I am staunchly pro-choice so it pains me to agree with the anti-choicers

[cali]

and the right on anything at all.

But they are right about the MSM not covering the Gosnell trial. If I had to speculate as to why, I'd say it's because most editors and journalists in the MSM are pro-choice and they don't want to cover something that they fear could damage the pro-choice side. I don't know.

In any case, no major news organization has sent a reporter to the trial. There has been little coverage and no, it's not merely local story. But it's also NOT about how awful abortion is. It's about one unlicensed butcher and the appalling things he did. So appalling that I'll provide a link but I won't post it here. It's also about a mind boggling failure on the part of the state of PA.

If for nothing else, this should be a national story for how Gosnell perpetrated these horrific acts without being shut down.

<snip>

The first line of defense was the Pennsylvania Department of Health. The department's job is to audit hospitals and outpatient medical facilities, like Gosnell's, to make sure that they follow the rules and provide safe care. The department had contact with the Women's Medical Society dating back to 1979, when it first issued approval to open an abortion clinic. It did not conduct another site review until 1989, ten years later. Numerous violations were already apparent, but Gosnell got a pass when he promised to fix them. Site reviews in 1992 and 1993 also noted various violations, but again failed to ensure they were corrected.

But at least the department had been doing something up to that point, however ineffectual. After 1993, even that pro form a effort came to an end. Not because of administrative ennui, although there had been plenty. Instead, the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all... The only exception to this live-and-let-die policy was supposed to be for complaints dumped directly on the department's doorstep. Those, at least, would be investigated. Except that there were complaints about Gosnell, repeatedly. Several different attorneys, representing women injured by Gosnell, contacted the department. A doctor from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia hand-delivered a complaint, advising the department that numerous patients he had referred for abortions came back from Gosnell with the same venereal disease. The medical examiner of Delaware County informed the department that Gosnell had performed an illegal abortion on a 14-year-old girl carrying a 30-week-old baby. And the department received official notice that a woman named Karnamaya Mongar had died at Gosnell's hands.

Yet not one of these alarm bells - not even Mrs. Mongar's death - prompted the department to look at Gosnell or the Women's Medical Society... But even this total abdication by the Department of Health might not have been fatal. Another agency with authority in the health field, the Pennsylvania Department of State, could have stopped Gosnell single-handedly.
<snip>
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/why-dr-kermit-gosnells-trial-should-be-a-front-page-story/274944/

Gosnell murdered hundreds of baby's during his 20 year stint. And yes, the moment a fetus takes a breath, it becomes a baby.
He butchered scores of women.

<snip>

For this isn't solely a story about babies having their heads severed, though it is that. It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers. Any single one of those things would itself make for a blockbuster news story. Is it even conceivable that an optometrist who attended to his white patients in a clean office while an intern took care of the black patients in a filthy room wouldn't make national headlines?

<snip>

[Cali_Democrat]

1. The real story here is economic and political. Lack of funding for abortions for poor women:

"Prosecutors have cited the dozens of jars of severed baby feet as an example of Gosnell's idiosyncratic and illegal practice of providing abortions for cash to poor women pregnant longer than the 24-week cutoff for legal abortions in Pennsylvania."

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. this case doesn't make much of an argument for anti-choicers, though

it does make the case that Medicaid coverage should extend to termination of pregnancy; that and that alone is the reason this Gosnell person was able to do what he did in the first place, because these women had no alternatives (apart from risky use of abortifacients like pennyroyal or seeing a back-alley abortionist).

[cali]

4. I think a big piece of the story is the lack of oversight by state agencies

and I think poverty and who most of his patients were, has something to do with that.

[Brickbat]

3. It's an important story. Most local dailies aren't likely to pick up ongoing coverage of the trial

because of space concerns, but it looks like the Inquirer is covering the trial. Why it hasn't delved into the complete and utter failure of the state to ensure basic health-care standards for the poor is beyond me, however.

ETA: I haven't checked to see if it has; perhaps it has. I also think that's one reason large TV news networks haven't picked it up; it would necessitate a hard look at how we provide health care in this country.

ETA: I can find stories about the trial on the website of the biggest newspaper in my state, as picked up by the AP. So the story's out there. I think people are surprised it's not being blabbed about 24/7 on the TV news shows.

[DURHAM D]

5. Huh? This is not about choice or anti-choice.

This is a story about medical malpractice and about 10,000 other criminal acts. Your title is totally off-point and completely bogus.

[cali]

6. No, of course it's not a story about choice

but there is now a huge story about the lack of MSM coverage of the trial. In fact, that story is now bigger than the trial story itself.

[redqueen]

9. Yep.

I completely missed previous stories in the actual liberal online media.

That the M$M has ignored this so completely is unreal. But they spent days zeroed in on the 'poop cruise'...

This case is beyond horrific. I'm blown away...

[DURHAM D]

13. The media looked the other way because it is about women.

[redqueen]

19. That's what I think too. nt

[DURHAM D]

11. The reason the MSM has not covered it is because the victims don't matter.

Your take away should be anger about what choices poor women, desperate women, women of color must resort to.

[cali]

12. that clearly is a significant part of my takeaway, genius.

[DURHAM D]

15. Your title and emphasis is still bogus.

[cali]

17. No, they're not bogus. and your saying so doesn't make it true. duh.

[DURHAM D]

20. Your OP takes the side of anti-choicers.

They are your chosen victim.

You say nothing about the actual victims, genius.

[cali]

33. ridiculous. gad.

I certainly did say quite a bit about the actual victims. And the likes of YOU judging my support for abortion rights? Fucking disgusting. No one here has posted as much on the vital importance of choice as I have. Do a fucking search, pumpkin.

[DURHAM D]

35. I know you have 78K posts but anyone and everyone is still free

to judge your misplaced empathy.

Please stop the condescending name calling.

[cali]

36. this has jackshit to do with the number of posts. duh.

It has to do with my unquestionable and well known support for choice, genius.

[YarnAddict]

25. The other victims . . .

How about the babies? Actual live-born human infants, whose heads were severed, who screamed in agony as they died. The women who were treated so abominably weren't the only victims in this case.

[ananda]

7. Tom Ridge

Republican Tom Ridge was behind undoing regulation and oversight of clinics and doctors.
He is supposedly pro choice (but only to a degree), but he also represents the worst of the rightwing as they seek to undo funding for healthcare and social services.

[LittleBlue]

8. Agreed. Deep down, every pro-choice person

knows that terminating a fetus is killing what will probably become a baby. There's no getting around it.

I'm pro-choice because the greater of two evils is taking away a woman's right to choose, which would just result in abortion providers going underground in the horrific way it was before abortion was legal. News stories like this will hurt the pro-choice movement, though, maybe because it forces people to confront something they don't want to admit.

[cali]

14. what? No. I don't look at it that way

I don't see terminating a fetus as killing a baby.

[DURHAM D]

16. wrong

[REP]

31. "Deep down, every anti-choice person knows

that all they care about is judging women, and that they don't give a crap about women or babies."

How that work for you?

Fetuses aren't babies. If you put a fetus in a uterus, you'd be committing assault on the woman and murdering the baby; babies need air to breathe (fetuses don't. For just one).

[Cleita]

10. The poor end up with the least competent medical help it seems.

We joke around here about the local pill pushers that serve the Medicaid patients. They basically try to push prescription drugs on the patients after a ten minute exam so they don't have to take the time for a more thorough exam and diagnosis to give them other treatments. These are doctors whom patients with better insurance won't see because of their reputations, but they will take Medicaid patients and the low payments by seeing many of them assembly line style in an hour and writing a prescription to either cure or cover up symptoms. If the patient should end up in the ER, then it isn't their problem but the hospital's.

[cali]

18. yes. and that this guy had a waiting room for white patients

is pretty horrifying too.

[Cleita]

21. This is one of the reasons why single payer or Medicare for All was promoted

by the Physicians for a National Health Plan. Their reasoning was that if everyone had the same plan, both rich and poor, it would raise the quality of administration of the plan and the care received by the patients. When there is a plan for those who can afford it and another plan for those who can't, this watering down of the benefits occurs, because those who don't have to be on the same system don't care about the others.

[msanthrope]

22. The non-reporting has nothing to do with the choice/anti-choice angle..it has to do with a gag order

that has been placed over the trial. A highly restrictive gag order that was put in place to make sure that a jury could be selected and that an error-free trial could take place.

Gosnell also ran one of the most notorious drug rings in Philly. You aren't going to hear much about that until those proceedings are over.

The grand jury report is available online.

ETA--the anti-choice freaks are already here, protesting the trial, and giving Gosnell an appeal point. Do we need more?

[ljm2002]

23. I think we aren't hearing about it...

...because the mostly conservative news owners don't want to inform us of what the future holds when safe, legal abortions become unavailable to women, and especially to poor women. Or young women who don't know where else to turn.

It's what finally tipped the scales back in the late 60s and early 70s: publicity about botched abortions. People finally got it, that even if you don't like the idea of abortion, safe and legal abortion is better than women bleeding to death in back alleys with hangers shoved up inside them.

It serves TPTB to not cover this story. They have their agenda, and it includes going backwards to the time when women were controlled. Stories like this will not help them. The forced-birthers are very short sighted and they don't see this. I hope they get their way and this story is covered. It deserves to be. We don't need butchers performing this service, it needs to be available to women safely and legally and without the insanity that currently surrounds this issue.

[YarnAddict]

26. Um, I don't think so

Most people in the media are probably pro-choice, and I think most of them don't want people thinking about aborted fetuses being born alive, having their spinal cords cut, screaming. I think that's why this story hasn't been covered.

[ljm2002]

29. Well you could be right...

...I guess part of the issue is that nowadays the coverage would focus on the fetuses and the obvious horror of what occurred to them, vs. back in the 60s and 70s where the focus was on the women who died due to botched abortions.

[IfPalinisAnswerWatsQ]

24. it is a brutal murder case. Abortion is only tangentially related.

Obviously Gosnell should be thrown in jail for life if convicted, but killing little babies when they are out of the womb is completely different from a first trimester abortion, which are when the vast majority of US abortions are performed.

[HockeyMom]

27. "18-24 inches long with no eyes, or face"?

Following this on a Freeper thread, which was deleted after they posted that quote from a worker testifying. Hello? Even a couple of Freepers saw something wrong in that quote. That BIG, almost full term, but their eyes and face hadn't developed? You need a medical degree for that one to not know something was very, very WRONG with that fetus/baby.? What other abnormalities did it have?????

Read between the lines. Were these "late term babies" compatible with LIFE to even begin with????

[Niceguy1]

28. I am not suprised.

There are evil people in all parts of society and it would be naive to think all abortion providers are good.

[AnnieBW]

30. Go ahead and ban abortion, antis

You'll just see more of these illegal abortion mills.

One has to wonder why the PA regulators weren't inspecting abortion clinics. Could it have been... budget cuts? Someone paid off?

[nessa]

32. This is what the Grand Jury had to say about the lack of inspections...

pages 147 - 148

Under Governor Robert Casey, she said, the department inspected abortion facilities annually. Yet, when Governor Tom Ridge came in, the attorneys interpreted the same regulations that had permitted annual inspections for years to no longer authorize those inspections. Then, only complaint driven
inspections supposedly were authorized. Staloski said that DOH’s policy during Governor Ridge’s administration was motivated by a desire not to be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions.

Brody confirmed some of what Staloski told the Grand Jury. He described a meeting of high-level government officials in 1999 at which a decision was made not to accept a recommendation to reinstitute regular inspections of abortion clinics. The reasoning, as Brody recalled, was: “there was a concern that if they did routineinspections, that they may find a lot of these facilities didn’t meet [the standards for getting patients out by stretcher or wheelchair in an emergency], and then there would be less abortion facilities, less access to women to have an abortion.”

Brody testified that he did not consider the “access issue” a legal one. The
Abortion Control Act, he told the Grand Jurors, charges DOH with protecting the health
and safety of women having abortions and premature infants aborted alive. To carry out this responsibility, he said, DOH should regularly inspect the facilities.

Nevertheless, the position of DOH remained the same after Edward Rendell
became governor. Using the legally faulty excuse that the department lacked the authority
to inspect abortion clinics, Staloski left them unmonitored, presumably with the
knowledge and blessing of her bosses, Deputy Secretary Stacy Mitchell and a succession
of Secretaries of Health. The department continued its do-nothing policy until 2010,

[JaneyVee]

34. I've heard about this story since 2011.