the time of the Grand Jury’s January 2011 report, I mentioned to a friend that (a) there would likely be an attempt to regulate these slaughterhouses; and (b) that no matter how horrific the conditions, we would be told that the legislatives remedies would be labeled “extreme” by pro-abortionists.
Both have come to pass. HB 574 would require that would hold abortion clinics to the same regulations that apply to freestanding ambulatory surgical centers. No more, no less. You could hear the hysteria all the way to where I live in Woodbridge, Virginia.
An editorial in Monday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is typical. The bill is a “phony, disingenuous ploy,” we’re told, that is “using the backlash against the horrors at the Philadelphia clinic as a way to limit a constitutional right of women.” The problem is not regulations—oh, there are supposedly lots of regulations—but rather “state employees not doing their jobs.”
Yep, in the fever swamp mind of Post-Gazette editorial writers, the real villains are legislators appalled and angered by Gosnell’s reign of cruelty and indifference. The heroes? Mom and Pop (so to speak) abortion clinics who selflessly abort the children of poor women–hard-working entrepreneurs who oughtn’t to be burdened with ‘excessive regulation.’
The question, as we talked about last week, is what the state Senate will come up with (www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2011/05/pa-house-overwhelmingly-passes-abortion-clinic-measure). Will the regulations in their bill have teeth in them, or be the kind of ultra-modest adjustment that will not upset the Abortion Establishment in the slightest?
An editorial in the Altoona Mirror understands what it is at issue.
“Whether one supports abortion or not, the state should do its best to ensure medical facilities, which includes abortion clinics, provide a safe environment to patients.
“That wasn’t the case in Gosnell’s clinic, and it’s important the state act decisively to ensure such a ‘house of horrors’ is never repeated.”
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