My angry two cents on the Gosnell situation
Apart from a little healthy liberal rage, I'm feeling pretty good. :D Yay for an arrow cortisone shot to the knee!
For 32 years, Kermit Gosnell exploited women too poor to afford early-stage abortions, and in the process, serially murdered viable infants. This issue goes beyond abortion, and yet it doesn't. The trial is both about human rights, and serial murder. The man kept trophies, for god's sake. He kept jars full of infants' severed feet, babies' frozen heads, and an infant's whole dead body in a water cooler jar. That's textbook serial killer behavior.
But what about the women? The ones who willingly went to such a butcher, and who allowed themselves to be anesthetized by administration staff and left to wait in a room with filthy couches covered in dirty blankets, in a room with cat feces on the floor. (Not the white women, though. They got to wait in a nice, clean office, fully awake and watching TV. Because they were white. I hope that makes you feel as sick as it does me.) These were women of all ages, from young teenagers to women in their forties and up. They had two things in common: they were pregnant, and they were poor.
They were poor. And abortions cost money. And I'll bet you anything they couldn't afford one anywhere else, or any earlier; and they had nowhere else they could turn but a man who let a high school student administer anesthesia, and who reused filthy, disposable tools tainted with gonorrhea and chlamydia. Gosnell's clinic was reported to authorities dozens of times, but its patients were poor. They were all poor, and nothing was done. The clinic and patients got lost in paperwork.
This is what is means to be poor in America.
And I promise you, Gosnell isn't the only back-alley abortionist out there.
So what can be done about it? How do you stop the monsters who deliver live babies, then kill them and call it abortion?
First, you Federalize abortion legislation. The reason we're in such a mess now is because every state is allowed its own opinion, and those opinions are loud and refuse to listen to reason. Each state gets to limit the practice a little more, then a little more, until finally restrictions are so great and abortions are so difficult and expensive to obtain that only people of a certain income bracket can acquire them. (Fun fact: most women who get abortions are married, and either have all the children they want, or are financially unable to raise another child at the moment.) Hence, take away States' Rights in this matter. Create a flat limit of, say, 28 weeks, and the states have to deal with it whether they like it or not.
Now that there's a flat limit and everyone's got to follow the rules, increase the geographical availability of abortion. Provide additional benefits of some kind to OB/GYN students who choose to study the process, and to schools that teach it. Open regulated, licensed, annually inspected clinics (Gosnell's hadn't been inspected since... '89?), and encourage them to not only provide abortion, but provide sex education to the community, which is something any abortionist worth his or her salt would gladly do.
As this is done, the price of abortion will fall. No, it's not a perfect system, but it's one idea, and we need ideas. I want to see abortion readily available and affordable to all, yet seldom needed. However, it's needed frequently, and will be for a very, very long time. Hence, something rational needs to be put into place for the benefit of everyone, especially the women who find themselves driven to back-alley butchers like Kermit Gosnell.
Wake up, America. This is what you've created with your arguments about pro-choice vs. pro-life, and your inability to see anyone below the poverty line. These women needed help 32 years ago, 17 years ago, two years ago, and we failed them in favor of bickering and Biblical misquotes and hemming and hawing about the value of a dollar. What about the value of a human life? Not the life of a fetus, but of a woman, a living, breathing woman, one that even the Bible states is more valuable than any unborn child. We need abortion, we need safe Federal regulation, and we need to quit screaming at each other before another woman is slaughtered in another "clinic" by another Kermit Gosnell.
For 32 years, Kermit Gosnell exploited women too poor to afford early-stage abortions, and in the process, serially murdered viable infants. This issue goes beyond abortion, and yet it doesn't. The trial is both about human rights, and serial murder. The man kept trophies, for god's sake. He kept jars full of infants' severed feet, babies' frozen heads, and an infant's whole dead body in a water cooler jar. That's textbook serial killer behavior.
But what about the women? The ones who willingly went to such a butcher, and who allowed themselves to be anesthetized by administration staff and left to wait in a room with filthy couches covered in dirty blankets, in a room with cat feces on the floor. (Not the white women, though. They got to wait in a nice, clean office, fully awake and watching TV. Because they were white. I hope that makes you feel as sick as it does me.) These were women of all ages, from young teenagers to women in their forties and up. They had two things in common: they were pregnant, and they were poor.
They were poor. And abortions cost money. And I'll bet you anything they couldn't afford one anywhere else, or any earlier; and they had nowhere else they could turn but a man who let a high school student administer anesthesia, and who reused filthy, disposable tools tainted with gonorrhea and chlamydia. Gosnell's clinic was reported to authorities dozens of times, but its patients were poor. They were all poor, and nothing was done. The clinic and patients got lost in paperwork.
This is what is means to be poor in America.
And I promise you, Gosnell isn't the only back-alley abortionist out there.
So what can be done about it? How do you stop the monsters who deliver live babies, then kill them and call it abortion?
First, you Federalize abortion legislation. The reason we're in such a mess now is because every state is allowed its own opinion, and those opinions are loud and refuse to listen to reason. Each state gets to limit the practice a little more, then a little more, until finally restrictions are so great and abortions are so difficult and expensive to obtain that only people of a certain income bracket can acquire them. (Fun fact: most women who get abortions are married, and either have all the children they want, or are financially unable to raise another child at the moment.) Hence, take away States' Rights in this matter. Create a flat limit of, say, 28 weeks, and the states have to deal with it whether they like it or not.
Now that there's a flat limit and everyone's got to follow the rules, increase the geographical availability of abortion. Provide additional benefits of some kind to OB/GYN students who choose to study the process, and to schools that teach it. Open regulated, licensed, annually inspected clinics (Gosnell's hadn't been inspected since... '89?), and encourage them to not only provide abortion, but provide sex education to the community, which is something any abortionist worth his or her salt would gladly do.
As this is done, the price of abortion will fall. No, it's not a perfect system, but it's one idea, and we need ideas. I want to see abortion readily available and affordable to all, yet seldom needed. However, it's needed frequently, and will be for a very, very long time. Hence, something rational needs to be put into place for the benefit of everyone, especially the women who find themselves driven to back-alley butchers like Kermit Gosnell.
Wake up, America. This is what you've created with your arguments about pro-choice vs. pro-life, and your inability to see anyone below the poverty line. These women needed help 32 years ago, 17 years ago, two years ago, and we failed them in favor of bickering and Biblical misquotes and hemming and hawing about the value of a dollar. What about the value of a human life? Not the life of a fetus, but of a woman, a living, breathing woman, one that even the Bible states is more valuable than any unborn child. We need abortion, we need safe Federal regulation, and we need to quit screaming at each other before another woman is slaughtered in another "clinic" by another Kermit Gosnell.