The first paragraph of the grand jury report of the Kermit Gosnell case — covering the 72 year-old doctor’s hellish late-term abortion clinic — is so simply and beautifully stated that it is worth quoting in its entirety:
“This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels — and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.”
The rest of the report goes to describe in detail the revolting stories that form that fabric of Dr. Gosnell’s history — stories such as delivering and then murdering a live, screaming baby and keeping jars of baby feet. It reads almost like a horror story in which the antagonist is not a misanthropic psychopath but a twisted doctor motivated by profit. And yet, the story has only recently begun to cause a significant stir in the media, even though the trial started March 18. In fact, I would not be surprised if this column is the first article to break the news to you.
Let me state at the outset that there are almost countless reasons why this story should be front-page news, even if we put aside the aspects of Gosnell’s conduct that deal with the killing of infants: serious health violations for women, preying on the poor, differential treatment for white patients, untrained employees, illegal prescriptions, overdosing of drugs and the massive failure of the government of Pennsylvania to catch this earlier. Despite all these reasons, the story still isn’t national headlines. It is hard not to draw the obvious conclusion: when it comes to abortion stories, the media is decidedly more comfortable covering those that advance the cause of free access than those that point to the dangers of a liberal attitude toward the unborn.
Perhaps some examples would be useful to make this point, although they are so numerous and intuitive that the exercise seems almost redundant. Take the instance of laws that many state legislatures, including Virginia’s, have tried to pass that force women to have an ultrasound before an abortion. The New York Times, ABC News and Slate (among countless others) were quick to report on this story in February 2012, using terms like “anti-abortionists” to label those who believe in protecting the rights of the unborn. Kermit Gosnell’s case received a brief mention on page A17 of the NY Times the day the trial started … and not a single story since, apart from an April 15 NYT blog post arguing that efforts to use the Gosnell case to “prove” abortion is wrong are “wrongheaded.”
Or take the stance of the Obama administration, which claims it cannot comment on ongoing investigations; where was this reverence for tact during the Trayvon Martin case? There isn’t even acknowledgement that what went on in Dr. Gosnell’s clinic is nothing short of pure evil.
Comments made by pro-choice advocates that should chill us to the bone are left largely unmolested. Alisa LaPolt Snow, a lobbyist for the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, was once asked a simple question posed to her by a member of the Florida State legislature: “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?” Ms. Snow’s answer? “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.” Her belief is essentially that a live baby, sitting on the table of the operating room, is still subject to the “choice” of the woman. Is this really what we believe? Even more importantly, should we tolerate comments such as this any more than we tolerate the comments made by Rep. Todd Akin that created such an outcry in the media several months ago? At the very least, Mr. Akin wasn’t advocating infanticide.
Some believe that this case doesn’t have to inform the debate on abortion in general. Pro-choice and pro-life advocates can agree that what went on in that Pennsylvania “medical clinic” is inhumane. But I disagree that there is nothing to learn here. There are hard questions we need to be asking ourselves, questions that the media may not want to ask. During my time on the Cavalier Daily, I have developed a penchant for attempting to ask such questions — perhaps to the chagrin of my editors — and so I’ll attempt, in my remaining space, to augment the debate where I believe it is lacking.
The first issue we have to address is what we’re doing to ensure that such clinics can never again survive for as long as Dr. Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society did. For all we know, there are a number of such clinics around the nation that have gone unmolested, as his did. New regulations have to be passed to ensure stricter oversight over licensed abortion clinics. Such regulations have failed to pass legislatures in the past because pro-choice advocates decry them as unnecessarily burdensome on those who seek to provide abortions. I would contend that the cost of allowing such monstrous acts of inhumanity to continue unchecked is far higher than any “burdens” such regulations would impose.
More importantly, however, we must face the elephant in the room: taking a liberal attitude to abortion — and by this I mean emphasizing a woman’s right to choose over a child’s right to life — has its dangers, especially when it comes to drawing the line between personhood and a mass of cells: a line which is already morally and philosophically fraught. Even if we are forced to accept that the government can and ought to decide where this line is to be drawn, we must nonetheless be extremely careful about its positioning. As of right now, various states have different policies regarding post-viability procedure. The bare reality is that the line between what is considered viable and what is considered nonviable is merely a day. Should the immense decision to end a fetus’ life really be contingent upon the arbitrary designation of a day, before which we are to faithfully assume the fetus has no rights, and after which women are legally obligated to carry it to term? Such an attitude is dangerously permissive and unacceptably casual in its treatment of the unborn child’s life.
And yet, the media seems unwilling to acknowledge any weaknesses in the liberal stance on abortion. Any objective outsider would reach the conclusion that the American populace had, for the most part, concluded that abortion was completely acceptable and that drawing lines of viability and legality is the best way to approach the issue. But this is absolutely not the case. The real issue is that intelligent, serious defenses of more conservative stances on abortion are simply not given fair play in the media; they are instead denigrated as radical, old-fashioned and prejudicial beliefs that have no place in our popular discourse. The treatment of the Kermit Gosnell trial is but a manifestation of this tendency in the media. That something so evocative of the dangers of assigning abortion rights on the basis of viability — in essence, a variable scale of life — manages to escape major attention altogether should tell us something about just how “objective” our news outlets are.
Biases in the media are unavoidable. But the extent of the pro-abortion bias in contemporary media is a national disgrace. The conversations we should be having about the most divisive and important issue in modern America are stifled by the very outlets that should be promoting diverse expression. In the meantime, those who speak out against these headwinds will face the long, uphill battle of first proving they have a right to speak out at all.
Russell Bogue is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. His columns run Thursdays.
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