Last Call

I've been thinking about the horrific Kermit Gosnell case in Pennsylvania for the last several days, having now gone to trial.  Dr. Gosnell is being charged with basically running the equivalent of an unsanctioned abortion clinic, a last chance step above the back-alley hell women have gone through over the decades.  Dr. Gosnell's medical horror show is awful and disgusting, and as Salon's Irin Carmon points out, progressive feminist bloggers and columnists have been covering the case for some time now, but have largely been ignored.

Now though the case has exploded all over the conservative noise machine, with hollow cries that the case has been deliberately spiked by the "liberal media".  The upshot is that if only the world knew the "truth" about Dr. Gosnell, there would be a huge, crushing backlash that would end abortion forever in America.  The real "truth" is of course limiting abortions so that only the privileged and wealthy few can get them (or in the case of states like North Dakota, attempting to outlaw it completely) is exactly what created the Gosnell monster in the first place, and conservatives know it.

So-called TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws are designed to put such onerous regulatory burden on abortion providers that they cannot remain open, regulating everything from parking lot sizes to demanding larger hallways, requiring multiple hospital admission rights for all providers at the clinic, requiring invasive vaginal ultrasound procedures, requiring clinics meet the same standards as surgical clinics, and more.

The entire Gosnell paradigm is working as intended.  States have been trying to shut down abortion clinics at the state level, limiting access for a great many women.  In 2009 that was up 87% of counties.  It's 90% or higher now.  Making abortion impossible to get, impossible to provide, has always been the goal for the anti-choice faction.  The entire point is to create more Gosnells and use them as empirical evidence that abortion needs to be outlawed by equating anyone who supports a woman's right to choose as being no different from Gosnell himself.

Already, Republicans are taking advantage of the manufactured outrage to plan to push for more regulations and restrictions if not outright federal implementation of more TRAP laws.  More Gosnells lead to more outrage, leading to more regulations, leading to more Gosnells.  That's the real story here, not the fake cover-up narrative.