Late abortion: the new clash in the Choice Wars

03.03.2011 Philadelphia’s ‘Baby Butcher’ scandal shows exactly why we need a principled defence of abortion - as late as necessary. By Ann Furedi.

Anti-choice campaigners were handed a gift last month in Philadelphia, when a Grand Jury indicted Dr Kermit Gosnell for murder in the deaths of one woman and seven infants at an abortion clinic.

Dr Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia carried out very late abortions – badly and unlawfully. This is how Katha Pollitt described it in the Nation: ‘Blood-spattered floors. Cat faeces. Broken equipment. A 15-year-old giving anaesthesia. Two women dead and countless more maimed and injured. Third-trimester fetuses delivered alive whose spines were then severed by the doctor… This is what illegal abortion looks like.’

Illegal abortion is a key phrase here, and Pollitt rightly protests that it has not been pointed out often enough that what Gosnell was doing was illegal. In Pennsylvania it is not legal to perform abortions after 24 weeks, although in some other American states it is. But nowhere is it legal to slit the throats of born-alive fetuses. And nowhere is it legal for untrained, unlicensed employees to carry out medical procedures. Gosnell’s treatment of women was indefensible – both clinically and legally. read more >>