If The Last Thread About Dead Babies Was Hard On You, You Don't Want To Click This

[Amake]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/why-dr-kermit-gosnells-trial-should-be-a-front-page-story/274944/
So this is some pretty bad stuff. It's about what happens when large parts of a country works tirelessly to restrict healthcare to its poor, deny its young sexual education and outlaw abortions. You get a clinic containing one trained doctor, one blood pressure meter, lots of unsterile equipment, lots of dried blood on the walls and lots of juice cartons with fetuses who had to be aborted by a scissor through the neck.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, is charged with seven murders. He has probably killed a lot more than that, he'll probably go away for a very long time, though I don't imagine he'd pose a threat to anyone either way.

There's the possibility that he's pure evil, sure, and he ran this medieval torture dungeon just because he wanted people to suffer and babies to sacrifice to his dark lords. But that seems unlikely. This is the real world, where people get beaten and shamed and pushed and ignored into impossible situations, with no right choice to make. These poor parents have been thrown off a mountain where not everyone is lucky enough to grow wings; I don't find it in my heart to blame the Doctor for driving an ambulance to the bottom of the cliff to pick them up.

And now can we please stop talking about if abortion needs to be legal?

[Shyria Dracnoir]

See, the difference between how abortions are conducted in reality and how the nuttier pro-life supporters believe abortions are conducted is that the pro-lifers' view is only accurate BECAUSE abortions are criminalized.

Unfortunately, the nutters are the ones driving policy.

[Magus]

To be fair, this guy actually received government funding from what I remember (it was probably bigger news here in PA since he was "working" out of Philadelphia). It's lack of funding for government oversight of the healthcare system that's a rather large part of the blame here, in combination with the socio-economic factors that were leading women to go to this guy, who was actually committing murder at most points (since he was killing viable infants by stabbing them in the neck). Our healthcare system in general lacks oversight (see any study of the wild differences in costs at different hospitals in different parts of the country and for different patients), but this was an example of the kind of insanity that can take over if you completely ignore it.

EDIT: Actually I'm not sure of the bent of the article or what you guys are thinking: do you believe elective abortions should be allowed in the third-trimester, then? Because I don't. That's just my cut-off for elective ones. Therapeutic, different story. There is a huge lack of options for women needing therapeutic abortions in the third trimester in this country. I think there were only two or three doctors in a very large geographical area.

[Shyria Dracnoir]

I don't feel that the decision to get an abortion is one that women can afford to postpone unless it's an issue of cost or health. If it takes you that long to decide you don't want to keep the child, just adopt them out. Therapeutic abortions are a bit hit or miss for me: I'm more supportive of performing abortions for that reason if the mother or the child absolutely cannot survive the pregnancy. I'm still trying to work out how I feel about abortions in the case of fetuses diagnosed with survivable but still potentially imparing disabilities.

[Amake]

No, I do think abortions that late are frowned upon with some reason. The question is why apparently enough women feel the need to have them that places like this clinic need to exist. Maybe they don't have anywhere else to turn without being judged, or that they can afford; maybe they aren't told enough about how pregnancy works to understand what they're doing; maybe they can't afford to take the time to think their situation through because they're working three jobs to afford rent, or maybe they're told that making a hard decision like either having an abortion or having a baby they can't support is the kind of thing they should leave to their betters or otherwise scared enough to try to ignore their condition until it starts kicking; I'm not sure, but I do know straight white rich old men would rarely be in need of Dr Gosnell's services.

[Magus]

It seemed like what this guy was doing was basically just inducing early birth/premature birth, and then murdering the infants. Third trimester abortions usually happen in the case of what Shyria said, the baby is going to die anyway/is already dead or is miscarrying. In this case it's been said that the infants were by all accounts viable at the time they were killed.

It's disturbing how Gosnell had a specially clean room for the white patients and dirty ones for the black and Asian ones. He's like some kind of racist.

[Amake]

Oh I can hardly imagine he's not some kind of racist. But I figure it was a numbers game; they could only give so many patients nice rooms and face time with the Doctor, and saving the best treatment for the white people would reduce the risk of patients raising a stink, going to the press or at least being listened to by the press if they did. Or am I being too cynical?

[Magus]

No, I think you're exactly right. On average a white person in Philadelphia is going to have more money than a black person, they're using him because there's no legal alternative to actually getting rid of the child as opposed to economic reasons, and if he were to actually harm them it's much more likely to blow back on him than if he harmed a black woman or an Asian woman. I think it just speaks for itself, really. There's no other explanation.