NOW: What we should learn from The Gosnell Trial

How can an organization like this be so misinformed? Here is the article.

The rates of unintended pregnancy in the United States are substantially higher than many developed countries.

In a post-Roe v. Wade United States, women have access to services that allow them to control their bodies -- that is, in theory. In practice, that access is often limited or nonexistent. The rate of unintended pregnancies is highest among low income and poor women, ages 18-24, and as a result, this demographic also has high rates of unplanned births and abortions. Women of color are also more likely to endure an unplanned pregnancy. Gosnell targeted women in these situations, often luring them with a lower price than that charged by legitimate providers.
87% of counties in the United States do not have even one surgical abortion provider and 35% of women reside in those counties according to Guttmacher. In some states, reproductive rights have faced extreme opposition, and the clinics are few and far between. North Dakota, South Dakota, Mississippi and Arkansas, for example, each have one lone clinic left. Extremely limited -- or no -- access to abortions forces women to resort to desperate measures. Let’s face it -- Gosnell’s practice was able to flourish because of limited access to abortion in the system.
When women do not have access to abortion services, it allows predators like Gosnell to prey on vulnerable people. These limited choices are facilitated by anti-choice legislation. In 2012, 42 anti-choice laws were passed at the state level. Some of is legislation includes: eliminating insurance coverage for abortions, slashing funding for agencies like Planned Parenthood, banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, forcing providers to deceive their patients by requiring them to give misinformation about abortion services, and imposing unnecessary waiting periods upon women before having the procedure.
Kermit Gosnell’s actions are entirely abominable -- under no circumstances should women be subjected to such practices. While the actions of this back alley butcher are horrifying, anti-abortion supporters have been using his crimes as justification for wiping out access to abortion in the United States completely. But criminalizing abortion is exactly what gives rise to predators like Gosnell. This serves as a dire call to action for legislators -- women need access to safe and legal abortion care lest they turn, in desperation, to the back alley.

http://www.now.org/news/blogs/index.php/sayit/2013/05/24/what-we-should-learn-from-the-gosnell-trial

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This article is wrong on so many levels. This is why.

The article states that Gosnell did late term abortions. Late term abortions are illegal. We are not talking about access to legal abortion...we are talking about access for women to kill in late terms. This has nothing to do with legal abortion or the inability for women to get to a clinic that does abortions according to the law. Those places exist. And the pro-aborts here on this forum would tell you that they are safe and clean. They side with this article that abortions should be done in safe and clean environments. This would not have happened however if late term abortions were legal.
So what did Gosnell do that has anything to do with abortion being safe today. The women who went to him....NEEDED A LATE TERM ABORTION. And while places like Gosnell do exist, they are hidden until exposed. If women had access to a place that did these legally....many deaths from his clinic would not have happened.

So I again state...the only way for abortion to be safe for what happened at the Gosnell clinic not to happen...is for late term abortion to become legal. And this article stated that fact without coming out and saying it.


The author stated...."dire call to action for legislators -- women need access to safe and legal abortion care lest they turn, in desperation, to the back alley."

Legislation today has nothing to do with the Gosnells out there butchering babies...nothing at all. We already have clinics that are safe and clean that do abortions up to 24 weeks. Right?

This is the crap that NOW puts out...the propaganda they spew trying to brainwash women into thinking that Gosnell has anything to do with legal abortion and the restrictions that are being placed on abortion today.

I do not condone any abortion let alone late term abortion. But if you want safe abortion for women...then you have to be for changing the laws to allow it to happen. This is what this article said.

 

Hmmmmm - you must have missed the word "Affordable"

Gosnell operated outside of the law, And by all accounts he "operated" in very poor neighbourhood and specifically targeting women of immigrant and often non-English speaking backgrounds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Gosnell

The very group who are unlikely to go to a higher charging clinic earlier, who may hide a pregnancy because of fear of family response etc

The Gosnell case is not going to make late term abortions go away. What it will do is regulate them and bring them further into the field of scrutiny. Remembering regulation is not necessarily legislation

One of the things that should be done to reduce the number of late term abortions of young women fearing reprisals from family is to offer a shelter. Like the old fashioned "lying in" hospitals where young women can go.

Are there any pro-life organisations offering such?

 

Dang you missed it again. Gosnell focused on LATE TERM ABORTIONS the ones women want that are illegal. If they were legal...how many women would not suffer? Shouldnt' they be legal? If not, why?

You want abortion affordable...but how affordable is something that someone is giving someone ...that is illegal? Shouldn't that be more money since that person is taking the risk? Again..playing devils advocate....if you want abortion affordable and you want all women to be able to get it...then shouldn't late term abortions be legal? Obvious there were women coming to his clinic for that specific service weren't there?

So you want late term abortion regulated? These women wanted to kill their children period. None of them were in a health crisis...or they could have gotten medical intervention had their lives been in danger. Any one of them could have gone to a hospital. No, they wanted abortions...simply because they did not want the life inside them. Gosnell offered them a solution. Now should his solution be legal or not? He was convicted on three counts of killing babies who happened to live...because he botched the abortion. Maybe the doctors performing them...should have more training, eh?

The article said, women need access to safe and legal abortion care lest they turn, in desperation, to the back alley."

These women went to Gosnell thinking that was what they were going to get. What woman goes to any abortion clinic and thinks she is going to have problems. How many think the clinics are up to health standards? We know that a great many are not. And...that the people working in them are not even certified to be doing them...especially administering anesthesia. The only way butcher jobs like what Gosnell did...would be to take away all the restrictions and allow for late term abortions in clinics like PP. This article stated that.

TEll me how a woman controls her own reproductive system...and has to do it around restrictions and do it safely?

 

Then why was he charged with only three counts

It is your contention that he "focussed on late term" but there is no evidence that the majority of his cases WERE "late term". Women were not flying in from around the country to his clinic

He was operating almost exclusively in a poor neighbourhood, he was operating to all intents and purposes illegally with no governmental oversight and therefore is the best example of what will happen when you make abortion illegal

 

<<< Mod Edit: Flamebait >>> Maybe that is all they could get enough proof on to go after him. I am sure there were more...but at least this got him put away. And that is a good thing isn't it? LOL Or isn't it Bowerbird?

An abortionist does not have to focus totally on late term abortions to go to prison. All he or she need do is to do ONE...and get convicted. And you have no way of knowing who went into his clinic unless you have every record of every abortion he ever did. Women get desperate don't they? Isnt' that what your position states....woman are desperate...therefore abortion should be legal and safe. Well abortion is legal but there are doctors who will go against the law and perform late term..and there are clinics that are shut down daily because of unsanitary conditions.

His clinic says nothing about making abortion illegal and what it would be like if it were. It does show however that what you and your groupies here say the truth of abortion is....is nothing more than lies upon lies.

<<< Mod Edit: Unnecessary Flamebaiting >>> And if the truths of abortion (abortionists not certified, sex offenders-uncleanly clinics, botched abortions, all the cases settled out of court) were exposed...this would show abortion in a bad light...and even PP says that is not a good thing.

The fact is abortion isn't usually a death sentence for the woman. The fatality rate however is way higher than you pro-aborts want to admit.
According to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the New York Department of Health reported seven legal abortion-related deaths that occurred between 1980-1985. The cause of death was due to general anesthesia. There were four abortion caused deaths in one single clinic in Florida between 1979-1983. In 1986 four doctors and researchers presented a study of no less than 193 deaths by legal abortion between 1972 and 1985. One researcher has uncovered cases of over 300 women who have died from abortion. Many deaths today are reported as something that is not related to abortion. Why? Cases settled out of court...doctors wanting to settle to save losing their licenses to practice.

The Chicago Sun Times investigated area abortion clinics in 1978..it uncovered cases of 12 women who died as a result of abortion...none of whose deaths were reported as abortion related.

<<< Unnecessary/Flamebait >>> Collateral damage to you folks. If you want my sources...which are from newspapers and government documents let me know I will post them. But why bother typing it all out...you will dismiss anything that puts abortion in a bad light.

Dr. David Cavanaugh stated this in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. "Since abortion has been legalized, "there has been no major impact on the number of women dying from abortion in the U.S.. After all, it really makes no difference whether a woman dies from legal or illegal abortion, she is dead nonetheless. I find no comfort in the fact that legal abortion is now the leading cause of abortion-related maternal deaths in the U.S."

Read LIME 5 which gives cases and court numbers....that show just how many women have died from abortion.

And with Gosnell...it is the tip of the iceberg. If the public really knew the true face of abortion they would be outraged. And sadly Life News and conservative new sources are the only ones exposing it.There are acts being committed that most news sources won't even report on. I remember one that happened in the late 90's. The University of Nebraska medical Center was doing experiments using brain tissue from children who were aborted. The doctor involved....Dr. Leroy Carahrt. At the time no one covered it. You should hear the testimony from the doctor. Here read it for yourself.

http://www.ashevilletribune.com/archives/tissue/Harvesting.htm

Attorney: Are there times when you don't remove the fetus intact?

Carhart: Yes, sir.

Attorney: Can you tell me about that, when that occurs?

Carhart: That occurs when the tissue fragments, or frequently when you rupture the membranes, an arm will spontaneously prolapse through the oz. I think most . . . statistically the most common presentation, we talk about the forehead or the skull being first. We talked about the feet being first, but I think in probably the great majority of terminations, it's what they world call a transverse lie, so really you're looking at a side profile of a curved fetus. When the patient...the uterus is already starting to contract and they are starting to miscarry, when you rupture the waters, usually something prolapses through the uterine, through the cervical os, not always, but very often an extremity will.

Attorney: What do you do then?

Carhart: My normal course would be to dismember that extremity and then go back and try to take the fetus out either foot or skull first, whatever end I can get to first.

Attorney: How do you go about dismembering that extremity?

Carhart: Just traction and rotation, grasping the portion that you can get a hold of which would be usually somewhere up the shaft of the exposed portion of the fetus, pulling down on it through the os, using the internal os as your counter-traction and rotating to dismember the shoulder or the hip or whatever it would be. Sometimes you will get one leg and you can't get the other leg out.

Attorney: In that situation, are you, when you pull on the arm and remove it, is the fetus still alive?

Carhart: Yes

Attorney: Do you consider an arm, for example, to be a substantial portion of the fetus?

Carhart: In the way I read it, I think if I lost my arm, that would be a substantial loss to me. I think I would have to interpret it that way.

Attorney: And then what happens next after you remove the arm? You then try to remove the rest of the fetus?

Carhart: Then I would go back and attempt to either bring the feet down or bring the skull down, or even sometimes you bring the other arm down and remove that also and then get the feet down.

Attorney: At what point is the fetus . . . does the fetus die during that process?

Carhart: I don't really know. I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound.

The Court: Counsel, for what it's worth, it still is unclear to me with regard to the intact D&E when fetal demise occurs.

Attorney: Okay, I will try to clarify that. In the procedure of an intact D&E where you would start foot first, with the situation where the fetus is presented feet first, tell me how you are able to get the feet out first.

Carhart: Under ultrasound, you can see the extremities. You know what is what. You know what the foot is, you know, what the arm is, you know, what the skull is. By grabbing the feet and pulling down on it or by grabbing a knee and pulling down on it, usually you can get one leg out, get the other leg out and bring the fetus out. I don't know where this...all the controversy about rotating the fetus comes from. I don't attempt to do that. I just attempt to bring out whatever is the proximal portion of the fetus.

Attorney: At the time that you bring out the feet in this example, is the fetus still alive?

Carhart: Yes.

Attorney: Then what's the next step you do?

Carhart: I didn't mention it. I should. I usually attempt to grasp the cord first and divide the cord, if I can do that.

Attorney: What is the cord?

Carhart: The cord is the structure that transports the blood, both arterial and venous, from the fetus to the back to the fetus, and it gives the fetus its only source of oxygen, so that if you can divide the cord, the fetus will eventually die, but whether this takes five minutes or fifteen minutes and when that occurs, I don't think anyone really knows.

Attorney: Are there situations where you don't divide the cord?

Carhart: There are situations when I can't.

Attorney: What are those?

Carhart: I just can't get to the cord. It's either high above the fetus and structures where you can't reach up that far. The instruments are only 11 inches long.

Attorney: Let's take the situation where you haven't divided the cord because you couldn't, and you have begun to remove a living fetus feet first. What happens next after you have gotten the feet removed?

Carhart: We remove the feet and continue with traction on the feet until the abdomen and the thorax came through the cavity. At that point, I would try . . . you have to bring the shoulders down, but you can get enough of them outside, you can do this with your finger outside of the uterus, and then at that point the fetal . . . the base of the fetal skull is usually in the cervical canal.

Attorney: What do you do next?

Carhart: And you can reach that, and that's where you would rupture the fetal skull to some extent and aspirate the contents out.

Attorney: At what point in that process does fetal demise occur between initial remove . . . removal of the feet or legs and the crushing of the skull, or I'm sorry, the decompressing of the skull?

Carhart: Well, you know, again, this is where I'm not sure what fetal demise is. I mean, I honestly have to share your concern, your Honor. You can remove the cranial contents and the fetus will still have a heartbeat for several seconds or several minutes, so is the fetus alive? I would have to say probably, although I don't think it has any brain function, so it's brain dead at that point.

Attorney: So the brain death might occur when you begin suctioning out of the cranium?

Carhart: I think brain death would occur because the suctioning to remove contents is only two or three seconds, so somewhere in that period of time, obviously not when you penetrate the skull, because people get shot in the head and the don't die immediately from that, if they are going to die at all, so that probably is not sufficient to kill the fetus, but I think removing the brain contents eventually will.
Later under cross examination, Carhart stated: "My intent in every abortion I have ever done is to kill the fetus and terminate the pregnancy."

Need I say more.

 

What we learned is that even once decent human beings can be desensitized into no longer seeing the inhumanity of wholesale slaughter. I'm speaking of some of the nurses, Gosnell is a sick (*)(*)(*)(*) serial killer. We also learned (not that we needed more proof) that the MSM will simply refuse to cover stories that do not fit into their personal world view.

 

There were no qualified nurses working in that stink hole, His "nurses" were untrained and that alone should have shut him down

Gosnell is the best evidence you have of what happens when there is no government oversight

 

Gosnell is the poster boy for Pro-choice. You have to be a truly sick freak to make money shoving instruments into women's uterus' in order to destroy a growing life.

If Gosnell was not a "Doctor" (<LMFAO) he would have been another Jeffrey Dahmer. The entire pro abortion community owns Gosnell.

 

Actually a very good case for continuing governmental oversight of abortion can be made based on Gosnell. If you make abortion illegal you will get more Gosnells as well as the extortion, racketeering and corruption that goes with all of that. I suspect that Gosnell kept practicing because of corruption in the health oversight authorities in Philadelphia.

What pro-lifers need to do is reduce the NEED for abortion. Legislation is useless and counterproductive

 

It is the anti-abortion community that limits access to safe, legal abortion.

 

Just as Shelley Shannon is a poster boy for pro-life.

Do you realise how inane your comment is, and let us not forget that Gosnell was charged with killing babies AFTER they were born .. were any of his convictions for killing prior to the birth?

I tell you the twist, spin and lies the pro-life zealots go to is staggering, and they wonder why so few take their radical opinions seriously.

 

Well Cady, it's simply just not the government's responsibility to protect sickos that want to harm their own children.

 

It isn't the government's responsibility to pander to religious wackos who want to keep women barefoot, pregnant, and dependent on men. Criminalizing abortion doesn't reduce the number of them, it only punishes women for wanting to control their own reproductive health.

 

Well, even if I was not religious, I would still be against abortions. I don't want women to be dependent on women. I don't want to punish women for sex. Also, I will most certainly admit that I am strongly in favor of more contraceptions if that will stop some more abortions from happening, unlike some other pro lifers.

Yes, right. Just like how Casey Anthony was almost punished for wanting to control her own emotional health and well-being. You see? By making such appealing to the emotions statements about "the womens reproductive health and rights", you're using some dirty and sneaky tactics, which could be used to justify almost freaking ANYTHING!

 

That is not an appeal to emotion. It is a fact that anyone, man or woman, has a basic right of bodily autonomy. It is also a fact that pregnancy has a MAJOR impact on a woman's health, and it is very, very wrongheaded to attempt to force a woman to risk her health and life.

Please keep in mind that Casey Anthony was accused of murdering her born child. Your continual attempt to compare the murder of born children to abortion, to post photos of born children, and to refer to fetuses as "children" is the use of emotional appeal on your part.

 

Well first of all, Cady, not living in the 1800's anymore. Pregnancies are almost always never life threatening to anybody.

Second of all, who else here agrees with your statements that even if the fetus has the personhood status, due to this concept which is about the basic rights of bodily autonomy that the woman has, which actually means that she still has the right to abort her fets, even if it's some actual human being?

 

Any pregnancy can result in death. It may not happen often, but it happens. Who are you to say a woman MUST complete a pregnancy and childbirth because it is "almost always never life threatening"?

How can a fetus have personhood status inside another person? What person has ever had the right to live inside someone? We don't have a right to sustain our lives at the expense of someone else.

 

So, you still support these so-called abortions "rights", even if the fetus is actually some person? I have asked you these specific questions many times beforehand.

 

I just answered you. It isn't a person as defined by dictionaries. I asked you to define "person" but I have yet to see your answer to that.

 

No, Cady, you did not answer my specific questions.

Anders Hoveland was absolutely right. You just make stupid excuses and derail these discussions by swerving around my very specific questions.

 

That's what you are doing now. I am not the topic and there is no need to insult just because you can't define "person."

 

Anders Hoveland was just absolutely right about you strange pro choicers.

 

Still can't define "person"? How can you demand personhood rights for a fetus when you can't define "person"?

 

If you were living in Nazi Germany during the 1940s, how exactly would you define a "person" to Hitler?

 

We're back to Hitler now? If you want personhood rights for a fetus, you should at least be able to define "person."