The real Kermit Gosnell story? Misogyny

[boston bean]

Low-income women who need to terminate pregnancies are on their own to figure out how to fund the procedure. While they are saving up the hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars that an abortion can cost, the clock is ticking. By the time they have enough money, it may be too late for a legal procedure. Low-income women and women of colour are also less likely to have access to things like affordable contraception, which help prevent unintended pregnancy in the first place. Again, you can thank pro-life actions against family planning funding, Planned Parenthood and birth control access for those gaps.

Gosnell preyed on those vulnerable women. The solution is not to make more women vulnerable. It is to deal with the factors that create that vulnerability.

As Lori Adelman detailed in her piece about Gosnell more than two years ago: "If you thought that racially segregated doctor's offices were done away with in the 1960s, get ready to feel like you just stepped out of a time machine." The American health care system is deeply segregated, with women of colour receiving sub-standard care at astounding rates. Gosnell allegedly treated white patients better, since he thought they were more likely to file complaints. And many of the women butchered by Gosnell were there entirely because of conservative laws that made it impossible for them to access abortion care earlier in their pregnancies.

Which is why the "pro-life" claims of concern for Gosnell's victims ring so hollow. For pro-lifers, this is an abortion story, and they are using it to argue that abortion should be outlawed - not taking the logical step to realise that Gosnell's clinic is exactly what happens when abortion is outlawed or inaccessible. They are not lamenting the lack of media coverage because any such lack of coverage actually exists. They are claiming a lack of media coverage as a way to brow-beat mainstream media sources into covering the issue with their particular frame.

The problem with the entire Gosnell case and the media storm around it comes down to sexism: sexism in health care access and sexism in whose voices are heard in the media. If women's bodies were not so intensely politicised - if we did not live a culture that believes women should be punished for having sex, and are not entitled to control our own reproductive capacities - abortion would be treated like any other medical procedure. Bad clinics would be shut down, because there would not be shame in reporting them. Procedures could be done at most medical centres, instead of relegated to dedicated, under-funded and politically imperiled clinics. Women would not have to spend months scraping up funding for a medical procedure. Kermit Gosnell simply could not operate in a country with solidly pro-choice laws.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/201341411431138373.html

[Mosby]

1. al jazeera? really?

Al thani has 3 wives and 24 kids, he is a member of the qatar royal monarchy and he is worth about 3.5 BILLION dollars.

They are good at faking western values, that's for sure.

His news outlet al jazeera is taking hypocracy to new heights.

I wonder if this essay make it into the arabic version? I'm guessing not.

[Shivering Jemmy]

2. My mom went to high school with this guy

She's having a hard time processing it.

[ismnotwasm]

3. This;

Nonetheless, anti-abortion advocates are crying foul, first claiming that no one covered Gosnell at all, and now wondering why large media outlets are not detailing the day-by-day of a trial in state court. A small handful of male writers who apparently did not read their female colleagues' extensive coverage of the issue and could not be bothered to run a Google news search brought the anti-choice claims hook, line and sinker. And now the broader media narrative is: "No one covered Gosnell because pro-choicers were afraid of bad press about abortion." Never mind it was pro-choice writers who so thoroughly wrote about the case when it broke, and if male journalists who rarely read or cover reproductive health issues did not hear about it, perhaps the fault lies with their own myopia.