The Federalist has an incredible article today, dealing with Planned Parenthood’s complicity in ignoring and frankly covering up Kermit Gosnell’s horrors at his abortion clinic. The entire piece is well worth the read.
There are a few choice bits I’d like to deal with here. First, it is all too fitting that Planned Parenthood is trying to electorally defeat the cousin of one of Gosnell’s victims, Margo Davidson, who’s running for reelection as a state representative. Davidson spoke out after seeing what Gosnell did to her cousin, Semika Shaw:
Today I honor [Semika’s] memory by voting for this legislation that seeks to safeguard the health of women that is long overdue, so that never again will a woman walk into a licensed healthcare facility in the state of Pennsylvania and be butchered, as she was, with her uterus perforated and her death of sepsis and infection permeating in her body till she writhed in pain on the floor of her home to her ultimate death. And today I thank the members of this house that supported this legislation for the safety of women.
Davidson’s support for regulating abortion clinics has led Planned Parenthood to endorse her opponent. Indeed, this is no surprise. Across the country Planned Parenthood has fought any attempts to regulate clinics despite unregulated clinics consistently producing horrors. But Brandon McKinley throws back the curtain on the reasons why:
No, Planned Parenthood doesn’t care about women like Semika Shaw. But why not? It can’t be some kind of mass psychopathy—though it wouldn’t be surprising if the hardness of heart that must accompany the killing of the unborn metastasized to other areas of life. Perhaps it’s a commitment to the ideology of abortion that sees the procedure and its proliferation as a positive good in society. This is surely part of it, and it helps us to understand why Big Abortion never took action to squelch Gosnell—he was to them a necessary evil, someone willing to take the hard cases and get his hands a little bloody.
But there’s also a more straightforward answer: money. One of the Wilmington Planned Parenthood nurses testified that “the culture at Planned Parenthood of Delaware was focused on maximizing profits and the bottom line, not quality healthcare for women.” This isn’t isolated to Delaware: Former Texas Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson was directed to double the number of abortions her facility performed in order to pad profits. Abortion is Planned Parenthood’s cash cow: at least 37 percent of clinic income comes from killing unborn children.
This is why Planned Parenthood and others knew that the conditions at Gosnell’s clinic were substandard, but did nothing:
[PPSP president and CEO Dayle] Steinberg said that when Gosnell was in practice, women would sometimes come to Planned Parenthood for services after first visiting Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic, and would complain to staff about the conditions there.
“We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health,” Steinberg said as she sat with Steinem before Tuesday’s events.
Former Republican governor Tom Ridge is guilty as well due to his cessation of all health inspections at abortion clinics. It’s as if Ridge, who might have had a sense of what could possibly be happening at places like this, wished that it would all just go away. Abortion is not a polite topic of conversation. At dinner parties, the issue creates a tangible awkwardness that almost feels viscous in the air. Perhaps he simply hoped that turning a blind eye would enable us to stop talking about it. Abortion isn’t fun politics.
At least he didn’t make money off of it.
