More Gosnell: Wikipedia Weights Deleting Gosnell's Entry Due to Failure to Attract National Media Attention;
Amanda Marcotte Declares, Contrary to the Facts, That Gosnell's Abbatoir Was "Underground" and Pro-Lifers Drove Women There

The last one first. Here's Amanda Marcotte, in a tweet, just making things up:

Pro-choicers support quality women's health care, and are the enemies of those who force women into underground clinics like Gosnell's.

The claim she's making is based on the typical rhetoric that if you ban abortions, women will be driven to "back-alley" abortionists and many will die due to incompetent surgery.

Trouble is, that rhetoric is about a hypothetical situation in which abortion is outlawed. Abortion is not outlawed in America -- nor in Pennsylvania. Gosnell's clinic was not "underground;" it was, by appearances, a government-permitted abortion mill.

In fact, despite performing illegal late-term abortions, it still got no inspections or negative sanctions from the state -- specifically, the Grand Jury report stated, due to pro-choice politics, which demanded that, contrary to the law, no abortion clinic should have any inspections or scrutiny.

So what could she mean about "underground"? She might mean that Pennsylvania outlawed very late-term abortions. And thus women had to go to Gosnell's dingy, bloody house of horrors to get them.

So what she might mean is... the crimes that Gosnell is accused of should not have been crimes at all, because live-delivering nine-month babies and then snipping their spinal cords on the operating table should have been legal.

In which case we understand Marcotte's only concern here: That these abortions should have been performed in a cleaner, nicer, more professional setting, as legal abortions might be conducted. Because she'd have them be legal.

In this version of things, the only problem with Gosnell is that he didn't keep things clean and let one woman die to a botched abortion. The seven babies killed on the table? They simply should have been euthanized in more sanitary conditions, in a nicer room, with better lighting and a better staff-- a better staff, because they'd be working in a legal operation, and thus Gosnell wouldn't have to hire sketchy scrubs to do the butchering.

So Amanda Marcotte thinks the only problem with this venue was its aesthetics and professionalism -- if they were butchering live-delivered children in a cleaner venue, she'd have no problem.

I don't know how to inform her that the dirtiness of the lab -- this perhaps traceable to pro-lifers, who made the process illegal, and of course illegal operations tend to be dirty ones -- is really not the top consideration here. It's a consideration -- one woman died due to the incompetence and unsanitariness of the abortion mill -- but not the only consideration, and not the top one.

Honestly I don't even know why I responded to her. She's plainly a lunatic.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia is now considering deleting the entry on Gosnell. Their rationale? It's a local murder story, nothing more. And they know that because the story has failed to generate any attention in the national media.

Note that they're all working from the same playbook: If we just keep silent on this, if we impose a coordinated embargo, essentially the story just goes away.

I don't suppose I have to mention Orwell. You were already on that page.

And so was Wikipedia.

posted by Ace at 01:49 PM

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